The Internet is a truly associative technology, allowing dispersed citizens to converse and to take steps in common … By facilitating association, it has the potential to empower individuals and to promote greater democratic oversight on government … The Internet’s ability to facilitate association could lead to an increase in citizen participation and oversight of government.
We plan to develop our node as a community resource which will help to revitalize our economically depressed area.
Eventually we want to allow the students to access all of the school’s resources from home. This is part of our long-range goal to blow the walls off the school, bring the world into the school, and put the school out in the world.
Representatives from more than half of the participating organizations predicted that curriculum reform was the prime purpose for educational networking and geared their work toward achieving this goal. Many also predicted the creation of digital libraries accessible through the Internet for teaching and learning would be key and geared their major efforts in this direction. NSNT members also proposed educators could benefit in the future from using networks in the process of project-based learning (organized around problem-solving or themes that provide motivating context) and collaborative learning (in which students and teachers become near equals in the learning process).
Instead of today’s model, where you have one expert at the front of the room talking to a lot of people, it’s reversed: You have one user at a computer with hundreds of experts built in.
By means of global networking on the Internet special interest groups and clubs are being formed. These groups can break down large issues into smaller ones and collaborate to solve problems.
We must be careful not to look to this technology with hopes that it will be the next band aid for education. Installing computers, software, networking hardware, telephone lines and cabling in our schools will not change the way our children think unless we use these tools in new ways which take advantage of the possibilities the new tools have to offer.
The theme of harnessing the physical infrastructure to improve the social infrastructure persists today. Community networks are a part of that thread. There have been some eloquent discussions recently about the issues associated with physical and virtual community. It is important to note that it is not an either/or choice. Virtual community can amplify the physical associations. On the common ground of the community network can be found, again, the sense of place that we all need.
It is easy to imagine that the mainstream high-bandwidth applications will be video-oriented with a purely commercial basis. But I think it likely that there will always be a sort of Frontier Internet, where the ferment of new ideas brews best, while other networks cater to the more market-driven mass of usage of what will by then be “conventional multimedia.”
Unless African countries become full actors in the global information revolution, the gap between the haves and have-nots will widen, opening the possibility of increased marginalisation of the continent. This gap will increase the likelihood of cultural, religious and ethnic ghettos leading to regional and inter-regional conflicts.