Digital Divide in Chicago - 2018 WBEZ article

This screen shot shows interactive map included in WBEZ article titled "Clear Signs Of The Digital Divide Between Chicago’s North And South Sides"

The article reports that "more than half the households in Englewood and nearly half the households in West Englewood (51 percent), Riverdale (49 percent), Auburn Gresham, and South Shore (both 46 percent), lacked internet access at home".

This is a disadvantage for youth and adults.

I show these maps and articles with the goal that readers will be concerned and will share the articles with others, who will also be concerned, and that this will result in people from different sectors giving time, talent and dollars to help reduce this problem.

Browse other articles on this blog, and the Tutor/Mentor blog, and share with your network, as the graphic below suggests.

This work is not something that can be done in a day, or even a year or a decade. But it is work that needs to be done.  If you'd like help digging through the information I'm sharing, or in making sense of some of the graphics, I'm available.

12-12-18 update - Visit this site and see 2018 data and maps showing digital access in census tracts across the USA.

12-19-18 update - World Economic Forum - report - Our Shared Digital Future: Building an Inclusive, Trustworthy and Sustainable Digital Society, 2022 goals. click here

1-16-19 update - World Economic Forum  report - Global Risks Report 2019

2-18-2019 update - Nearly one-in-five teens can’t always finish their homework because of the digital divide - 10/2018 Pew Research Center report - click here

2-25-2019 update - Digital Distress: What is it and who does it affect? Part 1. 2019 article focusing on "those on the wrong side of the divide (who) are being left behind, prompting the creation of strategies to ensure everybody can reap the benefits of this new age. click here

3-30-2020 update - Broadband is now our lifeline, but 20 million still lack access. click here

3-31-2020  update - Worst Connected Cities - 2018 from National Digital Inclusion Alliance -  click here

4-13-2020 update - Stop the Cap-Promoting Better Broadband, Fighting Data Caps and Usage-Based Billing - read articles at this link.

4-21-2020 update - Analysis of Digital Divide in California, including map and policy recommendations - click here

4/25/2020 update - One in five Chicago students lacks broadband. Here’s where they live - Chalkbeat Chicago story - click here

5-6-2020 update - Digital prosperity: How broadband can deliver health and equity to all communities - click here

1-24-2021 update - Mapping and Mitigating the Urban Digital Divide  -  This article describes a grant to the Center for Data and Computing at the University of Chicago to create new maps that build better understanding and help mitigate the Digital Divide.  

3-18-2021 update - visit the "saving the world" set of articles on Paul Signorelli's blog and find many articles related to digital access, digital justice, and digital divide. Below are links to two articles.
- Promoting Universal Broadband Access With Lev Gonick (Part 1 of 2- (click here);
- Promoting Universal Broadband Access With Beth Holland (Part 1 of 3) -  (click here)

3-18-2022 update - This Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Tweet shows that "neighborhoods experiencing deep poverty are the least connected to broadband. The Tweet also points to a resource page on the RWJF website. 

6-6-2022 update -  Interactive map shows level of broadband connectivity in rural zip codes throughout the USA. This is a project of RURAL LISC. click here

11-22-2022 update - HBR article "How to Close the Digital Divide in the U.S."  - click here

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Half the World Still not On-Line - Why this Matters.

Image from World Economic
Forum article

I saw this map on Facebook today and opened the World Economic Forum article to learn more. The orange and green areas of the map show hot spots of internet connectivity, meaning the US and Europe and scattered places in the rest of the world are on line and able to read my blog or connect with me and others in meaningful on-line interactions.

Read the article. See why this is important. 

Mapping Digital Learning Access - invitation

Earlier this week I watched a one hour documentary showing the Digital Divide in America, and identifying three key challenges that must be overcome.

I created this concept map to visualize that discussion and add some other issues that were not included in the video.

I'm looking for information that can make this cMap more useful.

First, if you know of articles that provide more information related to hardware, connectivity, or teacher training, I'd like to add links to such articles in the three nodes on the map that focus on those issues.   If you know of anyone writing about the challenges of keeping this stuff updated as kids go through school - 12  years - I'd like to point to such articles.

Second, I am looking for maps that show every school in the US, and provide some sort of indicator that shows what level of digital access that school offers.  Ideally such maps would have overlays showing poverty demographics and legislative districts, such as I've tried to provide in the Chicago Tutor/Mentor Program Locator platform.

A few weeks ago I pointed to the OpenStreet Map Project, in which people from around the world can help upgrade the quality of information for places throughout the world.  It seems to me that a group of students and/or volunteers could create a base map, and that schools from around the country could add their own information with pre-set icons that would show levels of readiness (yellow, red, blue, green, etc?) based on the information in the Digital Divide video.

Maybe someone is already doing all of this?  If so, just share a link and I can point to it.

This information needs to be available on a school by school level or in districts with multiple schools crossing income and wealth divides, the need of poor schools might be overlooked.  Including legislative overlays would build in direct accountability to the people who represent those districts.

We can't help kids get through school and into jobs and adult lives free of poverty if we can't give them a more equal playing field.

11-10-17 update - Here's an article titled "From good intentions to real outcomes: Equity by design in Learning Technologies", which relates to this topic.  It has been set up on Hypothes.is so readers can annotate and share ideas in the margins.

5-28-18 update - Here's an article about a 2018 Google Report revealing the state of CS education in the US

7-16-2018 update - Article titled "The Last Mile" talks about broadband access in rural areas of US.

9-11-2018 update - The Stark Geography of America's Digital Divide, article by Bryan Alexander, summarizes this Pew Research Center Report on the Digital Divide.

11-23-2018 update - Equity, Access and the Distributed Web - relevant blog article from #clmooc network.

4-24-2020 update - map showing broadband accessibility in Chicago census tracks - click here

Maps communicate information in unique ways

This map shows broadband availability in the United States. Availability is defined as at least 3 mbps download and 768 kbps upload speeds. This is from a Broadband Availability web site. When you live in a big city like Chicago you tend to take broadband access for granted. This map show that many places in America don't have such luxury.

This is just one more example of how mapping data can help make it easier to connect people from different places with a common understanding of a problem that affects people all over the country.

At the Tutor/Mentor Blog my article of 12/12/11 includes a map showing drop out high schools in Illinois. We need significantly more resources to map this information in all the ways we want, and to create the advertising and public awareness needed to get millions of people looking at this information.

Can you help? Click here to see how you can help.