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Video: Digital Literacy, Part 15
Dr. Barbara O’Connor
Director
California Emerging Technology Fund
December 19, 2010
DR. O’CONNOR: Well, because we’re the home of the high tech industry. I mean, you know, we really did generate a lot of the tools and products. And so if our students in higher ed are not capable of using them, they’re not going to get employed. And I’ve been teaching for 40 years in a university, and we have more and more international students who come in and are fully competent in using digital technologies and will start taking the jobs. And we’ve seen those trends.
Well, in the university, I mean, we’d assume now, where everything, because of cost cutting, is put on the web. We’re doing digital textbooks. I refer all my students to syllabi that are on the web. I post YouTube links. I post videos. And if they don’t have access to broadband technology so that they can download quickly, and they don’t know what to do or have the proper equipment to integrate all of that information into messages, into knowledge bases to understand problem solution, they really are down at least two grades in the class. And I’ve been tracking this for about 15 years.
So, you know, low income students, non-primary English speaking students who are having struggles and don’t have access to the same tools, cannot compete.