As I was scrolling through the blog I read L Bowman's latest contribution and it struck a familiar cord with me. My dad and step-mom do this to me. They will be begging me to come home and when I get to their house, we sit with the TV on and just stare. In addition they each have a laptop and after a while of being board I usually go get mine to. Since I found this interesting, I went to do some research and found this article:
http://www.hfrp.org/publications-resources/browse-our-publications/tapping-into-technology-the-role-of-the-internet-in-family-school-communication
It's about the Harvard Family Research Project. They are looking into whether or not schools communicating with family through the internet would work. The biggest issue is that many people do not have internet access. To give a real life example, my step-mom's school is working to try the same type of communication in order to reduce paper use. Their problem is that the majority of the school (like around 80%) is on free/reduced lunch. Meaning if the cannot afford $2-3 per day for their children's lunch, they probably cannot afford to buy computers or pay an internet bill.
Today, especially in the communities that we create in a college atmosphere, we tend not to think that people wouldn't have internet access. I mean even if you don't have it in your home, there are libraries, right? Wrong. Library hours are not conducive to families without normal or regulated 9-5 business days. Also they may not have cars.
Why does this matter to our class? Many people in this class are education majors so this will affect them, but also as we learn about digital literacy we may really want to consider how much of a literacy it really is, how much of the world lives without these things that follow us. How much of this country alone are we not reaching with our websites?
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