| Chapter 2: | Background |
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Almost every public school student in the United States has access to the Internet (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2004). However, Internet access at home is not as universal. It is assumed those who have Internet access at home are at an advantage versus those who do not have Internet access; this has been coined as the Digital Divide . The concept of a Digital Divide was a guiding principle for policy development and enactment in the late 1990s.
Following the Digital Divide, educational policices focused on the No Child Left Behind Act, which holds that all students should perform at a common standard, and the required resources to achieve that goal should be provided. With regards to Internet access for students, providing Internet access within schools is typically considered the enactment of this policy. An exception is the Evaluation of Student & Parent Access through Recycled Computers (eSPARC) program funded by the U.S. Department of Education in 2004 and conducted by the Pennsylvania State Department of Education. This three-year program is designed to study the “impact of computer technology and its benefits to students and families” (Pennsylvania State Department of Education, 2004, 2). This research identifies qualified participants, provides them training, gathers baseline data, and provides refurbished computers to high-need families.
In the late 1990s, most schools had some sort of limited Internet access, and consequentially, so did most students. Financial budgets dictated whether schools would have Internet access; as a result, the schools that did have Internet access at this introductory stage were the ones in more affluent communities. This also applied to training for teachers on using the Internet and teaching students about it.
From 2000 to 2005, there has been an impressive adoption of networks within schools. Net-days, E-rate, and other such programs have assisted in the creation of a network infrastructure that span nearly every American school. In addition to the existence of the physical infrastructure, a knowledge base to maintain these systems is becoming more common within schools. There have been several iterations of Internet-based software which has transformed the nature of interacting with information. Distributed network applications had become commonplace from 2000 to 2004.