Computers as Barrier to or Vehicle for Equity - Computing Equity in the Context of Education - The Research Center on Computing & Society

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Marianne LaFrance and Anne Meyer

3. Computing Equity in the Context of Education

In the preceding section, we pointed to several factors that engender inequity in computer access. Interest in them stems in part from the fact that they coincide with, are indeed part of, a larger social system in which some people are seen to be generally more deserving than others regardless of the resource. But computer access is also an issue unto itself. To elucidate this and to help define principles for just distribution of information technology, we now examine access in the context of a key political right, the right to a public education.

3.1 Computers as Prerequisite for Education.

For American citizens, education is both a right and a responsibility. Citizens can and must go to school. Moreover, to attend school means to adhere to the goals and performance criteria set down by the educational establishment. In this context, access to computer technology takes on special significance. For some years, the technologies of print have predominated pedagogy both as educational means and ends. In fact, the technology of print so dominates education that the two have come to be synonymous. During the first years of school, instruction focuses on the skills necessary to handle print. By “literacy” we generally mean the ability to read print and to express oneself in writing. Thus our very definition of children’s potential to succeed in school and in society is based on their capacities to handle print media. But for a substantial minority of people, print comprises a barrier rather than an access route to information and self-expression. For example, those with physical disabilities who cannot hold books or pencils, will never be “literate” through the medium of print. Currently such children tend to be educated in special, segregated environments because the predominant, print-based technologies of the classroom are inappropriate for them.

Until recently, there were few alternatives to print as a medium of information storage and retrieval, and of self-expression. Now, however, computers can provide alternative access to the processes central to education. Electronic multimedia offer an unprecedented opportunity for information to be delivered in a format that can be customized to meet the needs, interests and preferences of a variety of learners. A simple example is the capacity of computers to convert written text to spoken audio playback, enabling those who cannot decode print to understand the ideas contained in a piece of writing. Another example is the capacity of computers to accept spoken input as an alternative to keyboard input, thus enabling a physically challenged user to run the computer itself as well as to convert ideas to text without typing. In addition, the capacity of computers to carry digital sound, animated graphics, live video, and other media means that concepts can be conveyed in many formats besides text, providing alternative ways for individuals to grasp and work with ideas.

Computers thus offer expanded conceptions of human capacities as well as expanded definitions of what it means to educate. Disability exists then not so much in the individual but as a mismatch between an individual’s capacities to learn and the tools with which to do it. While students may not have rights to specific tools, they may have rights to the “least restrictive technology” for them, especially given that they are required to attend school and expected to learn certain bodies of knowledge. In this way, computers are equalizing devices in that they expand the potential of each individual to participate. At least in school, denial of access to necessary technology, when the tools exist, is essentially a denial of a fundamental right to an education.

3.2 Computers as Access Devices

Most discussions on inequities in computer access tend to see the computer as an end in itself. While this may be a natural tendency with any new technology, the critical aspect of computers is their function as a means. As Professor Maner has pointed out, computers are tools and as they become more apparent as means of access to the world they will become less visible as things unto themselves. Refinements and additions such as user-friendly interfaces, capacities for input and output of voice, music, and graphics, and availability of continually updated information over telecommunications networks provide users with a means of entering and participating in the realm of ideas. Computers are vehicles for retrieving, manipulating, synthesizing, and conveying information, in its broadest sense. Seen this way, the access concern is less an issue of access to the technology per se, but rather access to the information and the self-expressive capacities that the technology carries.

The computer is thus a device for participation and as such can actually alter a number of social inequities. In other words, the computer affords a way for certain groups of people to achieve parity on their own terms. The following presents some examples:

3.2.1 AIDS Videodisc with HyperCard Software

ABC Interactive has developed a videodisc on AIDS. Included is information about the disease and its transmission, interviews with individuals of all ages who have AIDS, numerical data on its prevalence, and a great deal more. The videodisc is controlled by HyperCard software which enables users to select segments they would like to view, in whatever order they wish. Selection options are presented both in text and pictorially. When a particular segment is being shown on the video screen, the text of what is being said on the video screen is shown on the computer screen. At any time, the user may click in the upper right hand corner of the screen and change both the video sound track and the text on screen to Spanish. Use of the computer is simple and transparent. The technology provides broadened access to vital information.

3.2.2 Speech Synthesis for Reluctant Writers

To increase the writing abilities of children with language-based learning disabilities, CAST, in Peabody, Massachusetts, has made good use of speech synthesis. The use of synthesized speech has been found consistently to be a powerful motivator for children, especially for those who have severe written language disabilities. Although talking word processors for children have existed for some time, other features such as illustrations, digitized sound, drawing/animating capacity and other enhancing opportunities can now be combined with it. The result is that children, who cannot write a readable sentence in the medium of print, can type a word or two, ask the computer to read what they have written, write some more, listen to the computer read it, and so on. The ability of the computer to read back what they have written offers a number of benefits: gross errors in spelling can be caught by the writer because the word doesn’t sound right; child users experience a sense of personal power when the computer, a powerful machine, reads what they have written; and children with disabilities who normally cannot get past the purely mechanical level of letter formation, spelling, spacing, and punctuation can engage in writing at a sophisticated level, concerning themselves with communicating effectively and completing a written composition independently. Thus, the computer is an access device enabling children to express their own ideas effectively to others.

3.2.3 Eskimo children’s multimedia stories

In another project developed by Hester Brooks at CAST, the computer is being used as a vehicle for increased engagement in reading and writing with Inuktitut children. These children come from a village in Alaska very close to the Arctic Circle, where education is conducted in their native language until third grade, then transferred into English after a transition period. Many of these children tend to be alienated from the process of education and to feel personally disenfranchised. Children with language-based learning disabilities have an even more difficult time belonging to and succeeding in the culture of school.

The computer is used here as a way to bridge language and cultural gaps between meaningful personal experiences and the “literacy” activities commonly presented at school. Using digitizing devices for sound and pictures and the adaptability of type fonts, children create, narrate, and illustrate stories both in their own language and typography and in English. They can begin their stories by recording them in their own voices into the computer and playing the sound back by clicking on a button. Then, they can type the story in English typeface or in Inuktitut typeface, and both typefaces and “soundtracks” are available to the reader of the completed story. The entire story environment contains culturally relevant elements, including the small icons that indicate buttons for moving from page to page. Designed in collaboration with the students, the icons are not typical computer arrows, but include options such as fish swimming in one direction or another or polar bears walking in one direction or another. Moreover, the children have the opportunity to choose which icons they want to use in their stories. Far from being alienating, the computer is a link between the familiar and personal world of these children and the world of alphabetic symbols which they must master in school.

3.3 Implications for Equity

The computer is not an end but a means for obtaining and creating ideas. Literacy defined as print competency creates unnecessary barriers for people who can handle the intellectual content of print material but not the medium. The same material manipulated electronically offers a broadened set of methods so that users with different cultural backgrounds, physical or mental abilities, levels of print literacy, and stylistic preferences can all get access to content and express themselves in a meaningful and understandable way. Thus the computer is a device for accessing knowledge, just as stairs, ramps and elevators are devices for accessing physical spaces.

When computers are regarded not as a technology per se, but as tools of access for a wide variety of ends, a new perspective on equity comes into view. In the context of education, it seems difficult or impossible to distinguish between the right to a free education and the right of access to the necessary tools. In the past, we have not held conferences on the question of whether every school child has a right of access to pencils and books. Yet computer access is the topic of this track address. Because computers are markedly adaptable and can be used by people who might otherwise be unable to participate in school, a sensible and just distribution would seem to call for their being made available.

Conceiving of computers as access tools may also alleviate inequities based on the assumption that computer users are or must be unique or have some special technical acumen. Rather, users of the technology are simply those who have particular ends they wish to accomplish and particular skills and preferences associated with those ends. Thus, musicians use computers for musical notation and composition; artists, architects, and photographers use them for creating and editing images; film makers use them for animating and producing simulated landscapes and effects; people with disabilities use them for reading, writing, creating art, and participating in mainstream social and vocational environments; those needing to communicate in another language use them as instantaneous translation devices. In short, computers are not fanciful objects but serviceable and multipurpose tools.

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