Part I: A Crisis of Internet Scale At Internet Speed:

This study focuses on a phenomena which has taken place at digital speed. From its identification, to inclusion in national policy, to the aggressive response it received from multiple sectors, this issue has been marked by broad action that is truly remarkable in these times. Seldom has an issue been more widely received with less detraction and rarely does the call for help receive such a turnout.

Given the highly fluid and dynamic world of the technologies, which themselves have a tendency to morph and change radically over time, and their demonstrated tendency create change in the organizations that deploy them, this might come with little surprise. This gave rise to an almost predictable degree of murkiness as businesses, civic organizations and individuals explored the benefits of computer usage. In academic, professional and government circles, the challenge was on to determine, in some certain terms, if, where and how this all was doing us any good.

One cannot help but be reminded of other fields of nascent scientific endeavor wherein carefully conceived studies are promptly trashed by their successors. The field of computer-assisted education, with us since the mid 70's, has been struggling to develop reasonable research methodologies and this has resulted in programs that have quantifiable, verifiable benefits to participants, particularly with assisting persons with certain disabilities and in distance-learning scenarios. The ongoing production of more general education tools under verified methodologies has been to some extent troubled by the continual advent of new technologies, however, which frequently themselves became the focus of programs. This suggests that solutions might have existed which will never see broad deployment because the technologies that they relied upon were abandoned by the mainstream.

Our topic is therefore quite current. Too current to do much pontificating or speculation, certainly too current to understand what exactly the impact of technical saturation will mean for us as a society. For these reasons our discussion will be limited to documentation that existed after 12/31/93. We have, in this period, ample data to helps us understand where technology is being used and by whom and for what purposes.

Initially I was interested in demonstrating measurable, quantifiable benefits to young people involved in Digital Divide programs, specifically teens, high-school or post-high-school kids. More specifically, I was interested in such measures in programs offered by not-for-profit organizations that were serving the most under serviced sectors visible in the Digital Divide arena, inner city and rural minorities. Our scope will necessarily verge outside of this territory, however. The definitions and history of the issue combined with the implications of imminent policy changes force us to consider the population as a whole and to make an evaluation of broad domestic trends in order to understand the scope and context of the issue. Over all, we must answer one preliminary question since it would have the potential to render further inquiry moot in relative terms: is this problem resolving itself? Does it in fact still exist at all? This is a rather key question at present because the Bush administration has taken a very different view of Digital Divide issues and is shaping it's policy accordingly.

Following this, we will then turn to the issue of measuring benefits in which I focus on the discussion of reviews and review methodologies in not-for-profit programs. The ensuing quest for measurable benefits will then lead us to focus on educational benefits. The educational arena is where we find more data available for study and where some of the soundest methodologies, from a scientific point of view, have been applied.

Defining the Digital Divide.

The term "Digital Divide" is used to describe the absence, in relative terms, of the many benefits of the "technology revolution" in certain identifiable aspects of our society as compared to others. In a nutshell, as the craze got going and achieved fever-pitch in the media and on Wall St., someone made the observation that the poor, minorities, women and rural individuals were getting left behind. Of particular concern were the nation's children as it was observed that traditionally under-serviced groups of children stood to be left even further behind in this aspect of education. The Internet by this time had gained its point of critical mass and became a household term. A very brief early timeline puts this in a highly contemporary context:

(Hobbes' Internet Timeline v5.5, Robert Hobbes' Zakon, Internet Evangelist)


Up until 1993 (give or take a year), only thin slivers of academic, military and technophile populations were really aware of the Internet and no one else really cared about it either. Certainly no one talked about a slide-rule divide then, the isolated nerd had yet a long way to go before becoming the fashionable geek. However, by 1994, William Gibson published multinational bestseller Neuromancer, which both prophesied and built an intellectual framework for what was to come. It proved to be the "shot heard round the world" in the Internet revolution. Gibson's work is credited with providing us with such lexical/philosophical tidbits as "the matrix" and "jacking into the "net". It also attracted young people to the net in droves.

On the adult side, the PC revolution, first propelled by the upper middle-class who had ourselves convinced that the expense of the personal computer (really quite pricey in those days) was justified by the enormous efficiency gained by having a very, very smart typewriter and then propelled as the same group replaced the first generation with successive Pentium, multimedia and special-purpose computers. We judiciously converted our previous investments into hand-me-downs, basement-clutter and good-old American landfill (although a good deal of this used technology also found it's way down to Latin America, Africa and the Mid-East). When Microsoft finally let Windows 95 out of the pen, it was received with more widespread and adoring pandemonium than I remember for anything. The kids loved it, the adults loved it, and the government loved it (back then, yes). We technicians loved it too. It made things a lot easier on everybody in the office, I'll be the first to say so. But to further jog memories, we cannot, in retrospect, suppose that such a massive product demand was genuinely motivated by the desire to get an edge in the office or to do our accountants work for them. We gobbled these slick new machines up because we are a consumer culture and the marketing folks had done a marvelous, stupendous, shining and brilliant job of making us think that PC's were cool. That this new cool thing just turned out to be such a good new thing for humanity I treat of one of the many serendipities surrounding this issue.

No one seems to remember who first contrived the term "Digital Divide" although by 1995 the notion seemed incipient. By 1996 the term had become hot property, and was articulated by the Clinton administration, which later claims to have recognized the digital divide since 1994, and has been working to overcome it with federal programs to provide Internet access to schools.

US Dept. Of State.

In 1997, President Clinton incorporated the issue into his 10-point "Call to Action for American Education in the 21st Century" as part of his State of the Union address. In this, technology access and training was both Clinton's lead and his counter-punch. For the President who's domestic policy had been served a backhand by the elite in his first months in office, who had then found foreign policy to be unstable grounds for confidence building, seeking to make education an official cornerstone would seem to be a matter of deductive reasoning. With technology, Clinton had found a policy that received bi-partisan support and ran him clear of tangling with the innards of the Department of Education, an institution whose entrenched bureaucracy might be the envy of any monarch. Clinton also had the great social imperative to "get it done" , which at that time had something to do with loading a bunch of machines and "computer people" on the job who would wave their magic wands to leverage benefits. We all remember that right? Change the paradigm, step outside the box, nobody really understands, but we all understand that the computer kids suddenly have it over on us. They are making millions, outfoxing traditional marketing concepts, breaking into supply chains, inventing new markets as they go along. We had finally found out how to market to Generation X-we could take a look at how they were marketing themselves. At the time it was common sense to jump on board or get left behind. The numerous success stories of the proverbial college-dropout geek-genius seemed to scream that we had on our hands a vehicle for liberation, a great equalizer in our societal quest for equal opportunity. It seemed axiomatic that the converse-that those unable to get on board for whatever reason, would be left out.

There was, by this time, plenty of fresh ammunition to support this position. Studies by the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA), the Department of Education and others had credibly shown that the fault lines between digital haves and have-nots were determined by race/ethnicity, income, education, location (rural, urban, inner-city) and disability. In July 1995 NTIA released FALLING THROUGH THE NET: A Survey of the "Have Nots" in Rural and Urban America". This report came at such a time and in such a way as to redefine an existing debate on information connectivity altogether: Connecting Americans to the information infrastructure was already a priority in the analog telephone age. The advent, rapid penetration and limitless potential foreseen in the digital age raised the stakes by a new order of magnitude in the information hierarchy: modems. Successive studies would continue to evolve new superlative orders of magnitude, so to speak, as internet connectivity, then broadband connectivity assumed the role of being the determining factor in quality or degree of information inclusion.

The NTIA Reports: Tracking the Digital Divide

The 1995 data was alarming, but fairly limited. Funding for further study was delegated and a series of reports ensued, each building upon the findings of the other and each expanding upon the body of data collected. These papers have formed the backbone of the Digital Divide domestic dialog to date. Sources include:

The 1995 report is kind enough to tell us in it's first lines how the report was conceived. As the President's principal adviser on telecommunications policy, the NTIA undertook to fill a gap in data between the Current Population Survey (CPS), conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the U.S. Department of Commerce and the data produced by the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) Industry Analysis Division, within the Common Carrier Bureau, which uses the CPS data to produce demographic profiles of telephone subscribers. As pointed out above, the issues of connectivity and information exchange were already under study by these organizations, and they rather dynamically adjusted their definitions to focus closely on computer and Internet usage. In order to include a geographic identifier for the households surveyed (the FCC's data do not indicate how telephone penetration in rural areas compares to penetration in suburbia or central cities), the NTIA in July 1994 contracted with the Census Bureau to include questions (on computer/modem ownership and online usage-what would come to be known as the "supplement to the CPS") in the CPS conducted in November 1994. The information gathered was cross-tabulated by income, race, age, educational attainment, and region (Northeast, Midwest, South and West), and three geographic categories (rural, urban, and central city) after the CPS was concluded. The CPS report contains data from a sample of 54,000 households. Since no such data had ever been obtained/derived, the 1995 report exclusively contained 1994 data. This is interesting because the supplement data seems to be from 1993. Successive reports would utilize data collected and manipulated in the same manner, and there is apparent consistency in the analyses of at least the first three reports. The tone and conclusions of the latter two reports is markedly different from their predecessors.

A Response In Keeping With the Pace of the Times

An unprecedented rush of funding, programs and partnerships spanning the technology, not-for-profit, philanthropic and govt. sectors followed the first report and continued to pick up steam in the years following. Numerous on-the-ground initiatives and entities sprung up well ahead of what it would take to organize such a multidimensional effort. Early war stories began to trickle in: used computers piling up in rooms with no technicians to deploy them, deployed computers with no trained support staff, deployed computers and support staff with no programs, programs with no controls, programs with no evaluation/risk analysis built in and so on. To more veteran hands in IT sector, this was predictable almost to the point of comedy. To veteran not-for-profit IT professionals, the comedy was a sour one indeed. It was clear that this movement lacked certain hands-on expertise, as did the tech-industry in general at that time for various reasons both good and bad.

From Government the response was chiefly represented by the TOP, CTC, Erate, LinkUp and PT3 programs.

An Abrupt Reversal of Policy

In 2002 President Bush requested $15 million for TOP and Congress appropriated $15 million, decreasing funding for TOP by 65%. For 2003, President Bush plans to eliminate federal funding for TOP altogether.

The Community Technology Center Program (CTC) offers free or low-cost public access to technology tools and services and to promote development of model programs that demonstrate the educational effectiveness of technology in urban and rural areas and economically distressed. Congress budgeted $10 million in FY 1999 to support Community Technology Centers as part of the budget for the Adult and Vocational Education Office of the U.S. Department of Education. The Administration budgeted $65 million for the program for FY 2000. IN 2001, CTC grants totaled $65M. In 2002 President Bush proposed increasing federal support of CTC's and that the program be transferred to HUD in order to merge it with HUD's Neighborhood Networks program. At present, however, like the TOP program, CTC funding has been zeroed out. This I believe includes the Federal Communications Commission programs designed to induce telecommunications companies serving rural and other high cost areas to provide the quality of services required by digital signals and broadband services.

TOP (the Technology Opportunities Program) is a competitive grant implemented in 1994. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce, TOP provides matching grants to public and not-for-profit organizations, which seek to demonstrate how the Internet and other technologies can be used to remedy social concerns. TOP received $45M in federal funding for 2001.

Erate: Discounts on telecommunications services of 20%-90% for schools and libraries, sliding-scale depends on community income level. Targets the least affluent and/or most expensive to serve areas. According to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics, Internet access in classrooms has nearly doubled from 27% of classrooms wired in 1997 to more than half (51%) in 1998, the first year of Erate funding.

LinkUp provides reductions in initial connection charges, Lifeline provides monthly reductions in service charges for low-income consumers. Some target community institutions -- schools, libraries, and rural health care providers.

Rural Health Care Division of Universal Service Administration Corporation seeks to connect health care providers in rural areas. FCC set up annual fund to subsidize telecommunication services for rural health care providers have resulted in huge anecdotal evidence demonstrating vast savings delivering healthcare such as remote diagnosis in rural areas.

National PT3 program (Preparing Tomorrow's Teacher to Use Technology). Federal program that's been funding $75 million a year for schools of education to create replicable edtech professional development for pre-service teachers

The Digital Divide Thesis Challenged

In a dramatic reversal of longstanding official policy, the Bush administration position has essentially been that the problem is resolving itself in good time, that groups who had previously enjoyed the least access now had greater penetration rates than the top categories of "haves" and that the numerous programs had done their job.

On 02/06/2002 Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY reported that:

In its fiscal 2003 budget submitted Monday, the White House proposed eliminating a fund that provided grants to reduce the ''digital divide'' between high-tech haves and have-nots, saying it was no longer necessary because so much of the U.S. population was now online. At a press conference Tuesday, a Commerce Department official said the Technology Opportunities Program had successfully introduced the Internet to many remote or underdeveloped communities, but funding for such efforts was now spread out across the government.

``What you're really seeing in our budget is a movement away from an awareness campaign and toward implementing what we heard in that laboratory,'' said Nancy Victory, head of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration "Clearly that awareness campaign was successful, but awareness is not the issue any more." "This program has been successful, but is no longer necessary to stimulate innovation in an industry that thrives on change and new applications," Nancy Victory, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Agency, which released the report, said, "I prefer to look at the glass as half-full." She pointed to the growth rates as more telling. From 1998 to 2001, Internet use among blacks grew at an annual rate of 31%, while use among whites grew by 19%.

Victory said TOP has run its course. She pointed to other parts of the budget that provide $1 billion in technology grants through the Education Department, another $1 billion for law enforcement technology through the Justice Department, and funds for rural communications infrastructure through the Agriculture Department.

"The TOP program was great, but it was $15 million," Victory said.

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