Digital Divide in Infotech Education ?

I asked my nephew to write a story for One Web Day on how the Internet made a difference to his life. What he wrote was bad, he concluded by saying that he gained nothing out of Internet.

I approved it and published it with comments.He is a Student of Information Technology from a locally popular Institute of Engineering, in his third year.

There are about 2000 students in this institution in courses ranging from Information Technology, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Electronics and Communication and Electronics&Electrical Engineering.In the entire campus there are three or four “Labs” each with 40 or 50 computers, some with LCD monitors and others with CRT monitors.

These “Labs” are subject oriented such as a “Database Labs” or “Operating System Labs” and these computers are not connected to the Internet. There is slow speed Internet in the campus with a total of 20 computers of configuration Pentium III, desktops bought in the 90s, all with CRT monitors. Twenty computers, open for access only for two hours each day, between 5 and 7 pm, “shared” by nearly a thousand hostel students as most day students leave by 4 pm.The nearest ‘web cafe’ (web cafe is rather an elitist term that wouldn’t fit the type of ‘browsing centers’ , especially in smaller towns and villages) is in the small town 7 kilometers away.It follows that his exposure to the Internet is limited and he feels that he hasn’t learnt anything from the Internet.

He came to visit me yesterday, I spent a few hours teaching him how to spend time productively on the Internet and took him to Wikipedia, Face Book, Online Tutorials, You Tube and showed him all that he could learn from the Internet. I told him to buy a computer immediately.

While we have institutions in India such as the Indian Institute of Technology where the facilities and quality of education matches if not surpasses the standards of some of the most renowned institutions in the world, this story truly reflects on the Internet access facilities and the attitude of the school / college authorities towards internet access or the usefulness of Internet.

What is pathetic is that those who teach him are grossly inadequate.

Image used in this article is from the Web, not related to the Institution of this story