Random quote, strange world

“President Bush has set out a bold vision for broadband in America, establishing a national goal for ‘universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007.’”

See Remarks by President Bush on Homeownership, Expo New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 26, 2004, available here.

Promoting Innovation and Economic Security through Broadband Technology: The President has called for universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007 and wants to make sure we give Americans plenty of technology choices when it comes to purchasing broadband. Broadband technology will enhance our Nation’s economic competitiveness and will help improve education and health care for all Americans. Broadband provides Americans with high-speed Internet access connections that improve the Nation’s economic productivity and offer life-enhancing applications, such as distance learning, remote medical diagnostics, and the ability to work from home more effectively. The Bush Administration has implemented a wide range of policy directives to create economic incentives, remove regulatory barriers, and promote new technologies to help make broadband affordable. The President believes that lowering the cost of broadband will increase its use and availability. – from the White House website.

I think President Bush missed his goal. There’s less than a month to go, and I’m just not seeing that universal broadband access.

Microsoft Excel

Today was the final day of a three-part series in Microsoft Excel and the students were very different than the ones I’ve been seeing in our Computer Basics, Internet Basics, Email, and Word workshops. A couple of the regulars were there and had a hard time keeping up, but we fortunately had two floaters and one instructor and that made things go smoothly. There were three different instructors each day, but I floated through all of them and got to see some different approaches to teaching Excel. One instructor uses a pre-made budget that he sends to himself so that people can see what lots of formatted data can look like, including split panes and freeze panes, several different formulas and some inserted comments, images and graphs.

One gentleman had an idea for an interesting project that he wanted to do, which is a great way to approach Excel – having a goal can make the process stick, I think. And we used a personal budget as an example of what a simple formula can do, which was something everyone could relate to. I saw a lot of light bulbs go on, and people really got into the concept of Excel.

My father is a wizard in Excel and can safely be called a power user, so I admit to some serious fall-back when Excel shows up in my life. Hard to rely on his expertise, though, in a class 3,000 miles away. But he’ll be happy to hear that I’ve been paying attention and was able to answer some questions.

Next week is Powerpoint, which is the last workshop for the year. Everything starts up again in February, and I’ve signed on to volunteer for another round. I’ve gotten to know some of the other instructors and have been really impressed with how well they teach these classes.

Some disconnected thoughts…

This will be a somewhat choppy, scattered blog, but I want to get some thoughts down.

I had my first experience today with a PDF that wouldn’t let me copy. Even when I selected the pointer cursor, nada. It wouldn’t let me select text. I was able to do a screen shot and then copy the image, then paste it into a word document. But of course I can’t format it since it’s technically an image. Foiled! Made me think about Lessig and copyright laws. Given that my use of the passage was for an academic paper and considered fair use, shouldn’t I be able to copy and paste a few lines? But no, the author’s East Coast code was being protected by West Coast code, protecting the document beyond what East Coast code even intended. I thought it was really small-minded of the publisher (I assume it was the publisher’s decision) to make it so difficult. I ended up using the passage, but had to do it the old-fashioned way and typed it out. Take that, PDF! In the end, I think it ends up hurting the author and lowly graduate students like me.

As for sharing something from my final paper, I have to admit that there’s nothing to show. I’m doing triage with my final assignments, so won’t be working on the paper until this weekend.

However, given Professor Shulman’s prompts, I do have a few thoughts:

++ what is the central question you paper speaks to?
I’m going to stick with the metaphor of a footbridge that I used in my project outline, at least as a guide. The digital divide, particularly when it’s applied to global problems, is so big and overwhelming, so I tried to think about my little piece of service-learning, or any kind of similar program and what kind of impact it could have. If the digital divide is something we want to ideally eliminate, then I see my service-learning as a small footbridge across something that would, in a perfect world, not exist.

++ what are the most relevant theories?
I find social capital theories to be really compelling, and as I do a literature review, I’m finding the digital divide and social capital often appear together. I didn’t include that in my project outline, so there may be some finessing before the final paper is done. But in brief, the idea that our society has less social capital than earlier times, and the idea that ICT could potentially be used to increase social capital – that’s interesting to me. And when I’m participating with students in the Community Workshop Series, I like to think that we’re building some social capital, and helping them to acquire skills to build some more. It’s encouraging that some of these 80-year-olds can use e-mail to keep in touch with their loved ones, and as their hearing goes, they’ll have a way to communicate. One of my grandmother students told me that she is now using Gmail chat to keep up with her grandchildren. Love that!

++ who are your straw people?
Hmm. My straw people are probably people who either think the digital divide is not a priority, given all the other big issues we face. Or those who think free computer classes at a public library isn’t helping anyone, at least in comparison to bigger digital divide issues such as access.

++ what are your tentative findings?
Tentative findings: I’m getting a lot out of the service learning because someone else did a ton of legwork. I’m told that the UNC staff person who got this program off the ground is a big proponent of service learning, particularly for MLS students ,and really gets the issues with the digital divide. Other graduate students get it, the director gets it, the public library gets it, and lots of people show up for the classes who really learn something valuable. So, I think that made my experience really sing, and now I get it.

Not sure yet how this will work into the paper, but I’m really drawn to this concept of social capital. Even if I’m only helping someone to complement his social network through email, I think it matters. Even if that person never votes, never gets involved in politics and doesn’t use the Internet to get informed – just stay in touch with people, or find support groups or chat rooms, or feel a little bit better with this new tool to communicate across space and distance. That would be enough to make it all worthwhile.

Social Capital and the Digital Divide

I thought this article in the Bloston Globe was fascinating –

A Friend in Need

In the article, author Thomas Sander writes,

“Americans worship wealth and bemoan the material possessions they lack. In 2005 (the Year of Rediscovered Class Consciousness?), we seem to be waking up to the material class gaps that have grown for almost 40 years, since 1967.

But attention to this real and important economic class gap could blind us to an equally troubling, less visible gap between the classes — a social capital gap. ”Social capital” describes the benefits of social networks. Having friends and being involved in groups not only secures jobs — more Americans get jobs through who they know than what they know — but improves one’s health, education, and happiness.

My service learning at the local library makes this issue real for me. A lot of the people are trying to acquire computer skills so that they’re employable, and to learn how to write and edit a resume. One woman asked if she could list me as a reference on her resume, and it struck me that I might be the closest thing to a business associate in her social network. Having access to someone with computer skills is a no-brainer for most of us, so it’s so hard to imagine what kind of network a person has, or doesn’t have, that she would need to take a formal computer class and ask a near stranger to stand-in as a reference.

Sanders continues:

“How can we close the social capital gap between rich youth and poor youth? … While people have to make friends voluntarily, one can certainly publicize the benefits of such friendships and dramatically increase the opportunity. For example, having youth at age 18 perform a year of mandatory national or community service in diverse groups would likely increase cross-race and cross-class social ties.

Moreover, we ought to ensure that in our rush to teach the 3 R’s in inner city schools we don’t forget to teach the 2 C’s (connections and community). Youth, especially poor youth, ought to learn about social capital and understand the social cost they’ll pay for not building these ties. Skills are also important: Institutions like churches and unions were cornerstones in teaching poor Americans how to run meetings, petition others, mobilize comrades, and build lasting friendships. Given the declines in union membership and church-going among poor youth, we must find other settings to cultivate such skills.”

Maybe it’s too much to expect that a series of computer workshops can close the digital divide and solve the world’s problems, but imagine the hand-up these people get as they learn to navigate what is essentially a new language, with new norms, new connections and new opportunities. Perhaps most of the people in the workshops will go out into the world and shop, but maybe a few will discover ways to build bridges to networks, get some social capital out of their efforts and move up the socio-economic ladder. And what if we taught ICT skills to community leaders who could mobilize their members, helping them access some of the powerful networking opportunities available on the Internet? Not just for jobs, but for well-being, health, information gathering, all the things that privilege the digitally literate classes?

Consider this shocking story of poverty in Virginia, where some of the rural poverty equals that of non-industrialized nations.

“Outside the gates, people lay in their trucks or in tents pitched along the grassy parking lot, waiting for their chance to have their medical needs treated at no charge — part of an annual three-day “expedition” led by a volunteer medical relief corps called Remote Area Medical.

The group, most often referred to as RAM, has sent health expeditions to countries like Guyana, India, Tanzania and Haiti, but increasingly its work is in the United States, where 47 million people — more than 15 percent of the population — live without health insurance. Residents of remote rural areas are less likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to have health insurance and more likely to be in fair or poor health.

Even after Katrina, it’s shocking to learn that this kind of poverty exists in America. Medical volunteers follow-up with these patients by phone after they have their fleeting visits, but imagine if the patients had universal access to the Internet, and could belong to an online social network tailored to their specific circumstances, say by health condition or through a RAM medical network that helped monitor remote patients.

Quite a long post with quite a bit of rambling, but it struck me that there’s a real role for ICT to help build social capital by helping people across the digital divide, either by teaching them skills or providing, at the very least, some kind of access.

One last link and then I’m done! This one covers an online social network built to help India’s seriously poor working class find employment:

Internet Revolution Reaches India’s Poor

I’m doing my service-learning in a fairly affluent town in America, so it’s easy to think that we’re not making a dent in serious social problems. I read articles like the ones I’ve mentioned here, and it makes me realize there’s unlimited potential for this kind of work.

“Undo typing” is your new best friend

Last week’s classes in Word sent me on a rollercoaster ride. I had such success during the email class before Thanksgiving, but Word is such a twitchy program, which makes it difficult to teach. I’ve floated during Word classes, and thought it would be a cakewalk to teach one, but the class had so many questions, and each one took me down a tangent. We didn’t cover anywhere near the things outlined for the class.

We probably spent close to two hours on the Save and Save As functions, plus practicing how to find documents, how the hierarchy works, and other things most digitally literate people take for granted. I got really flustered when one of the students said we weren’t going to have enough time to cover the topics he came to learn, such as edit, copy, paste. I actually broke out into a sweat and felt like my throat was parched.

Fortunately, I had two floaters to help, but they ended up talking so loudly with individual students, and it was hard to teach with the general noise level so high. I generally encourage students to ask lots of questions, but they ended up asking so many that I couldn’t create any kind of momentum. An hour flies by quickly when you’re flustered!

The next day, someone else taught the class, and I felt better realizing that we had sort of a rowdy class (for a new instructor, anyway!), and that you sometimes just have to ride the horse you have, not the one you want. I ended helping an older gentlemen (possibly late 70s, early 80s) who is one of the most adorable people I’ve ever met. Earlier, I told him that he couldn’t break the computer. But he had pressed so many icons, turned his page orange and his ink white and couldn’t figure out what he had done. I couldn’t either! He said to me, “You said I couldn’t break it, but I think I did!” and we both laughed. I told him that the “undo typing” icon will be his new best friend. He clicked it about 30 times to get it back out of his heavy formatting, and said, “Oh, I like this little button.” He always gives us all handshakes after the class and tells us how much he appreciates what we do.

I can see why people keep returning to each class – often they’ll take Word for three and four sessions before they disappear off on their own. Each instructor teaches the class in a different way, and each class has different questions, energy and agendas.

I worked with another woman to help her understand how to “break” the numbering format in Word. And we spent about ten minutes going over the difference between the enter key, backspace and delete. I realized that those three keys are really the trinity of the keyboard.

Word basics was exhausting – next week will be Excel, followed by Powerpoint. Glad I’m not teaching those. For now I think I’ll stick to the safe haven of floating.