ITR: New Approaches to Human Capital Development through Information Technology Research

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EIA-0085952York, BryantNortheastern UniversityITR: New Approaches to Human Capital Development through Information Technology ResearchThe objective of this project is to discover effective mechanisms for reducing the disparitybetween the technological haves and have-nots, in terms of employability, income and societalparticipation (aka The Digital Divide). Since a disproportionately large number of African-Americans fall in the category of have-nots, we have taken on the "so-called" African AmericanProblem as our research challenge. Recent data suggest that Hispanic Americans have begun toclose the gap in the Digital Divide. However, this is not the case for African Americans.Despite years of affirmative action and targeted programs, African Americans as a group have notbenefited in proportion to the resources expended. The Internet, the World Wide Web, and newinformation technologies are powerful engines for change and rapid technological change tends toexacerbate pre-existing social and economic conditions. Thus, the "Digital Divide" continues togrow because it is firmly supported by existing racial, economic and social divides, despite whatappear to be grand efforts to the contrary. Our project will implement a multidisciplinaryapproach to the solution of the Digital Divide problem for African Americans through basicresearch in information technology, distributed systems, human computer interfaces, andcollaboration technologies with a central emphasis on how culture expresses itself in andinfluences information technologies. We will utilize our results to develop technologies thatdiminish the Digital Divide.In this project we will conduct basic research in distributed systems, information retrieval, humancomputer interfaces, collaboration technologies, social/cultural preferences of African Americans,public policy analysis and culture-specific pedagogies and assessments. A unifying frameworkfor our project is the development of a culture-specific, distributed, distance learning system forAfrican Americans based on the single-learner multiple-teacher model. Our basic research iscomplemented by a number of educational technology development projects and communitydeployment assessments.