Abstract
In this article, we describe a study which examined factors that dominate the preferences of Israeli native Arabic speaking (NAS) students and those of Israeli native Hebrew speaking (NHS) students for choosing digital, printed, written, or orally conveyed information sources for academic learning. The study included 173 students (109 NHS; 64 NAS) from two academic institutions located in northern Israel who participated in the same two annual academic courses. We examined the perceived attribution of eight different information sources common in academic learning and 15 information source criteria that are relevant for the NAS and NHS students' preferences. We conclude that differences in perception of scope, depth, accessibility, trustworthiness, clarity, and especially the perceived ability of cognitive processing from various information sources can explain the “Digital Divide” between NAS and NHS Israeli students in the context of evaluating the contribution of different information sources for their learning. Thus, a techno-socio-cultural Second Order Digital Divide emerges. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2016.v6n1p39
Highlights
As adults, we perceive the world, and we conceive and learn about its nature by using the information to which we have been exposed and by the manner in which we process it
Data collected from a student focus group from the Department of Information Science indicate a reasonable reliability of the questionnaire (Cronbach’s alpha was between 0.80 to 0.87 among native Arabic speaking (NAS) and native Hebrew speaking (NHS))
The most conspicuous finding was that NAS students did not appreciate online scientific journal articles as one of the main information sources needed for academic learning, whereas NHS students regarded this information source domain as one of the two most appreciated (NAS average 3.33, NHS average 4.12)
Summary
We perceive the world, and we conceive and learn about its nature by using the information to which we have been exposed and by the manner in which we process it. Techno-economic globalization, by creating an abundance of highly accessible information sources to diverse populations, was expected to narrow the gap in knowledge-based information processing between minorities and socio-economic dominant populations. Digital readiness is the extent to which a population, a group, or a person has the potential to acquire and integrate cognitive skills in an instrumental digital environment (Horrigan, 2014). Lack of such readiness creates a “digital divide” that is commonly susceptible to differences of gender, education, age, language skills and socio-economic status. One of the important aspects of the study about the impact of this digital divide on integrating minorities, and one that has hardly been studied, is how minorities perceive, evaluate, and implement information sources and information in general, in comparison to well-based dominant socio-economic populations in a society
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