Oh the Places We “Don’t/Won’t” Go

Janet Poley, President
American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC)

March 2, 2001

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1. Oh the Places We “Don’t/Won’t” Go
   “The Digital Divide: Delimiting Diversity in the Tech Sector
2. It’s About Place & Money
   
   • Who’s Taking the Distance Out of Distance Education?
   • What’s Rural - What’s Remote?
   • Concentration of Poverty/Deconcentration of Opportunity
   • New and Old Economy
   • People Live Not By Bandwidth Alone
   
   
3. Key Digital Divide Factors
   • Geography
   • Income
   
   
4. What Are We Discussing?
   • Access to Information, Education and Opportunity for All
   • Job opportunities in rural/remote America
   • Ability to contribute to the Internet
   • Gender, Race and Ethnicity, Poverty
   • Workplace Conditions - Workplace Skills
   
   
5. Heterick Comments on DD
   • “We should worry about the unhappily slow roll-out and high cost of high speed digital connectivity. To produce really compelling learning applications, we will most often require megabit access."

   
   
6. The Real Digital Divide
   • “At the current roll-out rate of our phone companies’ digital subscriber line technology and the cable companies symmetrical broadband services, we will be severely limited in what we can design in the way of new learning environments for quite some time to come.”
   
   

7. ADEC Vision No More Back Roads
   • Reach into communities less than 25,000
   • HBCUs, Tribal Colleges, Hispanic Serving
   • Developing Countries
   
   
8. The Center & Periphery
   • Geography
   • Economics
   • Culture
   • Demographics
   • Technology
   • Community
   
   

9. Pretty Good Internet
   • DSL
   • Satellite Wireless
   • LMDS
   • Radio wireless
   • Protocols
   
   
10. So Who’s Out There
    • Youth - How Are the Schools?
    • Farmers - Where Are the Off- Farm Jobs?
    • Mainstreet - What Are the Impacts?
    • Teachers - Are There Enough?
    • Seniors - What Are They Doing?
    • Doctors - Where Are the Schools?

    
    
11. So What’s Out There?
    • Schools
    • Taverns
    • Casinos
    • Clinics
    • Railroads
    • Mountains
    • Desert
    
    
12. Glass Ceiling-Glass borders
    • Key - Be Linked to Global System-women aren’t getting international assignments
    • Key - women own/operate more than 1/3 of small U.S. Businesses - these women spend $170 billion on IT
    • Key - IT industry has only 8.1% female corporate officers -lower than Fortune 500
    
    

13. Women: Labor Force Participation
    • 1999 47% of total workforce - 29% of IT workforce
    • women most underrepresented in high paying IT occupations
    • women are 57% of computer operators
    • women are 10% of electrical engineers
    • men select computers and related products for their organizations more than 60% of the time
    
    
14. Wage Gap & Pipeline
    • Wage gap between men and women without college education in IT area is 21%
    • Only 17% of high school students taking AP computer science are women
    • Decline in computer science degrees awarded to women: 37% to 28% - only 1.7% of women earning undergraduate degrees in engineering
    
    
15. Tribal Nations
    • 70.4 percent of rural native American households have access to telephones
    • 26.8 percent have access to computers
    • 18.9 percent have Internet access
    • 185 BIA schools - 76 are connected to Internet
    • 100 of 550 tribes have a webpage
    
    
16. Telecommunication As A Factor in Production
    • Anyone can be a node on a network, but what matters most is who you are connected to
    • Local businesses need to be connected to large global businesses where information, commerce and decisions are centered.
    
    
    
17. Telecommunications (cont.)
    • Local nodes (places) need know-how, skills, adaptive socio-cultural and institutional infrastructure and entrepreneurial traditions
    • The front-line and cutting edge places for knowledge based jobs are big cities - remote and new entries are most disadvantaged
    
    
18. Centralization-Decentralization
    • Greater the extent of geographic decentralization of production activities - greater the need for centralization of key control activities
    • -highly skilled labor
    • -complementary economic activities
    • -cost of delivering to the market
    
    
19. Rural Penalty
    • Lower population density
    • Distance of rural communities from urban centers
    • Economic specialization in sectors other than information or knowledge-intensive ones (farming, mining, manufacturing, government service)
    
    
    
20. Broadband Deployment
    
    • Essential and necessary, but not sufficient if rural areas are to compete
    • Skills development, entrepreneurs, overcoming issues of low aggregate demand
    • Teleworkers - “lone eagles” are the biggest users of rural Internet
    
    
21. Implications
    
    • Rural areas will continue to lag without intervention and subsidies
    • More jobs will move overseas to urban areas
    • Hybrid networks - variety of technologies will be needed
    
    
22. Conclusion
    
    • Read between the lines - understand what is really going on - who is “spinning” - Commerce Department? Telcos? GAO?
    • Follow the money
    • Underserved communities need to “get smart” - participate in the political process