Closing the Digital Divide: increasing education and training opportunities for Indigenous students in remote areas

Abstract:

The project Closing the Digital Divide: increasing education and training opportunities for Indigenous students in remote areas has enabled a drilling down into the very real and practical issues associated with learning through application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) within the remote Titjikala Indigenous community. It is very apparent that learning occurred in many areas, and importantly, that the community of Titjikala, through those involved in the project, are beginning to identify how using ICTs can support their own aspirations and directions for learning. The project experienced many delays, conflicting priorities, and the gamut of issues that, to date, have prevented much take-up (or use) of ICTs across the board in remote Indigenous communities. The key learnings arising from this present project are summarised as follows: • Onsite training support is crucial to enabling access to facilities, troubleshooting of difficulties and building of the confidence of learners in using ICTs. • The supply side of working infrastructure and resources is only one aspect of the learning process, although this is the one attracting the most attention. The demand side — what community members, after experience and exposure to using a range of technologies, feel they want to do with these to meet their own learning and communication needs — is critically important. This project has highlighted how readily Indigenous peoples from remote communities will embrace new technologies if the use of such matches their own aspirations and needs. • Externally defined timelines and expected outputs negate the well documented importance of establishing relationships and the time needed to explore, in crosscultural settings, new concepts, ideas and applications. • This project was built on prior and ongoing relationships with the community and this was critical to the outcomes it did achieve. Involvement of members of the project team across a number of projects occurring within the community also ensured that the value of ICTs to achieving community priorities in a number of areas, not only education, was explored. This has led to both greater community ownership of the possibilities and discussions of the directions, such as local resource development, community members would like to explore further. • Institutional policies and priorities can often work against innovation, as does the numbers-driven funding regime of the VET sector. • Educational practitioners working with remote Indigenous communities have had little professional development in the use of ICTs within educational delivery. Incompatibility between the priorities and practices of Registered Training Organisation (RTO) systems and those of communities such as Titjikala, further compound the issues. • Infrastructure on communities is adequate, but interoperability issues exist. The issue is not broadband, but pedagogy.

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Evaluation Report