Re: Assignment for Week One

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> 	1) What are the one or two most pressing needs of
> 	   your PA school or library for the implementation
> 	   of effective and sustainable telecommunications
> 	   programs?
 
As I have observed efforts at building programs that rely on telecommunications 
for delivery, I have arrived at the same conclusions over and over.  The most 
pressing needs are for:

1.   Sustainable dollars to pay for the ongoing network costs.  One time
dollars can be obtained but no budget or citizens' willingness to pay seems to
be able to support the ongoing costs year after year.  

This is a classic problem in all new technology implementations I've seen. The
application may be great; there may be ready grant money to seed the effort;
and the end results may be potentailly excellent but...you can't get there from
here because of the cost of access, route, or network.  Given my druthers, I
rather see the effort put into transport (network, connection points,
bandwidth, desktop devices) rather than into applications.  No distant
learning occurs if you can close the distance.

2.   Funding the 4 year replacement cycle for hardware that is endemic in the 
industry.

If it weren't for Apples For Teachers from Giant Eagle, my school system would
not have computers in the classrooms.  Once the computers were installed, what
I observed was that no one had the funds to maintain them and they simply died
in place.  There also was no plan and budget resource to keep the technology
and applications reasonable current.  All of the information you see in trade
magazines and from folks like Gartner Group suggest that technology on the desk
top is really very expensive.

The net of items one and two is that the infrastructure is critical. It's the
framework that must be in place to allow the growth of integrated and
interconnected learning in Pennsylvania.

> 	2) How do the needs of schools and libraries differ,
> 	   and how are they complementary?

>From my lay person's viewpoint, although both are about information and
education, libraries may be more about facts and filing of information while
schools are about presentation and interpretation.  

One of the "cool" things about the internet is the amount of unbridled
information.  However, finding all of the information on a given topic is
difficult if not impossible.  Here is where I'd love to have a good librarian
in charge; keeping track of the stuff (a search engine that really finds
relevant information without arcane search rules and multiple searches),
sorting out the duplication (fifty web sites devoted to the same topic???!!!),
making sure that each nugget of information is documented (source, date of
origin).

Some of the "not cool" things about the internet are that information is not
truth (just 'cause its on the 'net, it ain't necessarily so) and the noise
generated by competing positions all trying to "talk" the loudest.  It's the
"educated consumer" issue.  Folks need to hear all sides of an issue, not just
the loudest talker.  They need to have positions and information packaged into
usable, understandable formats.  They need to be able to sort through 
information to reach an informed position.  This is a what the really great 
teachers do so well.

In using technology to augment education we should strive to take what 
libraries and schools do best and marry them to provide applications that make 
better citizens.


> 	3) How do the needs of rural schools and libraries
> 	   differ from those of schools and libraries in
> 	   urban areas?  

It seems to be to be an economic issue.  The haves, have, the have nots don't.
I repeatedly hear the same public goals for rural and urban schools and
libraries.  But the rural areas lack the resources that urban areas have in
their brick and morter facilities.  What's needed is a better way to get at the
resources, not more duplicated resources.  This means that resources cannot be
parochial.  If you've got something, it needs to be shared.  But even more
important (I'm back to the first question again!), there needs to be a way to
effectively share whitout burdening either the resource owner of the
receipient. 

Regards,

Bruce Hutchison
Director for Telecommunications
Computing & Information Services
University of Pittsburgh

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