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

The impact of ICT on Communication

The impact of ict on communication has made the communication world easier to communicate with each other, this has been done by the improvement on things that we already have. These are some of the things that have been changed or improved :

• The commen house phone upgraded to the now ever so popular Mobile phone
• The abacus was the old calculator, now they have upgraded it to a calulator machine and this machine will do any equation in split second time.

The impact on Education

The changes that has occured in the education sector has changed to a wide range of reasons to benefit the education system in different ways:

The things that might have changed would be,

The Use of ICT during lessons eg. touch board to show data and information

The use of ICT showing videos to help educate further

The use of ICT, keeping all the information together neatly, instead of keeping big folders of paper that might get distroyed easily.

These changes have been made from the following things

1. The use from Paper and pen
2. The use of video players
3.The use of white boards

The advantages and disadvantages of using ICT in education are :

Advantages :

It takes less space of storage and is easier to recover data to show past work.

The use of ICT means that people can easily set up work eg class work

The use of ICT means that people can set out work neatly for other people to read and follow it.


Disadvantages:

The work can be lost and never recovered but this sort of event rarely occurs.

The use of ICT means that people have the oppurtunity to abuse the system and go on different things that have no relevance to the education session.

The following two pictures are examples of the difference between the use of Ict today from the past, picture 1 is a ICT lesson in 2002 and picture 2 is a class discussion in 1990

commerce

The commerce market has only just been released to people which has meant that people can now do things like buy items from their own home, the company that has eploited this more than any other company would have to be Ebay, they have sold over 1 billion items since their opening which has made the one of the biggest online actionneirs ever. The customer that uses their company can easily just place a bid on any item they want, eg a football, and then wait to see if they win it or not, then the customer gets to negociate with the seller a sutiable time to deliver the thing that they have bought .



The invention of the IT world has also meant that people can sort out their online banking in their own time, this has meant more business for the banks and more control and less space taken up by documents with this new service.

Communication

The invention of the internet means that people can now keep in touch with friends family and colleagues anywhere in the world, this has been made by the massive expansion of the compan microsoft


This has been with the new invention of programmes like MSN messenger and E-mail outlook that has created a new level of contacting people, instead of waiting for people to get to the phone they now can keep updated with news and gossip whenever they like.


The invention of the internet has also meant that the phone system and the networks have had to be upgraded to better and fast er machines.

Downloading

In the new world of technology the world has demanded and created more music, videos and pictures than has ever been in the last 2 decades.

This new source of gaining pictures , music and videos has been done by the programmes that allow you to this, some of these programmes are : Limewire , Kazza , Bearshare.

Using these services the customer is able to access a wide range of films, music files and software for customizing their own computer. the next pictures are examples of some of the softwear/film/music files that you or anone else can dowload with the services provided:












these are samples of some of the programs that the customers would use :









The adavantages and disadvantages of downloading music and programs off the internet are:

Advantages

• Its isnt time consuming - it is easy and safe to do but also isnt time consuming the owner of the program doesnt ahve to go out and buy a whole CD which is very time ocnsuming.
• Its fast - fast dowloads and a wide ranges of things that make it easy to find what people arel ooking for.

Entertainment

Entertainment has also meant the creation of great new CGI, opening the new floor of the gamming industry. The new gaming industry has opened a world of the very best CGI making it extremely realistic, the newest games that have been released are shown as below:

Halo 2 - made by microsoft towards their console the Xbox, and one of the biggest selling games in that console











World of Warcraft - One of the biggest Mulitplayer Online Role Playing Games of all time (MORPG) this has some of the worlds most serfisticated software to creat some strange but beautiful CGI






these are just two of some of the huge range of games that use GJI bit in doing so the companies that create these games make sure that their customers are not as good as they say they are.