The digital divide & access to technology
Back in 2019, the ONS published a report titled Exploring the UK’s digital divide. In it, they observed that:
In 2018, 12% of those aged between 11 and 18 years (700,000) reported having no internet access at home from a computer or tablet (PDF, 3.16MB), while a further 60,000 reported having no home internet access at all.
The report wasn't specifically focused on education but it did provide some data to back up what most of us working in Education already knew. Putting it very mildly, students don't all have the same start in life.
Since this report there have been two significant events that have highlighted just how significant the digital divide really is.
The first was the pandemic. Suddenly, students were sent home and schools were closed. Some schools were ready for this as they happened to have already invested heavily in digital technology to support teaching & learning in school. Other schools were blindsided by this new paradigm; staff and students had incredibly limited access to technology, and the students' learning suffered hugely as a result.
The second event is currently gathering speed with the first waves breaking on the shores of education in the last 12 months, and that is the explosion of generative AI. Generative AI brings endless promises along with a similar number of risks.
In different ways, both of these two events demonstrate clearly that the world we are preparing our students for is one that we cannot predict, and one filled with fantastical promises coupled with new challenges to overcome.
Detailed predictions about such an uncertain future are a fool's game, but I do think we can make a couple of general assumptions about the world that we're preparing our students for:
Technology, and AI in particular, will have an enormous influence on the lives of everyone.
Those that understand this new technology will be the best equipped to adapt to an uncertain future.
Given this, and the learnings from the pandemic, I would like to make one further assertion...
1:1 devices for students are now critical to their success, it will not be possible to keep up without them.
Technology has always been able to empower and enable both teachers and students, but there is a difference in degree. 20 years ago technology was able to deliver significant, but incremental improvements to the education we could offer our students. AI promises an education that is more personal, carefully crafted to each learner, with tools to guide them into that "flow" state where the real magic happens. The change that AI brings is an order of magnitude.
We no longer need to move on from knowledge that is a prerequisite for future learning, simply because most of the class is ready, forever stranding those few that couldn't quite grasp the concepts in time. 1:1 devices for schools have been enabling this for at least a decade now, but we're in the middle of another step change; the technology is about to get a whole lot more powerful and those without access to it will fall even further behind.
Our collective experience throughout the pandemic taught us that those with the tools to adapt are in a much better place when the paradigm shift occurs. The pandemic changed things temporarily, once it was declared "over", the majority of education snapped back to normality.
AI is different. For one, we can see it coming. Developments are happening at pace, but there is at least time to think, time to test, and time to respond. We do get a little breather between each leap in capability.
There's also no way to put this genie back in the bottle. The idea of a moratorium on AI development is fanciful, and there's no possibility of a vaccine or herd immunity against the change that we'll witness over the next decade.
Let us not miss this opportunity. We owe this to the students that we serve, and we owe it even more to those without the resources and support at home to help them into this new world.