Creating Digital Opportunities in IT Education: An Inclusive Framework
Basawaraj Patil, Klaus Maetzel, Erich J. Neuhold · 2003
In the evolving Information Society (IS), the Information Technology (IT) skills are necessary to harness the power of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). The United Nations (UN) estimates that there are about one billion illiterate adults and 2-3 billion technological illiterates in the world. Not surprisingly, a majority of them are from information-poor regions, non-wired societies and non-English speaking countries. Unfortunately, due to the complex nature of the digital divide - the unequal access to ICTs, billions of technological illiterates from non-English speaking regions encounter syntactic and semantic, linguistic, cultural, cognitive and socio-economic barriers to reap the benefits of ICTs. In this paper, we focus on the universal usability issues of textual languages and IT educational resources with emphasis on creating digital opportunities for acquiring basic IT skills. We propose an inclusive educational initiative based on universal design principles that ameliorate information digital divide and provide unique educational and learning opportunities to the disadvantaged users.