Education Equity and the Digital Divide

The term “digital divide ” has traditionally described inequali-ties in access to computers and the Internet between groups of people based on one or more dimensions of social or cultural identity. Accordingly, researchers tend to compare rates of physical access to, or actual use of, these technolo-gies across groups based on race, gender, socioeconomic status, education level, disability status, first language, and other identifiers. But this conceptualization for the digital divide fails to capture the full picture of inequity and alien-ation recycled by these gaps and the resulting educational, social, cultural, and economic ramifications, particularly by those who are already alienated by exclusive curricula, school cultures, and most other dimensions of education. The purpose of this article is to reformulate a conceptualization of the digital divide and its relationship to education by building on a critical review of recent research and shifting the “ac-cess ” paradigm toward one not based on equality of physical access, but on equity of access. By August 2000, women had surpassed men to become a majority of the United States online population (National Telecommunications and Infor-mation Administration [NTIA], 2000) leading many instructional technol-ogy scholars to hail the end of the gender digital divide—gaps in computer and Internet access rates between women and men. If there were more women than men using the Internet, the logic went, equality had been achieved. (The slightly larger overall number of girls and women, as com-pared with boys and men, using the Internet was consistent with the slightly Gorski, P. (2005). Education equity and the digital divide. AACE Journal