Orientation #2 - POTLUCK!!

Two days after the first orientation, and we have a potluck!  This time the orientation was 6 hours!

For this meeting we started off with a piece of paper with a question, quote, or phrase which we were supposed to comment on.  The most interesting question, at least to me, to come up during this exercise was one about Muslim women and whether or not they were oppressed.  Basically the argument centered around the upbringing of Muslim women and asked if they knew they were being treated unequally, the argument was that Muslim women were not oppressed because the did not know they were oppressed, and the counter was the opposite(as I know nothing of Muslim's in general I could only listen to these arguments).

While this was going on I was thinking about how this could apply to the digital divide(not the sexist part but the ignorance portion).  The main question that got into my mind was "are there people who are unaware of the advancements of current technology".  Of course the answer to this question is "yes" as "current" technology is ever changing is hard to keep up with the rapid releases of new products.  So I re-worded this question to "are there people who are ignorant of current technological uses in the GTA?"  Now this is a question that is much harder to handle, if the question was not limited to the GTA then the obvious answer would be "yes" as people from various areas around the would would easily fit into this category.  However people in the GTA live in a much more technologically advanced world others who live in 3rd world countries.  In the end I had concluded that the only people that this would be possible for in the GTA are those that have never stepped outside their houses and are devoid of technological devices at home.  This basically means that this is not a problem for the digital divide, at least in areas with a heavy concentration of technology.

Following this exercise we then began another, this time we were given six stickers, three red, and three green and were asked to place red stickers under the type of writing we dislike and green under writing we like.  Of course we were allowed to place more stickers on specific types of writing if we liked it just that much.  What I found interesting about this exercise was that our group in particular seemed to dislike Facebook and Twitter.  The main consensus for the reason we hated these two were mainly that it was awkward.  The discussion centered around how the process of using Facebook and Twitter to allow either friends or total strangers to know what you are doing at the moment seemed like it was strange.  Its like our privacy is being invaded when we do those things.
Other reasons included that the social networking sites have become too confusing to navigate, or even use due to the overload in plugins.

After this discussion we had a break, all i can say about this break is mmmm cheese.

Following this break the next couple of exercises were focused on teaching, us the tutors, how to effectively teach illiterate students and ended off with a speach from one of the founders of the group and an ex-student who accomplished some remarkable things.

This portion,I had felt, had nothing to do with the divide.  So I started to get anxious about the reason why I was here in the first place.

After the meeting a fellow UofT student and I consulted with the organizers and found that, although we are doing the same training, our task in the end will be different from the others.  This gave me some relief as I was not prepared to teach students how to read and write, heck in that area I'm in no position to be teaching students when I have my own grammar problems.

So the next question to follow was "what exactly am I going to be doing to bridge the digital divide?"  The reply I got was in short teaching a different group, whose goals are more orientated towards learning technology.  When I tried to inquire further, the response was that the coordinator for the literacy program and the technology program was different so I would have to speak with the coordinator for the technology program to get more specific answers.

Orientation #1 - Introduction

This blog will be talking about my experience's with the digital divide while I am a part of a service learning community, so for my first post I will start where every potential tutor starts off.  Orientations!

Today was the first day of orientations for all tutors, and Being one of the three UofT students assigned to this community I was feeling incredibly intimidated. But after entering the room and mingling with some of the other UofT students the feeling had dissipated.

The session lasted a total of 3 hours and consisted of roughly 4 sections starting with an icebreaker and ending with a discussion on a video.  The main topic throughout the orientation was teachers, teaching methods, and how to interact with students.

In particular the talks were centered around individuals who, for whatever reasons, were unable to learn to read during their childhood.  This means that they are COMPLETELY illiterate, meaning they cannot event read or write in their first language.

At this point of the orientation I was thinking to myself "people like this exist?" Although rude, I had never actually thought that there would be people in Toronto that would be completely illiterate. This was naive thinking on my part as there can be a variety of reasons why residents would be illiterate.  For example Canada has many immigrants from around the world.  Hence its not strange for people in third world countries without schools and mandatory education to move into Toronto and immediately start work.

This is one source of the digital divide.  People who are illiterate essentially cannot keep up with technology.  This is mainly because of the complexity abundance of technology, old and new, that is currently already out or coming out in the world.  People who are illiterate would need people to explain how to use every item explicitly, meaning that anything new that comes up would require help from another literate individual.

Documentation and user guides are rendered useless to illiterates.  This means voice commands is the only form of human-technology interaction possible between illiterates and technology.  Also, although there is support, voice commands are less reliable then plain text.

To bridge this divide, our task, to my understanding is to teach illiterate individuals to become literate.