New Technology and Digital Worlds: Analyzing Evidence of Equity in Access, Use, and Outcomes

By Mark Warschauer, Tina Matuchniak. 2010

844 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is broad consensus among educators, communication scholars, sociologists, and economists that the development and diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) are having a profound effect on modern life. This is due to the affordances of new digital media, which bridge the interactive features of speech and the archival characteristics of writing; allow many-to-many communication among people without regard to time and space, including mass collaborative editing of texts; facilitate the creation of a global hyper-indexed multimodal information structure; and enable content production and distribution in both writing and multimedia on a scale previously unimaginable . For all these reasons, computer-mediated communication can be considered a new mode of information, or a “fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge”, following the three prior revolutions of language, writing, and print. The previous revolution, brought about through the development and diffusion of printing, took centuries to unfold, as its full impact depended on the industrial revolution that Gutenberg’s printing press preceded by several centuries. Today, though, the development and diffusion of computers and the Internet occur simultaneously with a new economic revolution, based on transition from an industrial to an informational economy.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/afcee00ca804a27e0abc4263fb526532c2b71c22

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Citations in the corpus

Learning in One-to-One Laptop Environments (2016, background): “The relationship between technology and inequality is quite complex, and it will take far more than distribution of computers to address this issue (see Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010, for a discussion).”
Technology and Education: Computers, Software, and the Internet (2015, positive): “Access to a home computer may also improve familiarity with software increasing the effectiveness of computer use for completing school assignments and the returns to computer use at school (Mitchell Institute, 2004; Underwood et al., 1994; Warschauer and Matuchniak, 2010).”
Social media and education: reconceptualizing the boundaries of formal and informal learning (2016, background): “Appropriation of technologies by educators is often used to replicate traditional approaches and is thus at odds with the creative practices in participatory digital cultures (Green and Hannon 2007; Warschauer and Matuchniak 2010).”
Constructionist Gaming: Understanding the Benefits of Making Games for Learning (2015, background): “…in which they are engaged, with children at lower income and predominantly minority schools (see Margolis, Estrella, Goode, Holme, & Nao, 2008; Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010) receiving considerably less access to and engagement with computing activities that focus on actual creation of…”
IEA International Computer and Information Literacy Study 2018 Assessment Framework (2019, positive): “There is evidence from many countries of considerable disparities in students’ access to digital resources in homes, and researchers and commentators claim that these disparities affect the opportunities that students have to develop the capabilities required for living in modern societies (Warschau”