As Warschauer (2008) mentioned, many people have been discussing the problem called a “digital divide” since the mid 1990s. In his speech at the 2011 TED Talks, Aleph Molinari defined the word “digital divide” as “the gap between individuals and communities that have access to information technologies and those that don’t.” He pointed out the fact that still 70 % of world population is digitally excluded, which means that they do not have access to a computer or the Internet. The Internet map below was created by Chris Harrison, who is a Ph.D. students in the Human -Computer Interaction Institute at Canegie Mellon University, to show the densities of Internet connectivity (chrisharrison.net). When you see this, you can see that internet connection is extremely concentrated in the North America and Europe. We can also see that the Internet has spread all over Japan. In fact, according to the official census investigated by the Ministry of Internal affairs and Communications in Japan in 2010, 78.2 % of Japanese people have access to the Internet at home. In short, most Japanese people are included in the 30 % of people in the world who are digitally included. However, do Japanese people really enjoy the benefits of information and communication technology (ICT)?
According to Warschauer (2008), just having access to computers and the Internet does not ensure being proficient in ICT and being informed users of ICT. He argues that we should extend the definition of “access” to fully understand the benefits of ICT in social and personal life. He also suggested four factors we should examine when we consider what “access” means: physical resources, digital resources, human resources and social resources. In this site, I am going to argue what teachers in Japan can do to make their students not only digitally included but also informed users of ICT in terms of these four factors.