Diversifying Digital Learning: Online Literacy and Educational Opportunity

How does the digital divide affect the teaching and learning of historically underrepresented students?
Many schools and programs in low-income neighborhoods lack access to the technological resources, including equipment and Internet service, that those in middle- and upper-income neighborhoods have at their fingertips. This inequity creates a persistent digital divide—not a simple divide in access to technology per se, but a divide in both formal and informal digital literacy that further marginalizes youths from low-income, minoritized, and first-generation communities.
Diversifying Digital Learning outlines the pervasive problems that exist with ensuring digital equity and identifies successful strategies to tackle the issue. Bringing together top scholars to discuss how digital equity in education might become a key goal in American education, this book is structured to provide a framework for understanding how historically underrepresented students most effectively engage with technology—and how institutions may help or hinder students’ ability to develop and capitalize on digital literacies.
This book will appeal to readers who are well versed in the diverse uses of social media and technologies, as well as less technologically savvy educators and policy analysts in educational organizations such as schools, afterschool programs, colleges, and universities. Addressing the intersection of digital media, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic class in a frank manner, the lessons within this compelling work will help educators enable students in grades K–12, as well as in postsecondary institutions, to participate in a rapidly changing world framed by shifting new media technologies.