Chris Gilliard and Hugh Culik’s article, “Digital Redlining, Access and Privacy” brought forward issues we as postsecondary students experience on a daily basis but don’t recognize as problems. Digital redlining is when institutions and policy makers enforce boundaries and/or use technology policies, practises and teachings to discriminate against specific groups (Culik & Gilliard, 2016). If you are unfamiliar with digital redlining, a prominent example outside of a classroom setting could be Facebook. When you sign up for Facebook you don’t identify your ethnicity, however advertisers can target certain populations based on your previous likes, shares and groups joined. They can also choose who they want to exclude from seeing their advertisements. This is invisible redlining because we as consumers are unable to see this happening. Doesn’t it spike your curiosity to how much information is circulating the world that you have no knowledge about?
Digital Redlining affects the way we learn as students and teach as educators. Students are limited to the amount of information we can learn about and community colleges and lower income institutions suffer these consequences to a greater extent. These schools are unable to access information that is available to higher educated schools and programs. Imagine attending a school that had restrictions on majority of the websites you were trying to research information on? I can relate to this in the sense when researching journal articles to provide support to arguments for a research paper and being unable to access them because I have to pay for it. It’s extremely frustrating and discouraging to have a limited amount of information to use for a topic. Another issue is feeling less qualified while applying for a job because you weren’t exposed to/ blocked from the same resources and educational tools your competitor was allowed to access. Redlining poses many restrictions to our learning as students.
How are we as future educators supposed to promote creativity and exploration in undiscovered topics if the information surrounding these topics aren’t readily available to us? We are setting students up to fail if we expect them to gather enough information to build on topics that are restricted to the public. We are also unable to know what policies will shape what our students will see and not see which is where the problem begins. Policy makers need to ask themselves who and why their target population is and whether these filters, available access, and policies are restricting a student’s learning or promoting the openness students require to achieve their goals. I personally believe after reading this article, the only students that set up to succeed are the ones privileged enough to attend higher education institutions, so how do we change this? This is the pending issue that needs to be made aware of and addressed. I react to this issue the way I do because it directly affects me as a students and a future educator. With my knowledge about this topic now as I teach, I will be aware and take into considerations the issues redlining causes. I hope you enjoy my twitter essay addressing many of the concerns and issues associated with digital redlining.
Brittany Rocheleau