Abstract:

In the recent years, globalization raised some rather unexpected aspects concerning the ability of minorities, immigrants or natives, to acquire profound advanced knowledge and skills in order to adapt and integrate as equals in the workplace environments. Cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic and technology adoption factors are the salient reasons for minorities in encountering difficulties in gaining advanced knowledge and skills needed for narrowing the 'Digital Divide'.
However, those factors and others, still statistically correlative with the 'Digital Divide', do not hold explanatory properties as to how they are linked to such minorities' setbacks. Most of the studies relate the 'Digital Divide' directly or associatively to the physical accessibility and availability of computers, fast internet conductivity and other similar products and services. Furthermore, applied projects aiming to trigger, lever or stimulate profound minorities' integration by exposing them to hi-tech technology, had not percolated and distributed in minorities population and at the best, reveal the most gifted and able.
The purpose of this study is to return to the fundamental issues and raise some rather basic questions concerning the distinctiveness of a specific minority in information characteristics perception. It is assumed that answers to such questions may shed light on the difficulty of narrowing the 'Digital Divide' between minorities and the established, hi-tech advanced population.

The article describes a study which examines factors that dominate the preferences of Arab and Jewish students in choosing digital and/or printed information source for learning. The students participate in an annual academic course given in the department of business management at a college in northern Israel. The study included 112 students (83 Jewish students, 42 men and 41 women and 39 Arab students, 25 men and 14 women). The study examined the perceived attribution of information sources characteristics among Arab and Jewish students in a specific domain (Business Management) and focuses on the differences in such perception as they influence different manners of the preferred information source chosen for learning.
It is suggested that differences in perception of scope, depth, accessibility, trustworthiness, clarity and especially the perceived ability of cognitive processing in both digital and printed information source, can explain the 'Digital Divide' between Arab and Jewish Israeli students in the context of evaluating the contribution of different information sources for their learning.

Keywords:

Information Characteristics, Digital Divide, decision making, minorities.