[1177] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Consortium guidelines
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Janet Murray)
Tue Aug 13 08:20:16 1991
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 91 04:55:37 PDT
From: Janet.Murray@f23.n105.z1.fidonet.org (Janet Murray)
To: com-priv@psi.com
[In response to the inquiries re: the Consortium for School
Networking: --Janet jmurray@psg.com]
>From John Clement, EDUCOM K12 Project
TO: ALL on K12-LISTSERV
Consortium for School Networking
Temporary Secretariat:
EDUCOM K-12 Networking Project
1112 Sixteenth St., N.W., Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036
202-872-4200 (-4318, fax)
clement@educom.edu
BUILDING A NATIONAL EDUCATION NETWORK
GOAL, RATIONALE AND RECOMMENDATIONS
There are a wealth of information resources, working projects, curriculum
and institutional reform efforts ongoing at present that use computer-
mediated communications networks -- electronic networking -- to contribute
substantially to the nation's educational improvement.
In order to extend the opportunity offered by this technology, we need to
establish a plan that broadens participation and establishes a consensus
on a shared national infrastructure.
Participants must include all entities supporting K-12 education,
including Federal and state government agencies, museums, libraries, and
educational materials developers, as well as schools, colleges and
universities. An excellent start toward a shared national infrastructure
is offered by the interim National Research and Education Network (NREN),
currently linking postsecondary research and teaching centers with Federal
laboratories as well as business and industry.
Goal statement: to put at the service of educators and students
nationwide a network of information and communication resources that
increases their productivity, professional competence, and opportunities
for learning and collaborative work.
To make a national education network into a national resource, certain
objectives must be achieved through the coordinated action of public and
private sector groups:
% Connect a critical mass of users
Achieve equitable access by ensuring the national network is
reachable from all K-12 classrooms, ultimately by a local (non-toll)
call, but in the short term by connections with predictable,
affordable costs. Achieving such a goal will take time, but specific
connectivity initiatives can make rapid progress in the short term.
% Provide access to resources
Significantly increase the number, type and quality of resources
(whether information sources or human expertise) made available to
K-12 students and educators over the network. A national system
must provide directories and other mechanisms to help locate
resources and collaborators on the network.
% Provide training and support services
Put in place training alternatives supporting learning and use of the
unified national network, along with support services to encourage
and facilitate its use.
% Support the development of technology which reduces barriers to
use
Develop applications which make it easy and efficient to access
network services and are easily adapted to classroom use.
Rationale for networking: Electronic networking can facilitate many of
the major educational reform goals:
% Promote collaboration in a distributed community
A pervasive problem in schools is the isolated nature of the work.
Networking will enable educators and students to engage in
substantive dialogue and collaboration with their peers, both locally
and in geographically remote regions.
% Improve communication access
Reduce access costs and make costs fixed; support ways of linking
local and wide-area networks.
% Provide equitable access to information and resources, and
suitable means for dissemination
Give educators and students nationwide equitable access to
information resources, to expertise, and to mentoring opportunities
in the community, in universities and in industry.
% Support professional growth and development of both preservice and
inservice educators
A unified educational network can provide a continuing linkage
between K-12 and postsecondary education, supporting
dissemination of staff development resources.
% Support communications between teachers, students, researchers,
and other professionals so that all can assume the role of both
researcher and learner
Electronic networking is an ideal environment for reflection on
action research and insights from practice. Networks can provide
effective common ground for teachers and researchers to work as
peers. Other groups (for instance, curriculum developers or
publishers) can work directly with educators.
% Support educational restructuring
Changing communication behaviors will change organizations.
Networking can reinforce the linkage between staff development and
organizational change by connecting those working on issues of
everyday practice with each other, streamlining the processes that
support renewal and restructuring initiatives.
Recommendations: Four initial steps can "jump start" the construction
of a national network infrastructure for K-12 education:
% Accept the interim NREN as the principal backbone structure for
the network
The interim NREN reaches all fifty states, currently offers extensive
local connectivity, and already connects the nation's postsecondary
institutions as well as much of business and industry. Many
commercial networks are linked with the interim NREN. A number
of states are linking to the NREN for state K-12 educational
connectivity efforts. The NREN is committed to open,
nonproprietary standards.
% Provide a national directory resource
Making educators' access to each other and to "what is out there"
easier will encourage a strong sense of community. An easy-to-use,
well recognized directory resource will allow educators to identify
people with whom they can collaborate as well as existing resources
they can use.
% Provide means for user support
In the short term, to overcome initial obstacles presented by the
current technology, facilities at regional and local levels can provide
training, answer questions and solve problems, thus promoting
connectivity and facilitating access. In the longer term, support for
technological development will lead to improved interfaces and more
automated forms of access, while increased experience with models
for support at local levels will reduce the need for regional user
support services.
% Support research and development in network applications for
curriculum, instruction and administration
To maximize the benefit of existing educational reform efforts, the
groups involved need to consider how they can use network-based
communications and collaboration to help accomplish their goals, as
well as how their goals can be adapted to a national educational
environment driven by the existence of a shared "information
highway". R&D efforts focused on networking in support of K-12
curriculum, instructional, and administrative objectives can become
a means of learning from experience and pilot-testing alternatives.
A significant start in this direction is offered by the planning
document "Linking for Learning: Computer-and-Communications
Network Support for Nationwide Innovation in Education," released
in June 1991 by the National Science Foundation's Directorate for
Education and Human Resources.
--
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