The study From Digital Divide to Digital Opportunities; Critical Perspectives on ICT use in South African Classrooms is written within the field of Comparative and International Education. The focus is on the use of ICT in disadvantaged classrooms in Cape Town, South Africa. The study aims to fill a gap in the understanding of the global proliferation of ICT in education. With the focus on the concept of the digital divide, the emphasis lies in strengthening the understanding of ICT within the context of a developing country. The overall research question is: How does the digital divide manifest itself in South African classrooms?
The concurrent mixed method design was used for data gathering and analysis combining classroom observations and interview data with data collected through questionnaires. The data collection was conducted during fieldwork from January to July 2007.
A critical perspective is applied, and the concept of a digital divide is discussed as a manifestation of power and inequality. The necessity of reconceptualising the digital divide is emphasised, and the need for greater weight on the contextual background of learners is asserted. That includes addressing learners’ cultural diversity in educational policies and securing that educational reforms regulate access to relevant content in a relevant language (learners’ home language). By focusing on cultural diversity and the language issue, the study goes beyond statistical ways of measuring the digital divide. Instead it emphasises local capacity building, local knowledge and local expertise as key factors when exploring how the digital divide specifically influences disadvantaged learners and their teachers, but more generally how it influences the use of ICT in a classroom context.