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.