D iconference keynote_final

Digital Inclusion: Are
we nearly there yet?
Professor Jane Seale
TEL Digital Inclusion Consultant
Plymouth University

What has research and practice
contributed to our
understanding of:

1) The experience and impact of digital
exclusion

2) The processes and resources
required to promote digital inclusion?

Digital inclusion can be understood as
disadvantaged learners being able to:

• Access technologies and the opportunities afforded
through these technologies ;
• Use these technologies to access and produce
information/content or to communicate and interact
with others and in doing so;
• Participate in formal or informal learning activities
and opportunities that are;
• empowering in the sense that the learner is able to
achieve outcomes that are personally meaningful to
them and has an increased range of both personal
and socially valued options to choose from

WHAT DOES RESEARCH AND
PRACTICE TELL US ABOUT THE
EXPERIENCE AND IMPACT OF
DIGITAL INCLUSION/EXCLUSION?

Research can identify who is
digitally excluded
• Families with school age children
• Those with only basic secondary school education
• Substance abusers, travellers, domestic violence
sufferers and the youngest children.
• Those with mental health problems and children in
care
• People who have a disability/health related problem

• Although the tendency is to focus on the “headline”
data about access to and use of Internet (and not
other technologies)

Sources (PWC , 2009; Digital Inclusion Team,2007; OxiS, 2011)

Research can identify reasons
for use/non use
• Cost
• Lack of interest
• Lost access
– finished school; lost job etc.

• Informants tend to be those who have a
“voice” that is easy to access…..

Research can identify “access”
behaviours

• Valentine et al. 2005
– Libraries and Internet cafes did not act as
substitutes for lack of access to ICT at
home, because it was children who had
access to a computer at home who were also
the pupils who accessed ICT most often in
other locations out of school.

Research tells us something
about impact

• Socio-economic impact
• Example: families with school age
children
– “[..] if the 1.6 million children who live in families
which do not use the internet got online at home, it
could boost their total lifetime earnings by over £10
billion” (PWC, 2009)

Research tells us something
about impact (2)

• Educational attainment, confidence and
motivation
• Example Valentine et al. 2005
– Statistically significant positive association between
pupils‟ home use of ICT for educational purposes and
improved attainment in mathematics at years 6 and 9,
– Pupils, parents and teachers reported that using ICT
raised pupils‟ confidence and had “motivational
effects”

But we have to use
this research data
intelligently

Intelligent use of research data

• Value a range of different impacts
– Impacting on large groups versus impact on
smaller groups (where the scale of impact
may be greater)
– So that what is valued by the minority is
measured alongside what is valued by the
majority

Intelligent production of research data

• Choose a range of different impact
measures
– so that impact can be shown across all the
excluded groups
• e.g. socio-economic and educational attainment
measures are not necessarily applicable to adults
with learning disabilities
– So that outcomes that can show long term gains
can be effectively used alongside those that
show short terms gains e.g. reduction in re-
offending or improving employment
• Address the quick fix mentality of many funded DI
projects

But current research only goes so far….

• Lots of good, large-scale survey work
– ONS , Ofcom, OII
• But this work rarely produces rich, thick
descriptions of “experience”:
– how and why people use or not use technologies:
meaningful use
• (including but extending beyond the Internet)
– How practitioners support digital inclusion
and why some practices are more effective
than others: meaningful “best practice”

Practitioners can contribute to
this knowledge gap
• For example: Helen Milner of UK Online Centres;
uses data on what‟s stopping people:
(Access, Confidence, Motivation)
– To inform what her organisation does
– and produces “case studies” to show raised confidence
and motivation
• But there has to be incentives for practitioners to “tell
it is how it is”
– be critical/evaluative, without fear of losing
funding, contravening government policy
• What practitioner in their right mind would report a
failure………….?

WHAT DOES RESEARCH AND
PRACTICE TELL US ABOUT THE
PROCESSES AND RESOURCES
REQUIRED TO PROMOTE DIGITAL
INCLUSION?

1987-1993: I worked in “mental handicap”
hospitals and adult training centres

We had technology- all hail the BBC Microcomputer!

Going backwards?
• 24 years later…… a private hospital
for people with severe learning
disability and Autism was highlighted
in a 2011 Panorama programme
about systematic abuse and torture.
• That modern hospital did not appear
to have one single piece of digital
technology available for use by the
patients
– No computers, no Internet, no
mobile phones, No MP3 Those who are not
Players, no iPads, no viewed as human, are
communication or assistive denied access to the
technology everyday tools of
humanity

Not necessarily, but need certain factors
to be in place……
• Let me give you an
example….
• Concepts of access:
ESRC Seminar Series
– People with learning
disabilities participated
on an equal basis
– Supported through
committed advocacy
work
– Included through the
use of technology

Included in research through the use of
technology, participatory methods &
skilled, creative advocacy workers:

• Using mobile phones to
organise independent travel to
and from the university
• Presenters with learning
disabilities able to tell their
powerful stories of “access” to
non-disabled participants
through PowerPoint with
pictures and video clips

Included in “life” Self-Advocacy groups:
– digital & video cameras to
through the use of record visits to heritage
technology, & sites
– communication tools to
skilled, creative produce an accessible
report of how well the
advocacy workers sites facilitated access

Life-story work:
– digital cameras,
PowerPoint, iTunes
enabled people with
learning disabilities to
control what is said about
them in person-centred
planning meetings,
interviews for care-
workers

We need to know more
about people and
processes

So that we can explain why...
• Stuff like this happens….

“The majority of teachers interviewed did not set homework
explicitly to be done on a computer because of their
concerns about digital divides in terms of children‟s access
to home-based ICT. Children, however, implicitly absorbed
the message that they should use a home computer if they
had access to it. As such the digital divide is still there even
though teachers did not explicitly set homework using ICT, it
was just not acknowledged because pupils were using it out
of „choice‟ rather than under teachers‟ direction”

So that we can explain why...

• Stuff like this happens:

“However, Inter-Life, which began in 2009, has uncovered
problems some looked-after children have getting online.
Despite government action, Internet access is still often
unsatisfactory. Researchers have encountered instances of
young people eager to join the project who, 10 months after
they have been signed up, are still unable to get online.
According to Frank: „Most children‟s homes will let young
people on a computer for one hour a day – and it has to be
supervised. You cannot get on to many sites as they are all
blocked. Technically you have Internet access but it doesn‟t
amount to anything worth having.‟”

Are we nearly there yet?

• No, not quite
• But we know more about what we
need to know/do in order to get
there!

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