I. Introduction
A. National Information Infrastructure
With leadership from the Clinton/Gore administration, the nation is embarked upon an ambitious expansion of its basic information infrastructure. The popular press has given considerable attention to the way the new infrastructure will be able to incorporate elements of the traditional broadcast media. This coverage has been fueled by the frenzy of mergers and acquisitions in the communications and entertainment industries, but this aspect of the emerging National Information Infrastructure (NII) is only one aspect of a much broader landscape.
It's true that the principal backbone of the new data superhighways will be able to transmit hundreds of channels of video services and allow for video on demand to individual households. But the technology which underlies the new data highways is a symmetric technology, meaning that it enables two-way communication at equal data rates. This permits any site which is attached to these data highways to act as a source of information on a par with any other site. The basic cost of connectivity to the new data highways is low, and the number of connections that will be possible is high. This fact implies a fundamental change in the way in which information will be distributed in our society and heralds an age of Network Democracy.
In a Network Democracy there will be many available information providers. This will include not only the traditional providers, such as publishers and broadcasters, but it will involve schools and government agencies, businesses and individuals. The price of entry will be low, and it will be possible for individuals users of the network to be very selective in their choices.
Among the first sites likely to benefit from this new information architecture are businesses, hospitals, government offices and agencies, libraries, and educational centers. All of these groups have traditionally gathered large amounts of specialized information, and all have a need, and in some cases a mandate, to disseminate this information to a large public audience. The NII will enable this to be done quickly, efficiently and economically.
Since the paradigm of a Network Democracy is new, it is not surprising that the opportunities presented by the NII will be seized in an irregular and halting manner by many of the constituencies which can be served by the newly available technology. This makes things particularly difficult for the public schools, which typically have less in-house technical expertise than do most businesses, universities, hospitals or government agencies. Yet school systems stand to gain a great deal from the NII, so it is important to overcome this obstacle.
By including schools in the National Information Infrastructure we will provide them with the tools to deal with several major educational issues. Among these issues are the following:
Isolation. The traditional classroom, modeled roughly on the nineteenth century factory, isolates teachers from their peers and from subject experts in their fields. It isolates teachers and students from new information resources. A networked classroom overcomes these limitations.
Equity. If all of the nation's classrooms are networked, then all students and teachers will have equal access to information resources on the network. Such resources are becoming increasingly important in the educational process. Furthermore, the need to prepare students to work in an increasingly networked nation requires that students gain familiarity with the tools needed to acquire, manipulate and assimilate information.
Restructuring. Computer networks are the technology of school restructuring. They enable site-based management teams and others who are implementing the process of restructuring to communicate among themselves and to access needed external resources.
The ability of computer networks to assist efforts which deal with these issues suggests that schools should certainly become an integral part of the emerging National Information Infrastructure. This transition will require new organizations and affiliations to assist school districts in the support of the new technology that will be deployed. This process has already begun, with the formation of groups like the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN). Through the Consortium's electronic mail address, info@cosn.org, one can begin to explore the resources and organizations available to facilitate the development of school networks and catalyze the interaction of schools with vendors, network service providers and government agencies.
The present paper seeks to provide readers with the vocabulary necessary to understand what it means for a school to be connected to the national network. The process of full connectivity can be achieved in stages, and this paper attempts to present the stages that any school might follow. Each stage is presented in terms of the benefits that it provides for the school, the type of services that can be utilized at that stage, the limitations inherent to that stage, and the costs required for the installation and operation of that stage of connectivity. The paper necessarily includes a number of technical terms. New terms will be printed in boldface where they first appear; and all technical terms are summarized in a glossary in section IX. In discussing the national network itself we will typically use the term Internet, which refers to all those interconnected networks which use the same protocols as the national network and appear to users as a single large network. The Internet is global in scope, with a current population of perhaps 20 million people, a number which will more than double in the next year.
We do not mean for our presentation to be a do-it-yourself manual for school connectivity. Rather we hope to provide readers with enough information that they can converse intelligently and productively with telephone companies, hardware vendors, network service providers and other groups with whom they must deal in the process of designing, installing and maintaining their own networks. We also hope that the present document will be useful to telephone companies and other service providers, by giving a clear explanation of why schools need certain categories of service and by offering a common vocabulary for discussions with school district customers. The need for a common vocabulary is particularly important in an area where the dominant commercial forces may not be aware of the value of the new technology in effecting significant and valuable changes in the educational system. In purely commercial terms, there is a vast new market to consider. The present paper seeks to help develop that market, and - in so doing - to address the three fundamental educational issues listed previously.
There are a few fundamental guidelines which we will mention from time to time, and which readers would do well to keep in the front of their minds as they read the pages which follow. These are the principles of interoperability and scalability. A viable National Information Infrastructure must be based upon common public protocols so that all vendors can participate in its development and all the computing equipment in use at any given site can be connected to the network and work in tandem. Furthermore, the architecture of various components of the network must be such as to work not just for a handful of adventurous teachers and students but for whole school populations on a day in and day out basis.