A story today published in the Boston Globe reports this sobering disparity:
A total of 54 percent of white students use the Internet at home, compared with 26 percent of Hispanic and 27 percent of black children. Limited access can erode a student’s research on assignments or college scholarships.
Watching my own kids thrive on supervised access to a range of late model lap tops that float around our house, the impact of this disparity is clear. My four year old can click around pre-K alphabet or other skill-building software with relative ease and he has a sense, albeit perhaps a bit disturbing, that successful professionals are joined at the hip to the wirelessly connected laptops.
The press release leading to this story resulted in over 200 new articles. Perhaps early claims for the end of the digital divide were pre-mature.
