digital divide

It’s easier to think of the digital divide as being an international problem but it seems hard to believe that there is a digital divide in America as well. In America we still have schools in some low socio-economic areas that have problems with access to computers and most importantly to the Internet. In education it is important to have access to computers and the Internet. But it is also most important to teach students how to use the Internet wisely. Even if students were to gain access to computers and the Internet would they be able to do their assignments? That is a good question as sometimes it’s more expected that students already know how to do effective research on the Internet but in actuality they may not know ways of doing proper research. It’s important for a teacher to know their students and to know what they have access to and not. It may be a good idea to go over best practices for research before assigning a research topic to students. There are sites to avoid such as Wikipedia for research because it is a site that is easily changed an updated by other people and topics may not be covered accurately. Whereas scholarly research on google is an appropriate way for conducting research as well as JSTOR. There is a digital divide in America and it’s part of have nots and part not knowing how to properly use the tools that are available. As schools become more connected and teachers become more knowledgeable about the Internet it might help the digital divide in America but it will take time and it won’t happen over night.





IN China
About the digital divide between China and western country, the first thing that I thought it was the government control that what should be on the internet and what should not. Personally, I think it was not right even it can avoid something bad emerge on the internet by that way. I think most of Chinese hate that too. And I know something funny about what Chinese government does. For example, the cursed Forsaken in WOW was actually made up with a bunch of bones. But it’s not allowed in China and they add the body for cursed Forsaken.
And another thing is if something bad happened in China. You can’t search the related word on the internet. I think the government should not control the internet.


In China, the digit divide is quite serious. Some highly developed cities like Beijing and Shanghai have high rate of Internet access while one hardly has a computer at home in some districts north of Jiangsu Province. However, china is developing so fast that the digit divide has already improved a lot. I still remember when I was in elementary school, few of us have computers at home. My father bought one, using dial-up to get to the Internet. It was hard to believe at that time, Internet had been popular in United States. Anyway, I believe most of us are prefer to the world that has no digit divide because this is the lifestyle. We will be quite uncomfortable if we don’t have the access of Internet.