Access to digital community

As part of my Teaching Online Open Learning training, I recently explored my access to digital resources.  The training site suggested that I use a number of sites to do so.  

The first it suggested was broadband.gov.  This was a horribly designed website.  Government sites might be trustworthy, but they are all too often poorly designed.  I was supposed to use this site to analyze my upload and download speed.  I couldn't find a way to do so on the site.  I did find a link on the site that would take me to an a different, non-governmental website for the test, but I didn't use it.  I wasn't the only one that had the problem.  The comments section was full of similar complaints.

Fortunately, the TOOL training site provided another link to measure upload and download speeds, http://www.speedtest.net/.  Being a nongovernmental site, this one worked.

My measured download speed was 25.85 Mbs and my measured upload speed was 6.06 Mbs.

The next part of my assignment had me look at another government website, the national broadband map.  This one was also poorly designed, but fortunately my online class had given me clear directions on how to find what I wanted on the site.  For my county, Floyd County, Georgia,  the average download speed was 10-16 Mbs.  My county ranked 99th out of 159 counties in the state in download speed.  A number of broadband providers were listed for my county.  The one I use, Comcast, supposedly provides download speeds from 100 Mbs to 1 Gbs.  I use Comcast and my measured download speed is much, much lower.

Bad government websites and personal internet speeds aside, I was supposed to consider what barriers might affect access to digital learning and what might be done to eliminate such barriers.

I teach in Floyd County Schools.  Many of the students in my school are poor.  Some of them do not have internet access at home.  There are programs in place to help this.  Low income students can get free internet access from the cable company.  However, they have to have their own devices to access the internet and many don't.  They presumably also have to not be behind on their paid cable bill and the like.  There are also programs in place to give the community access to the internet.  The public library provides this service.  Many local businesses have free wifi.  The schools have free wifi with student access and computers are available for student use within the school.  If a student wants internet access, he can get it.  In fact, most all of the do get internet access.  However, most of them don't use it for education.

I also looked at a site from Georgia Tech about making internet access more available to handicapped students.  There are some good ideas there, but some physical handicaps do place limitations on internet access that are hard to overcome.