US/ND-3: E-rate/Greatest Benefits
E-rate/Greatest Benefits
Frank Odasz (franko@bigsky.dillon.mt.us)
Sat, 14 Sep 96 11:03:19 MDT
As a longtime supporter of connectivity in schools and libraries
I would like to raise a few cautions.
Students spend about 19% of their time in school. Without
connectivity from the home, their self-directed lifelong learning
capabilities for themselves and particularly their families are
severely curtailed. Teachers need home-based connectivity because
that's the ONLY place they'll have time to teach themselves new
skills.
If color Pentium laptops are available in a year's time, as
predicted, for $500, it will become increasingly obvious that
teachers, students and all learners will optimally benefit from
personal mobile computers. Lease-to-own programs with payments
possible through providing community service training make sense.
Most citizens don't frequent their public libraries. While
community computing centers are needed to support those without
alternatives, home-based telecomputing is the goal we should be
shooting for. The question stands as to what to do if the local
library, as in my town, just isn't interested in providing
Internet access, training and technical support to citizens?!!
As a prerequisite to receiving the E-Rate, schools and libraries
should be tasked with community outreach/training activities
which require them to share their connectivity, hardware and
expertise with the broader community. In Canada, 2,000 students
were funded to raise the teleliteracy of local businesses. 1500
rural communities will receive $30,000 for community networking
efforts, to involve schools, libraries, *<HOMES>*, and virtually
all possible community groups and organizations.
On training, E-Rates should be tied to verification that adequate
training will be available on an ongoing basis. Nationally
disseminated online lessons would be a rather obvious delivery
method; Internet multimedia, CDROMS, video, etc. Why should
everyone waste time reinventing the wheel?
As a society, we still don't know how to work together online
productively, yet. I'd like to make the point that we're a
passive preliterate video society evolving toward becoming a
proactive literate society.
Email is the most scaleable, affordable, and powerful
connectivity tool we have today, and its been around for over a
decade. While the web is simple to use and motivational for
beginners, the real power of functional information and
interaction continues to text-based. Powerusers turn off the
images on their browsers to speed up their searching time since
its the textual information that will usually most benefit them.
This awareness has to be taught. What people need is not always
what people think they want. Email alone, without some type of
group conferencing plan to allow people to come together easily
online, falls short of the potential for true community
networking.
On wireless solutions, as with measuring purposeful public
problem-solving dynamics, we can't assume anything. We need many
testbed projects to measure and validate what actual scaleable
solutions exist. If only a fraction of what we've heard about
wireless is true, we should all still be demanding major testbed
initiatives.
Sincerely,
Frank Odasz
Director of Big Sky Telegraph
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