A Review Of Digital Media And America's Learning Divide By Professor S. Craig Watkins

In his essay Mobile Phones, Digital Media and America’s Learning Divide, Professor S. Craig Watkins discusses the different ways that digital media affects the learning divide between middle and low-class students and also students of different races, ethnicities and cultures. Watkins’ purpose in writing this essay is to show how mobile phones are closing the learning divide as well as the digital divide. He uses facts and research that he has gathered as a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s research network on Connected Learning to back up his statements and improve his credibility as an author. Watkins begins his essay with a personal experience from a trip he took to New York City to not only grab the reader’s attention, but also to appeal to the reader’s emotions and really engage them in the essay. He uses this personal experience as a basis for his argument that mobile phones are increasingly becoming more popular that laptops and computers because there were none for sale on the street he was walking down. The credibility of this claim is not necessarily valid because walking down one street cannot determine this. Watkins ends the paragraph with a remark saying that it has not been long since African Americans became a viable market for mobile phones (p. 170). This statement, although not

He states facts saying how African Americans and Latinos are just as active, if not more active, on mobile devices than Americans and Asian Americans. Two questions are asked in the middle section of the essay: the first being whether there is evidence supporting the claim that digital media is helping close the achievement gap between African American and Latino students and White and Asian American students and the second being what role digital media plays in America’s learning