The Digital Savvy Divide and What We Need to Do About It

Mar 13, 2016
2 min read

Much has been made of the digital divide, the gap between rich and poor when it comes to access to the internet and the digital technology that most Americans take for granted.

The issue is particularly worrisome for students, since by the time they are high-schoolers now the vast majority of peers have, at the least, a smartphone as well as access to laptops and a broadband connection for homework. Students who don't have that access, the theory goes and some research (kind of) shows, are at a huge disadvantage socially and academically.

But I'm seeing a related phenomenon among my students that is at least as worrisome as the divide in access: call it the digital savvy divide.

My school is in one of the state's least prosperous counties, measured by per capita income, but judging by the number of times I have to motion to put a phone away during the week, the vast majority of our kids have smartphones and use them quite facilely for communcation, entertainment and information. And while there are students whose Internet access is limited at home, they are outliers. So while they're almost all connected, when it comes to evaluating the quality of information they're seeing, students show the kind of stark differences in ability that you expect to see in reading, writing and math. And those in the middle aren't close to where we want them to be.

Too many upperclassmen answer, "YouTube" when asked to name a credible source of information and can't come up with more than that. Or they' can't distinguish between a source that's trying to tell them something and one that's trying to sell them something.

To be sure, there are kids who can discuss in detail how marketing agendas influence what news organizations write about, but those kids are in the minority in my school. And as this survey from the University of Missouri's journalism school makes clear, the savvy divide cuts across class lines.

Yet teenagers today have very little chance at success as economic actors, not to mention citizens in a democracy, if they don't develop decent BS detectors when they have to navigate a world of information that is mostly, well, BS, For all the coverage of the digital divide, the savviness divide is perhaps more important. Improving access to digital tools does little good if students don't know how to use those tools.

That means as educators we have to make a great effort at teaching digital litearcy. And that means far more than telling students not to use Wikipedia when they're doing research (and which is a wrongheaded prohibition besides).

Schools and teachers from elementary on need to put the same kind of effort in developing digital literacy as they do in fostering print literacy.