Our complimentary virtual Symposium will be held November 2-3, 2022. Register here for a keynote session with Marconi Society Fellows and Young Scholars and much more!
The Decade of Digital Inclusion is hosted in partnership with the Institute for Business and Social Impact (IBSI) and Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ubiquitous affordable access to the Internet and the World Wide Web is now an essential ingredient for a modern education. This is becoming true for health care, as well and for other parts of our everyday lives.
To help students achieve the educational goals that will open worlds of opportunity to them, we must solve for the unique needs of the education. For example, ubiquitous home access for an elementary school student must be reliable, but we may be able to forgo low latency and extremely high download and upload speeds. While it would be wonderful to provide all students with the highest levels of service against every parameter, the objective of digital inclusion is access for all students. I estimate that service cost would have to be on the order of $5 per month in developed countries like the U.S. to achieve universal service.
The technology is available to provide the service levels and pricing suggested here. The only issue is prioritization.
As technology evolves, the minimum standards for specific applications like education will also evolve. Download speeds of 10 or 20 Mb/sec may be useful today but totally inadequate when augmented and virtual reality become common educational tools.
A curated version of the World Wide Web will eventually become necessary for students and digital newbies. There is already a wide variety of educational tools available today, but there is also skill involved in discriminating between useful tools and false information. Curation can be a difficult problem but ultimately some form will be necessary. If we can have specialized information networks like LEXUS or public radio and TV, why not a curated World Wide Web dedicated to education?
Fewer than half of today’s students have adequate and affordable Internet access, whether because of lack of coverage or because the cost is too high. Technology and political resolve can solve this problem at minimal cost to society.
