Digital Divide

The digital divide is the gap between those with regular, effective access to digital technologies and those without. The term digital divide refers to those who can benefit from it, and those who don't, as opposed to just talking about who has direct access to technology, and those who don't.

The "Digital Divide" describes the gap between individuals and communities with greater and lesser access to technology resources and training. Bridging the Divide is critical because:

• Digital media can engage students who lose interest in traditional schooling;
• All people are entitled to take part in the new information-based economy;
• In this Digital Age, employers require workers with technology skills.

In essence, the digital divide is the difference in access to learning resources that modern technology offers young people, usually a working computer and an Internet connection. While our schools are better equipped than ever before, the variation in the quality of learning that takes place at home is huge. And as children only spend 15% of their lives at school, the learning that takes place at home is extremely important to their future success.

Technology offers us a unique opportunity to extend learning support beyond the classroom, something that has proved impossible to do until now. But the digital divide means that millions of children are currently denied this help.

An example of digital divide being adressed would be the following:

South Africa has 11 official languages. It also has one of the greatest divides between rich and poor in the world, and this divide is most evident in the technology area. The IT world unwittingly has excluded the masses as technology has raced on leaving many South Africans behind. Socio-economic circumstances, imbalanced education policies under the apartheid regime, as well as language barriers, are some of the factors recognised in this exclusion.

Dr Neville Alexander, political activist, who was imprisoned on Robben Island during ex-president Nelson Mandela's time there, and director of the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa, has been a key player in the language debate. He emphasises the need to move away from being a monolinguistic society:

An English-only, or even an English-mainly, policy necessarily condemns most people, and thus the country as a whole, to a permanent state of mediocrity, since people are unable to be spontaneous, creative and self-confident if they cannot use their first language.

Navigating the cyber world is daunting enough for first-time travelers, without having to do it in a language that is not their own. The translation of computer programmes into South African languages such as Xhosa was virtually uncharted territory until last year. Most computer software is only available in English and poorly supported in South Africa's second language, Afrikaans. The other nine official languages are not visible in any form of software--interesting when considering that Zulu is the most commonly spoken language in South Africa, with Xhosa a close second.

To address this, translate.org.za (http://www.translate.org.za/) has been set up to translate computer software into various official languages of South Africa. This is the first project of The Zuza Software Foundation, a nonprofit organisation aiming to promote development and open-source software in Africa. Zuza, meaning ``gift given freely'' in a local African language, is working on proposals directed at internationalisation, business development and education using open-source software. Zuza is responsible for another project, Linuxlab (http://www.linuxlab.org.za/), which provides disadvantaged schools with refurbished computers and free support.





the prime example of a digital divide is from nation to nation, this can be seen in the first picture labelled 1., in this picture we can see the distribution of digital equipment and devices.

In the picture we can see that the wealthier countries such as Australia , Canada, USA and United Kingdom , have been highlighted in a orange colour , and against the colour scheme this shows high frequency of distribution.

In other countries where the distribution is very low such as Africa, Brazil and Asia, these areas are highlighted in white meaning that they have an extremely low amount of digital distribution.

There are many contributing factors to this Digital Divide between countries some of the problems could be :

• The countries may have poor facilities such as no electricity
• The countries may not have the economy to support computing necessities
• The countries might not want to change their ways of doing things such as agricultural work