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ISSN number: 1746-4757

  

Feature Essay: The Digital Learning Divide - responding to the access needs of citizens

Gerry McAleavy, Tony Donegan and Celia O'Hagan

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The Community Response

The picture is not all negative. Institutions have developed from the ground up which are attempting to respond to the needs of their community. For example, the St. Vincent de Paul study showed that financial exclusion was being addressed by the remarkable growth of the Credit Union movement. The total membership of Credit Unions in Northern Ireland (total population 1.6 million) has more than doubled between 1988 (134,226) and 1998 (281,614) and the total shareholding has expanded six-fold in the same period. Volunteers have been remarkably successful in running a community credit business in some of the most disadvantaged areas. The Registrar’s report notes that the default rate for Credit Unions is 0.5%. This success has come about not through solutions being imposed from above, with reference to pre-defined plans of action and political or media-friendly criteria, but through solutions developed from those in need of them. Resolutions to complex issues have come about through valuing and recognising existing procedural knowledge devised in informal settings:

“ The solutions are intensely pragmatic…. They replace the products of apparently sophisticated theory with apparently simple, often normative, rules of thumb. The rules have been developed and applied not through rigorous analysis and logic, but often through the intuition and experience of designers on the ground looking at specific problems and trying to solve them”. [18]

Amongst the skills involved in this enterprise are IT skills. Again, rather than being imposed from above, the necessary skills are shared between volunteers. Citizens in communities have networked to ensure that Credit Unions can share their expertise in IT systems for accounting and use of compatible systems. While many Credit Union volunteers do not have formal qualifications, they have acquired significant knowledge and skills in informal settings. These achievements may be unrecognised by formal educational institutions, but the reality is that communities have taken on board the need to use IT productively to provide an essential service despite the lack of any government support or any significant interest from the formal educational sector. It was recommended [19] that:

“ A programme of co-operative business education should be initiated, building on current formal and informal modes of learning and delivered through flexible methodologies, including the use of Information and Communication Technologies, experiential learning and with appropriate opportunities for progression”.

The challenge in enabling provision of IT to disadvantaged communities is, then, to afford adequate recognition and value to the collective knowledge created by citizens who are actively working to ensure that their communities remain viable. This will entail a radical rethinking of many assumptions regarding the need to ‘deliver’ basic IT skills to disadvantaged areas and an acceptance that power will have to be shared with communities, including the power to decide what is and is not valid knowledge. While government bureaucracies have come to accept, in principle, the concept of social capital, the current emphasis of the education system is the individual knowledge acquired through human capital. The concept of social capital can be defined within the view of Bourdieu which is that social capital consists of assets and resources that communities acquire through the fostering of networks of mutual advantage [20]. Contained within this is the recognition that the identification of social capital is dependent on the willingness to accept the definitions of communities rather than attempting to pre-define the limits of social knowledge.

The Educational Needs of the Excluded

Addressing social exclusion entails that education, poverty and other contributing factors are fully recognized as constituting a major challenge for communities and policy-makers. Education is important because it strongly influences future life chances at an early age. In the U.K., men with no qualifications had an unemployment rate of 30% in 2000 as opposed to 4% in 1979 (Economist, September 8th 2001). Without adequate education it is now becoming more difficult for young people to emerge from impoverished backgrounds to take their place in the workforce and become more socially mobile.

As young people move up the age range they are confronted with a society where further and higher education has become the norm for nearly half of all school leavers. Entry to higher education is at the highest level ever in historical terms (a generation ago the rate was around 6%) but participation varies depending on a range of factors. In research carried out at the University of Ulster, based on a sample of 753 students drawn from the Belfast Education and Library Board Area we found that a typical ‘non-progressor’ was likely to have some of the following characteristics:

  • be a male protestant who lived close to the school in postcodes BT13, BT14 or BT15
  • have attended a secondary school where a high percentage of pupils claimed free school meals
  • did less that one hour of homework at night
  • was less involved in school activities and less likely to ‘get on’ with other pupils
  • less likely to have received much information on progressing to further/higher education, or to have talked to teachers and parents about the possibility
  • wanted to go to work as soon as possible
  • had no internet access.

The picture of a typical non-progressor suggests a young person in a family where financial circumstances are difficult and where social skills may be lacking and more care needs to be paid to the needs of the young person. However, in the St Vincent de Paul study (360 respondents) it was apparent that parents were highly aware of the importance of education. 82.2% recognised its important role in getting a job. Significantly, no individuals in the 18-30 age group without qualifications were employed.

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Footnotes

18. Penn (2001) REFERENCE MISSING FROM BIBLIO

19. McAleavy, G., Collins, K., Adamson, G. and Strain, M. (2001) Co-operatives and Disadvantage in Northern Ireland, Belfast, Office of the First and Deputy First Minister return

20. Bourdieu, Pierre (1986). "The Forms of Capital" in John Richardson, (ed), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood Press, pp. 241-25.