Generative AI, the Digital Divide & Enacting Agency
South Jamaica Houses is a housing project in South Jamaica, Queens, New York. Three elementary schools are located near the complex and some of the students frequented the SJH community center which is where I established my first “computer art lab” in 1993. I pitched the idea for this lab to my employer because when I was working at public schools and community-based centers in and around New York City I noticed the lack of computers. At the time I was a computer graphics major at Pratt.
Three years later (in 1996) Lloyd Morrisett, a founder of the Children’s Television Workshop, coined the term digital divide “to describe the chasm that separates information and communication technology (ICT) haves from have-nots,” where the gap between them creates inequality (Eubanks, 2011). According to researchers, the digital divide impacts children’s ability to learn and grow in low-income school districts.
Digital inequality has evolved beyond a binary distinction between “have” and “have not,” becoming a question of “more” versus “less” that evolves with the incessant innovation of ICT. For example, one well-resourced Queens, NY public school received brand new Mac computers and other related equipment from the district that sat untouched in boxes because none of the teachers knew what to do with them. Having more computers did not solve the problem at the school. I was hired to work with the school to create a computer lab and model (for teachers) how to teach students.
The digital divide is not merely a technological, but a social challenge, and the key question of how to tackle it hinges on the context-dependent issue of the expected social benefit achieved by ICT. Since the potential applications of ICT are diverse, the strategies aimed at tackling these diverse challenges must be diverse as well. — Martin Hilbert
ICT innovation has led to the establishment of ‘power hierarchies’ that are grounded in systems of power and oppression. The digital divide keeps certain groups from having access to the spaces (and technologies) where innovations are being created. Some have argued that generative AI has the potential to magnify the digital divide by introducing new costs to be incurred, new skills to be mastered, and new forms of bias that must be understood and avoided. Others have focused on the technologies’ developing capabilities to suggest that they can mitigate digital inequality by providing easier access to information through conversational interfaces, allowing everyone to participate more fully in the information economy.
What has worked for me in the past is not being overly concerned about the technology and giving young people opportunities to learn or do something creative with emerging or new technologies. Ten-plus years ago the innovation was augmented reality, including the use of mobile devices and video project mapping. We taught youth how to embed artwork with markers that triggered images and sounds. We taught them how to generate/project animations on camera-enabled laptops using their bodies. Today, the “it” is generative AI. At Lesley University, we show students how to control “draw bots” using the face sensing (AI) extension in Scratch.
What worked in each of these examples was helping young people develop a capability to act to produce particular results, or agency. Agency is not something that people possess, but rather it is enacted through “socioculturally mediated and contingently creative dialogue with the world” (Sharma, 2007, p. 300). The above examples show how enacting agency is a promising social practice and outcome of learning. However, few studies have explicitly investigated agency in ICT, or STEAM. A focus on agency is compelling because it potentially addresses long-standing justice-related challenges in ICT, including how or why individuals may find utility in generative AI toward the issues that matter in their lives.
Eubanks, V. (2011). Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age. The MIT Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhgk1
Hilbert, M. (2011a). The end justifies the definition: The manifold outlooks on the digital divide and their practical usefulness for policy-making. Telecommunications Policy, 35(8), 715–736.
Sharma, A. (2007). Making (electrical) connections: Exploring student agency in a school in India. Science Education, 92(2), 297–319.