The Digital Divide Within Formal School Education: Causes and Consequences

Although schools in most industrialised countries have taken strong measures to ensure equal access to ICT resources, inequalities continue to exist. To understand what measures might be effective for eliminating these remaining differences, it is necessary to partition the problem into at least three classes. In the first, here called the missing link, are students with specific disabilities and those in schools in remote rural or poor inner-urban areas where telecommunications are limited and expensive. For these groups, technological and economic solutions are required for access. For the second class, however, here called the wasteland, the very nature of ICT is the problem that needs to be corrected. This class is occupied by women and girls and by some minorities, who find computing too solitary, isolating, and mechanical. To attract females to ICT, software needs to be redesigned to appeal to a wider audience, the image of the computing world needs to be softened and made less antisocial, and