Problems and Solutions with the Digital Divide

Multicultural education is a movement to identify and eliminate the inequities and injustices that plague our schools, societies and world. This presentation will focus on a program that was brought about in the early 1990's to eliminate the inequities brought about by technology. The Digital Divide refers to disparities in access to the Internet based on race, socioeconomic status, gender, and other social and cultural identifiers. In the early 1990's it was the goal of the government to overcome the digital divide by getting computers to all schools and people. Such an initiative failed to deal with how people used computers, outdated software, how slow their connection was, or even if they could afford any of the other related computer items (i.e., printers). The digital divide initiative also failed to take into consideration reports from the reliable sources (i.e., teachers) that merely having computers in place is insufficient to ensure computer literacy. This has created an abundance of problems for today's society. The presentation will explore the problems that the digital divide has created, talk about how to solve these problems, and provide relevant examples to show the audience what the problem and solutions looks like.