Do enough students have internet access at home?

One of the questions that is often raised when setting technology based lessons, is “do enough of the students have the internet at home” but also “what happens to those who do not have the internet at home?”

While the Internet and Web 2.0 are flying ahead, there is still the important consideration of those who still do not have internet access at home.

I was reading the ABS figures on this issue based around another essay I had to do and was interested by what they showed. (Any figures I quote below are from the link above!) It is amazing to see the growth of the Internet in Australia. From below 20% in 1998 to 60% in 2006. It is also interesting (and a bit disappointing) to see that education makes up less than 20% of internet usage. Another interesting figure is that cost is considered a low impact for people not having the internet. Cost only affected 19% of people for not connecting to the web, while more significant reasons included “having no use” or “no interest”.

Therefore, from these statistics, if I was to set a series of web based homework activities over a school year, and only 60% of my students had internet access, do you think the others would buy an internet connection at home?

My answer would probably be “yes”, though I am very interested to see what others think.

When you consider how cheap dial-up is, it is sufficient for research activities; however, there is the obvious strain on web 2.0 tools such as YouTube. When my broadband internet connection was slowed a few months ago for exceeding the data limit, I realised how tough dial-up was. But before buying broadband, I thought “dial-up is great… how could broadband be that much better???”