I read the three articles listed below. And the issues that came to my mind were the apartheids between economic status, race and the importance of skills. The articles focus on quantifying the issues for support. Generalizing and mapping out the changing landscape of eduction seemed to be the main focus at least with Warschauer and Yardi articles. The Mckay article touched on the changing social interactions caused by the diffusion of technology into our society.

I felt that one thing was missing, a true focus on the emotional connection, cultural differences and the negative impact on the students who do not succeed with technology. The readings were broad generalizations, focusing on race, gender and the use of technology. There was mention of the hispanic culture in Yardi’s article. However, the reading attributed the issues of access for hispanic families to financial and language barriers. I wonder if there is a deeper cultural relationship. I remember attending a movie showing, hosted by the Multicultural center here a PSU. The movie examined the different cultural views on education. I apologize for not remembering the name of the movie. But, the hispanic culture did not encourage the value of females attending college in the documentaries example. Could this be a correlation to the necessity of obtaining a computer and having online access at home?

Also, I ask, is the cultural view of technology and its uses truly explored? In the Yardi (p.195), they explain “[w]hites were more likely than Blacks or Hispanics to use word processing, e-mail, multimedia, and spreadsheets or databases.” They associate this difference to the economic status and language spoken in the families. There needs to be a deeper question explored here. Why is there a difference? Modeling of the parents or community members? Teaching styles of the teachers in the various schools associated with the economic status? A broad generalization about correlation is made.

The Mackay article addresses a new cyber culture emerging from the new generation of tech-savy youth. In reference to the above issues of ethnic cultural, is there a connections? Let me explain. The use of technology to socialize and connect with each other maybe rooted in a ethnographic and anthropological reason. One example is the Hispanic cultures roots to community and family. These are strong ties and occur in real life social gatherings. Now combined with the economics and values of technology, would the family purchase items to place a physical distance in those real life gatherings? Is there a thought about that or is there just an apparent cultural behavior?

A White family using email, word processing, databases and etc. finds value in this. Would this family be less likely to have dinner around the table and eat while using a computer? Thus allowing technology to place a barrier between them and a real life gathering. This may encourage connection on a digital level.

The social interactions may have different significance rooted in traditional values that have evolved from cultural roots. The articles don’t explore these perspectives deeply, but try to associated them with quantifiable statistics. Explanations maybe rooted in cultural traditions or more anthropological roots, combined with the socioeconomics issues. Factors to examine are affluent hispanic families and compare usage, how, when and where technology is used to non-affluent hispanic families. Furthermore, the comparison of technology usage to affluent and non-affluent caucasian families will reveal the culture developing or mutating from the diffusion of technology into our lives.

I mentioned the negative impact on students within this diffusion of technology. We tend to focus on how having and not having technology impacts a child. Then further focus on the child that arrives to innovation as in the example of the film maker, Max. We forget the child that fails with technology or uses it in a non-productive manner. How do we help these student? Is this issue solvable with the presences of a stellar teacher? Is the mentor part of the relationship between a teacher and the student the qualitative factor to overcome all the socioeconomic, cultural and other negative life influences? Is giving technology access to a child enough? Or is the emotion support and encouragement to use the technology in a positive way vital to helping the students who are a negative outlier? We focus on the positive outliers in these articles, but never highlight the negative outlier? The negative outliers a generalized! I will keep asking questions and trying to find the balance in the presentation of stats and numbers. I hope others can assist me in seeing more balance in the presentation of the articles. Because we need to help the ones who have no access and have access that are not doing well with technology.

Articles Read:

• Mckay, S., Thurlow, C., & Zimmerman, H. T. (2005). Wired whizzes or techno-slaves?: Young people and their emergent communication technologies. In A. Williams & C. Thurlow (Eds.), Talking adolescence:Perspectives on communication in the teenage years (pp. 185-203). New York: Peter Lang.
• Warschauer, M., & Matuchniak, T. (2010). New technology and digital worlds: Analyzing evidence of equity in access, use, and outcomes. Review of Research in Education, 34(1), 179-225. doi:10.3102/0091732X09349791
• Yardi, S., & Bruckman, A. (2012). Income, race, and class: exploring socioeconomic differences in family technology use. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3041-3050). ACM. Doi: 10.1145/2207676.2208716.