[568] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Schools, et al
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Russ Hobby)
Mon Apr 8 14:38:27 1991
From: rdhobby@ucdavis.edu (Russ Hobby)
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 91 10:34:56 -0700
To: com-priv@psi.com
UC Davis has had the Davis High School connected to the Internet for a
year and a half now and we have learned several things.
First, you need to have someone in the school that is excited about the
project and will push it from within the school. The other teachers,
once exposed to networking, love it, but are reluctant at first because
they can not see the applications and don't want to take the time to
look into it. We have been developing a course called "Mining the Internet"
that teaches educators how to use the resources of the Internet. This will
be used this week at the California Educational Computing Consortium
"Silicon Dreams in Gold Rush Country" Conference. The idea is for these
educators to take "Mining the Internet" back to their schools and use
it as a teaching tool there.
The second thing that we have learned is that the current way that we
are connecting K-12 does not scale. We have connected Davis High as a
subnet of our campus network, and thus we provide all the network
services (DNS, etc) for the high school. This will not scale to a large
number of K-12 schools bacause universities just don't have the
resouces to do all that support. Also the K-12 sites do not have the
technical expertise ( or the money to hire the personnel with it) to
operate a site on the Internet with the type of management tools that we
have today. Up to now, sites connecting to the Internet, for the most
part, have local experts to run the network. As the Internet grows, we
will be seeing more smaller sites, like K-12, that will not have the
resouces to take care of an Internet connection.
Solutions to this problem can come in a couple of ways. One is for the
network provider to sell the necessary network services to the site and
take care of it for them. I think that serveral of the participates in
this mail list are headed this way as commerial services. Another way
is to develop tools to make network connection and management easier.
If we can make connecting to the Internet as easy as setting up an
AppleTalk network (yeah, I know there are differences in complexity ;-),
the smaller sites would be able to handle much more of the management
themselves.
UC Davis has a propsal in to NSF for funding to develop a
hardware/sofware package to act as a "turn-key" Internet connection to
provide not only a low cost network connection, but also provide the
sites own network services to make them a self sufficient site. "Mining
the Internet will be part of this package. Once developed, we want to
make it freely available to regional and commercial network operators
to support K-12 connections.
Russ
Russell Hobby
Data Communications Manager
U. C. Davis
Computing Services INTERNET: rdhobby@ucdavis.edu
Davis Ca 95616 BITNET: RDHOBBY@UCDAVIS
(916) 752-0236 UUCP: ...!ucbvax!ucdavis!rdhobby
