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Another Pew report
Here’s another memo from Pew’s Internet & American Life project, which is actually about China. The numberrs when it comes to China always stagger me. The report predicts strong growth in Internet usage in China, where currently only ten percent of the population is online. As detailed below, the demography is interesting:
In China, just over 10% of the population uses the internet, according to the latest government accounting. Users are relatively young, male, urban, and are disproportionately composed of students. Just over 70% of the user population is under age 30 and almost 60% are men. The penetration rate in urban areas is about 20%, compared with just over 3% in rural areas. Among occupations, students make up nearly a third of Chinese internet users, and business workers account for 30% more. The rest are a mixture of self-employed, non-profit workers, the unemployed, teachers, government workers, and army personnel. Peasants or farmers account for only about 0.4% of the online population.
China is already an important piece of the open educational resources movement, with projects like CORE sharing vast amounts of educational materials created natively in Chinese and translated to Chinese from other languages. The influx of new Chinese users will no doubt transform the Internet as a whole (as Pew predicts), but given the enormity of the educational challenges there, I expect the impact on open and distance education to be even more pronounced.
