Digital divide in secondary schools : a Hong Kong study

Abstract

There is always a gap between student learning and classroom teaching in Hong Kong education. The use of information and communication technology has made the situation even worse. It is a common practice for students to work together through digital media like Instagram, WhatsApp, opening online Chat Room and Facebook by using elements like video, music, texts and artistic photography to reflect and discuss ideas for project assignment. During the process, students can further investigate what they have learnt in lessons and construct new knowledge. However, our schools are still concentrating on text-based presentation software for teaching. Schools have been reacting slowly to the appearance of this new popular participatory culture.

Therefore it is interesting to study schools’ ICT infrastructure, the digital literacy in classrooms as well as students’ individual usage behavior in digital media. From the study, we are able to realize the reasons for choosing those multimodal elements in the students’ learning as well as posting them online. Then, we can determine the relationship between the participatory culture in creating multimodal artifacts and digital divide in education among students; as well as finding out those factors which lead to the gap and enhance participatory culture in academic purpose for students. Thus, we can improve the situation of students’ learning outcome gap during the use of digital media in teaching and studying.

My thesis will employ qualitative research method in case study approach. It consists of 6 students’ interviews as well as teacher’s focus group interviews of three teachers from two schools. The results show that there are different forms of technology and usage gap among the students in using digital tools. Certainly, there are several ways to overcome the barriers.