Brad Holland
Final Reflection
The rise of information technology
must be accompanied by a push for evaluation on its uses and accompanying societal
consequences. As an educator and peer participating in the Community Technology
Literacy & You project, I must regularly stop and reflect on community
informatics topics including digital divides and identity within communities. Over
the course of the last ten weeks, these are the two topics that I found myself
reflecting upon most. Likewise, I was consciously aware of them during
classroom discussion and community service learning.
In a society that is rapidly
becoming more dependent on technology, there exists a digital divide between
people with tech-prowess and those without. This division has an important role
in determining the economic and social position of people in developed nations such
as America, where most white-collar jobs require rudimentary computing skills.
The digital divide is strikingly similar to the cycle of poverty. People who
are digitally literate can use information technology as a tool to gain further
knowledge, advancing themselves economically, intellectually, and
technologically further ahead of the digitally illiterate. The digital divide
is apparent to me during my daily life when I interact with people of different
generations. Older generations that did not grow up using information
technology have a much more difficult time understanding the potential of
technologies such as the internet, mobile computing, and social networks.
People like my parents often ask me questions that I simply Google to provide
an answer. My first reaction when encountering a problem is to look it up
online, whereas they usually ask their immediate peers for information. To take
it one step further, my parents’ parents would most likely would have scoffed
at the idea of an internet search, because their generation is even less
digitally literate and cannot comprehend the scope of online information. I
feel it is important for the digitally literate to help teach and encourage
those who lack similar skills; digital literacy opens up a whole new world of
information and opportunity.
This course’s focus on identity made
me think about how I perceive myself within the mix of thousands of individuals
that I interact with on a daily basis. There exist countless forces in the
world that try and sculpt or mold our characteristics using outward social
pressures. It requires immense strength to be an individual and think freely.
How we perceive ourselves affects how we interact with others. This became
important during our workshop sessions, because we as volunteers were not
present to simply instruct from a top-down hierarchy. The bi-directional
learning goals of this course required us to perceive ourselves as community
members on the same plane as the women in our workshops. This train of thought
is radically different from my other university courses, and is especially
liberating when I began to consider the inclusiveness of our efforts.
Our workshop sessions were not the
only inclusive community in this course. Thanks to a welcoming classroom
environment, my classmates, instructor and I felt comfortable discussing
personal matters as they relate to our cohesiveness as a group. I can
confidently say that I am comfortable with my identity among these people,
which allows for more wholesome and meaningful interaction. There are countless
things we can learn from each other if we allow our individuality to flourish
and use technology to support the communication process. This course is
certainly a step in the right direction, but we have much more work to do.
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