Grappling with the digital divide
Times Higher Education, August 14, 2008
Hannah Fearn

This article grapples with the difficulties of getting faculty to teach with the communication tools their students are now used to using. It suggests students are ‘transliterate’ across a range of technologies and laments that most faculty are not.

Now I’m all for faculty experimenting with email and forums, but I wonder sometimes if making dichotomies between those who do and those who don’t is the most helpful way to think about the problem.

I like to suggest to students that technologies at work progress vertically, and one system drives out another. Whereas technologies at home progress horizontally, and we just get more and more ways to do the same thing.

Thus, what we have today are different ranges of competence – perhaps we’re more up the analog end, and they’re more up the digital end. But at the same time, we occasionally send text messages, and they know how to get a stamp and mail a card. And both parties are struggling with how to construct an identity on the ever shifting sands of privacy. May be we have more in common than we like to think.

In his classic sociological article, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” (American Journal of Sociology 1973) Mark Granovetter demonstrates how social activity influences labor markets. In this and other work (including a follow up article in Sociological Theory in 1985 and his book, Getting a Job, from University of Chicago Press, 1995), Granovetter systematically explores how 282 men in the U.S. found their jobs.  His work has not only provides evidence for the truism that “it’s not what you know but who you know,” it also illustrates how social activity and labor markets overlap and interact with one another.    Some of that is changing.  more...