When I first came into Digital Citizenship, I thought I would be reading and hearing lectures about the laws that we have digitally as citizens of this country. Instead my horizons were expanded, and I learned about so much more. In the beginning I was shy, I didn’t like doing the videos just like my other fellow classmates.
We started off with our own super hero, us. We created a super hero we would want to be and what we would want to accomplish, as well as how we would help the world. We shared out backgrounds and how we came of this power. This exercise little did we know was the ice breaker of the whole class. When we would share other people would relate or even have had the same experience as one another.
The next step that we had to do was have a blog site, this site would allow other fellow bloggers to read about what we do in class and our perception on many things. We did a voting section, posters, and of course videos. I believe the videos have more personality than the papers. Digitally we may think we know all we need to know but we don’t. One major thing that stood out to me was the Nine Elements and the Digital Divide. Out of the Nine Elements, Digital Communication stood out to me. As a communication major I didn’t expect that any less.
Digital Communication is a mode of communication, it occurs when the information or the thought is encoded digitally as discreet signals and then is electronically transferred to the recipients (Quora). To simply this, it's basically decoding information into a binary code and transmitting it between devices that can encode information from and decode it back into a format the sender and receiver can process; through images, sound, word (Quora).
Students use digital communication devices when they are not in the class room as way to communicate followed by educational purposes. Ownership of digital access is prey common amongst college students. Out of 4,374 students that took a survey, overall 93% of them own their own computers. Cell phones of course are owned by 82% of the students; females that own cellphones are about 84% compared to the males who only own about 77% of their own devices. In research conducted by the University of Minnesota, 99.5 % of students use their computers on writing documents and emails, 97.2% use it for internet pleasure and surfing the internet, 96.4% use it or classroom activities. A lot of students don’t use their computers for editing and creating videos; a lot don't understand how those applications work. When it comes to the hours spent working on homework on the computers, students only spend only 2-5 hours a week. An average of 3-5 hours on surfacing the web, texting, and listening to music. Women spend more time communicating compared to the men who spend more time playing games, surfing the Net, and downloading music. Students with the lowest GPA’s spend more time on computer gaming and the students with high GPA’s use their computers classroom support and school activities.
Referring to how I stated most students don’t use those computers for creating or editing videos the reason why is because not all students have a certain skill level to use it. On the average undergraduate students need to develop two types of skills; information literacy and fluency and technical skills needed to use the tools. Due to the constant and rapid changes that happens with the software's it requires new and different skills as well. Students were asked how much they are skilled in for each application, they said that they are only skilled in communications, word processing, and of course the internet. Which is all that we learned through high school. The only students that showed more improvements were the ones that are in business, life science, and engineering. Students have the basic skills needed with basic software but unless they are going into that field, they don’t show that much interest. The upper classmates show much higher skills in PowerPoint than incoming freshmen.
When it comes to Students turning down their volumes in class that is a rare thing that happens. Most students are always listening to music so when they take their headphones out, they don’t remember to take out the headphones or just don't care enough to turn their volume down. Sometimes students don’t even like their volumes up and prefer their phones on vibrate, it's easier for professor not to hear and causes less problems in the class room.
Overall, I believe that our society still has a lot to learn when it comes to digital communications because it is a constant expansion of materials. I also believe that some students shouldn’t be so focused on the digital side of things too much.
The Digital Divide is a term refers to the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern information and communications technology, and those that don’t or have restricted access (TechTarget). This technology can include phones, tv, personal computers and the internet (TechTarget). There are major technology companies that have internet access, computer access and a way to help these regions and demographics and they don’t help. As an inner-city kid, I went to a public school and we did have technology, but outdated technology and they were slow and difficult to work with. Only schools that had updated and newest technology were schools in suburban areas. They had access to the latest MacBook's computers and laptops.
I believe the reason why they don’t give public school students access to these latest technologies because they’re in the city and usually schools within the inner-city have a bad reputation. The next generation is our future, regardless where they are coming from or the education that they’re getting they are our future. When it comes to having the latest technology, those inner-city kids are the number one consumers. We get these advertisements the most because we invest in them the most.
Homework now in days require internet access, most kids don’t have internet access and that’s where the frustration comes from and the drive to get an education is hard and the struggle begins. These kids are first generations and the only thing parents are worried about is just making sure they get through high school. If the high school doesn’t get the help or have the access to half the things, they’re going to need to use in the real world the probability of them wanting to do more decreases.
In conclusion, I think it’d be better for more big technology companies get in partnership with more inner-city schools or just schools that aren’t fully equipped with the latest technologies that they need. Apple Inc is the only company that is in partnership with schools and I believe that the other big companies can do more to help. We are the future, we can’t keep going into the future unprepared, when we’re sent to school to be prepared for it.
One thing I can say is that through this class, I learned that I have a voice, some strong ideas, and that I matter. We are the future and we don’t invest as much as we should, and we don’t care as much as we should. We have a chance to be great influencers out there, through that one thing we have in our hands all the time; our phones. Our knowledge is greater than we know and I’m just glad that I found that. Of course, here's a link to watch my video https://youtu.be/1FATmqjW3lc.
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Work Cited
“What Is Digital Divide? - Definition from WhatIs.com.” WhatIs.com, whatis.techtarget.com/definition/digital-divide.
Melkonyan, L. (2018). [online] Available at: https://www.quora.com/What-is-digital-communication [Accessed 13 Nov. 2018].
Kvavik, R. (2018). Convenience, Communications, and Control: How Students Use Technology. [online] Available at: https://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications/books/educating-net-generation/convenience-communications-and-control-how-students-use-technology [Accessed 13 Nov. 2018].
