Digital Divide Articles
Digital Divide/Equity Articles, Wireless Networks,
Dewayne Hendricks, Indian Reservation & Computers
Digital Divide
2013 The digital divide isn't about "access" to computers anymore, but instead about using computers for productivity, employment, education, and enrichment. There is a gender gap in tech and the new skills-based digital divide.
2011 STILL ONLY HAS DIAL UP SERVICE
One-third of U.S. households lack broadband Web access
". . .a new
telecommunications administration report, Digital Nation 2010
, says that about one-third of U.S. households still lack a
broadband
internet connection
. Furthermore, 5% to 10% of Americans only have access to
internet services that are too slow to even support a basic set
of online functions, such as downloading Web pages, photos or
video." Interactive National Broadband Map
http://www.broadbandmap.gov
The Connect America Fund hopes to give rural Americans broadband
access, bridging the "digital divide". Sweet land of subsidy
http://www.economist.com/node/21541061
Rural broadband access could be key to economic development
http://www.wisbusiness.com/index.iml?Article=255010
New Research Shows
Digital Divide Still Persists in the U.S.
Exploring the Digital Nation-Computer and Internet Use at Home [
pdf
]
Connecting America
fcc.gov/
A Brief History of the Rural Electric and Telephone Programs
pdf
Industry lobbying keeps public in the dark about broadband
2010 The government is spending up to $350 million of taxpayer
money to create a map that will show where there is high-speed
Internet service in the United States and where there is not.
Despite the large expenditure of taxpayer funds, it will display
no information on price or subscriber numbers. Internet connection
speeds will be averaged over an entire metropolitan area and an
as-yet unknown portion of the data collected to make the map will
be off-limits to the public. And in an odd twist, state grantees
getting paid to collect the information are expected to get some
of their data from the Federal Communications Commission, begging
the question - why not require the FCC to create the map and save
$350 million? The mapping program is being paid for by the Obama
administration's 2009 stimulus package, which includes $7.2
billion for broadband projects. The text of the plan, though,
comes from a different piece of legislation: the Broadband Data
Improvement Act, a 2008 law passed by a Democratic Congress and
signed by Republican president, George W. Bush.The lack of a
requirement for robust, public data in the legislation is no
accident. It is a testament to the lobbying power of the nation's
providers of high-speed Internet service, which for the past
decade have stifled government efforts to collect and make public
data that could help the nation determine the width and depth of
the so-called digital divide.
Kathy Baron, a reporter for KQED, did this story about Digital
Equity
http://soundprint.org/radio/display_show/ID/112/name/Digital+Equity
The Analog Divide: Technology Practices in Public Education.
Computers & Society 31 (3):22-31.
by Torin Monahan 2001
This article develops the concept of “the analog divide” to
account for social inequities that persist even with access to
information technology. I follow the design of technological
infrastructures at one Los Angeles public high school to
demonstrate the many non-technical efforts needed to make
computers “work” for students. Finally, I suggest some ways to
bridge analog divides through flexible designs of educational
spaces.
Internet, Crystal Radios, Online Curriculum, 802.11
Dave Hughs Delivers Universal Net Access
The Importance of Crafting Culturally Relevant Content
by Karen Ellis 2001
As more and more classrooms are wired, the Internet provides
teachers a new gateway to relevant, diverse and engaging content.
The CyberPlayGround portal offers an interdisciplinary guide to
using the Internet to deliver online curriculum. It provides
comprehensive learning resources for different cultural and ethnic
groups, and also for those with different approaches to learning.
See Benton Foundation
Computers for Youth seeks to provide refurbished computers, training, support, and online content for those who cannot afford to obtain these tools and resources on their own.
On the Sidelines H-1B leaves minority workers on sidelines,
groups say
10/19/ 2000
William Kramer didn't want to blame racial prejudice for his
failure to find an engineering job. But after a year of job
hunting in Silicon Valley's booming economy, he began to wonder
what was going on.
AMERICAN INDIANS
The Dandin Group's Dewayne Hendricks is setting up a wireless network at Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation that could be a model of the kind of network he wants--one that may have to circumvent FCC regulations on frequency, power, and transmission technology to deliver high-performance broadband. Complaints or blockage attempts by the FCC may be negated if the tribe asserts its Native American sovereignty; more importantly, Hendricks hopes it will put public pressure on the FCC to open up the spectrum. The FCC is concerned that unlicensed access to the full spectrum would give rise to too much transmission interference. Hendricks is convinced that spread spectrum technology will make a common-use spectrum workable, with technologies such as ultrawideband and dense-packet networks shoring things up if spread spectrum comes up short. So far, Hendricks' team has set up wireless connections for Turtle Mountain Community College and a small group of other buildings. Turtle Mountain is one of four reservations whose colleges are being equipped for wireless as part of a $6 million National Science Foundation initiative administered by EDUCAUSE. (Wired, January 2002)
Dewayne Hendricks, CEO of Dandin Group Wireless Device Bill of Rights
Head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Delivers an Apology
2000
The High Performance Research and Education Network (HPWREN)
is overcoming geographical, social and technical barriers to
bring high-speed Internet access to the La Jolla and Pala
tribes.
In remote San Diego County, HPWREN's 45Mbps (million bits per
second) wireless backbone connects the low-lying San Diego
coastline with the county's mountainous eastern region, home of
the La Jolla and Pala Native American reservations. This
outreach is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as
part of an experimental wireless network that also links UCSD
with the Mount Laguna Observatory (operated by San Diego State
University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign),
an earthquake-detection site (run by the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, part of UCSD), and two large ecological reserves
with multiple field stations. UCSD received a $2.3 million NSF
award in August 2000 to create, demonstrate and evaluate the
prototype wide-area network for research and education.
Connecting the Native American communities posed special challenges for the team led by computer scientist Hans-Werner Braun and geophysicist Frank Vernon of UCSD. Foremost among these is the rugged terrain where the reservations are located - ranging from valleys with elevation of 2,000 feet above sea level to mountain peaks at 5,000 feet. "There are no line-of-sight views of existing microwave towers from the sites," Braun said. "And in the case of La Jolla, we didn't even have access to electric grid power on the mountain ridge edge of the reservation."
That necessity prompted HPWREN staff to design a system of solar arrays and batteries for beaming digital signals where land--based lines aren't practical. After first testing the solar setup last fall, the team deployed it in December on Palomar Mountain, which looms above the La Jolla reservation.
La Jolla tribal members worked closely with the HPWREN team to prepare the solar-powered system and antennae that would provide the reservation's learning center with high-speed Internet connectivity. Now young and old alike gather in the La Jolla and Pala learning centers to surf the Internet at lightning speed.
"The UC San Diego collaboration with La Jolla provides an opportunity for our learning center to receive access to technology and capabilities that we otherwise would not have in our remote county area," said Jack Musick, La Jolla tribal chairman. "We look forward to building educational programs that allow children and adults to take advantage of the connectivity."
The project is exciting, Braun said, "because it's an
interdisciplinary effort to design a network that -- though
experimental -- is robust enough to be relied upon by
researchers under even very adverse conditions, including
catastrophic earthquakes. HPWREN is developing such a system for
geophysicists, astronomers and ecologists, while demonstrating
that the same tools can connect under-served educational users
at remote locations like the Pala and La Jolla reservations."
FIND
Details and photos about a variety of projects
*
SDSU Field Station Programs
Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve, a Swissbotanist studies
Southern California wildlife using an HPWREN connected camera. In
addition, more than 50 research projects are being conducted at
the reserve, including threatened and endangered species, water
quality and public health, agriculture, and global change.
*
HPWREN researchers wrote and implemented software that uses
SIO's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics existing
seismic sensor network to relay real-time data to client
computers
. The objective is to provide notice prior
to actual shockwave arrival at the client machine, as well as
analyzed information within a minute or so following an event.
*
California Department of Forestry firefighters demonstrated a
rapid responsemobile wireless access point via a relay using
tripod-mounted antennas
. The connectivity originated from the HPWREN 45 Mbps backbone and
demonstrated how high-speed access to a network from an incident
management site can provide firefighters with data about an
incident.
Clinton Hopes to Raise Indian Internet Use
By MARC LACEY SHIPROCK, N.M., April 17 2000
Moved by the story of a young American Indian girl who won a free
computer but lacked a telephone to hook it up to the Internet,
President Clinton today announced a program to offer low-cost
phone service on the nation's Indian reservations as a first step
toward integrating American Indians into the information age. Mr.
Clinton introduced the $17 million initiative, to be financed by
an assessment on long-distance companies, at the start of a
two-day tour intended to focus attention on the people and places
left behind by the computer revolution.
Indian Affairs Head Makes Apology September 8, 2000
Remarks of Kevin Gover, Assistant Secretary,
Indian Affairs Department of the Interior at the Ceremony
Acknowledging the 175th Anniversary of the Establishment of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs
On behalf of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, I extend this formal
apology to Indian people for the historical conduct of this
agency. And while the BIA employees of today did not commit these
wrongs, we acknowledge that the institution we serve did. We
accept this inheritance, this legacy of racism and inhumanity. And
by accepting this legacy, we accept also the moral responsibility
of putting things right.
Karen Buller of the National Indian Telecommunications Institute (
www.niti.org
), an organization concerned with infrastructure, economic
development and sovereignty development of the Native American
nations, discussed her surprise at how readily Native American
communities adopted the Internet and high-level applications.
"When I first started working in telecommunications I thought it
would be like giving vitamins trying to get Native Americans on
the Internet, but it wasn't like that at all." Ms. Buller found
Internet connectivity is important to Native Americans because it
supplies a number of culturally relevant applications. Advanced
applications have provided the ability to address language
preservation for example.
Dakota Language homepage
HTML-literacy allows Native Americans to define themselves as
authors and to control how their culture is presented. Other
successes that take into account the needs of Native Americans are
the increased use of wireless technologies, an increase in Native
American-owned phone companies, the growth of Native American
"policy wonks" and "techies." The Internet has also been used as a
community-building tool. It is used by churches to reach remote
parishioners, AA meetings, the preservation of oral tradition
through advanced applications, and the sale of products
demonstrates how the Internet can be seen and used by an informed
community.
Native American Public Telecommunications
WITH PROJECT EXPANDING NET'S REACH, THERE ARE NO STRATEGIES IN
PARADISE
From Benton Headlines [SOURCE: New York Times (D8), AUTHOR: Jeri
Clausing] 7/2000
On the South Pacific island of Pago Pago, Pago Pago Elementary
puts on fundraising variety shows each year. To date the shows
have paid off: a public address system and plans for a new
fountain. But the school's latest addition, 25 high speed computes
weren't had for a song. The computers, hooked by satellite to a
high-speed line in Hawaii, were financed by a $4 million grant
from the E-rate program. In its third year, the program has helped
connect a variety of schools from Pago Pago to Aniak Alaska,
making stops at all points in between. Nearly $4 billion has been
awarded to schools and libraries in the United States and in
territories like Puerto Rico and Samoa. At the end of last year,
95 percent of the nation's public schools had at least one site
with Internet access, and 63 percent of all classrooms had been
wired, according to the Federal Communications Commission, which
oversees the program. For all of the successes of providing
hardware and access, appropriate classroom use remains an issue.
"To date, there is no curriculum or lesson plan teachers can
follow," Ms. Bowles-Weilenman said. But the success of the of the
program is hard to argue. Once threatened by Republican lawmakers,
the program is no longer a point of debate. Both Vice President Al
Gore and Texas Governor George Bush have incorporated the program
into the election platform. "It's hard to attack success," said
William E. Kennard, the chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission.
Feds Earmark $12.M to Bridge Digital Divide
January 6, 2000
Mary Hillebrand -- E-Commerce Times,
The recently renames "Technology Opportunities Program" is a
federally sponsored grant provider for local governments and
nonprofit organizations who develop programs designed to combat
the digital divide. The deadline for applying for these funds is
March 16, 2000.
"Let's Conquer the Divide"
by Jaron Lanier (Jaron coined the term Virtual Reality)
"Future generations are going to judge us by whether we can rise
to meet the challenges of Information Age poverty. There are no
excuses. America is in an undisputed leadership position on the
world stage, and there is no question that our wealth abounds. We
believe that capitalism is not a zero-sum game, that wealth begets
more wealth. Therefore, moral imperatives aside, it should be in
all our interests to find a way to alleviate the suffering of
those who haven't yet benefited from the boom times...."
DIGITAL DIVIDE IN RURAL AMERICA
Assistant Secretary Rohde delivered testimony before the Senate
Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry on the digital
divide in rural America and efforts to ensure that viewers in
small and rural markets have access to local broadcast
programming. [SOURCE: NTIA]