Making Connections

How technology acquaints students with their communities

By Mary Claire Scanlon

Mary Claire Scanlon is a Los Angeles marketing and business consultant and writer who specializes in educational technology.

Not too long ago, Rob Denkhaus squeezed a baby elephant partway into his office. A group of delighted and amazed inner-city students from the Edgehill Community Center in Nashville, Tenn., gazed at the creature up close. The elephant, however, didn't even acknowledge their presence.

That's not because the animal is used to kids, but because the kids were able to see the elephant in Denkhaus' office from their classroom. Denkhaus is the education director at the Nashville Zoo, and both the zoo and the center are participants in a community-school network called Project DIANE (for "Diversified Information and Assistance Network").

Although Project DIANE includes just a few schools in its 30-site network, it offers a bright picture of how communities and schools can connect on a day-to-day basis with the use of technology.

Zoom-in on learning

Denkhaus, armed with a multimedia computer and a handheld camcorder or at other times with an inexpensive digital video camera, is able to hold two-way conversations with classrooms that are similarly outfitted. As far as Denkhaus is concerned, Project DIANE has greatly extended his opportunities to educate students.

"So many [Nashville area schools] are rural that if I were to visit them with a traditional outreach program, I might not visit anyone else that day," says Denkhaus, who adds that driving time would limit his in-person visits to two schools a day, at best. "The state of Tennessee also has strict restrictions on what types of wild animals can visit the schools," Denkhaus says, "and it can be upsetting for an animal to go on a school visit."

With the network, the zookeeper can give tours to several additional schools and show youngsters all kinds of wildlife. "They can do everything but touch and smell the animals," notes Denkhaus.

When they're not roaming around a zoo, Nashville classrooms are hooking up to a museum, state historical archives, senior citizen centers, business counselors, and local business resources. All in all, more than 30 sites are on the network.

Project DIANE is the brainchild of Stephen Shao Jr., who became the director of applied research at the College of Business at Tennessee State University after spending several years in the telecommunications industry. Shao started the project with $170,000 in seed funds from a Tennessee Valley Authority grant. The grant was awarded to Tennessee State University, so that Shao could focus on economic development.

At the beginning, Shao found it difficult to interest schools, but now "they are knocking on our door, asking to be part of this," he says. He's helped more than one school apply for grant funds--a necessity, since participating schools must purchase the hardware and pay for the ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) telephone lines the technology requires. Fortunately, in Tennessee, ISDN lines cost only a little more than regular telephone lines.

Project DIANE makes use of inexpensive computer video conferencing technologies and relies very little on use of the Internet. Shao admits the video images on the computer are not perfect; they are slightly grainy and jerky, because squeezing video through a telephone line is a little like squeezing an elephant through a doorway. Still, he says, the images work well enough for students to have learned sign language from a man at the Tennessee League for the Speech and Hearing Impaired center.

A Ferrari and a cup of gas

A state away, another community network is garnering a lot of national media attention. Blacksburg, Va., population 81,000, appears to be one of the few U.S. cities that is making the information highway a budget priority on a par with road repair. With the help of Virginia Tech, the city created Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV), which makes broad use of the Internet.

Blacksburg residents can shop on-line for groceries at Wade's Supermarket and have them delivered. Information about city laws, local businesses, and schools is all available on-line. Live on-line chat groups are helping to build community and business networks. To ensure equity in access, if residents don't have a computer, they can use one at the library--free of charge. Overall, roughly 22,000 residents have Internet e-mail accounts, and more are coming on-line every week.

Although BEV is a thriving electronic village, it is a village without much school involvement. Only a few of the 19 K-12 schools in surrounding Montgomery County have even a small presence in the network offerings. That's odd, given that Blacksburg considers itself a university town and the lead statement posted on the BEV education Web page states, "the No. 1 priority of Blacksburg's growing community is education."

Most of the schools that do take part in BEV do so under the auspices of Virginia Tech research projects, which focus on how learning changes on the Internet. But only three teachers are actually involved in those projects, and most of their classroom projects center on student-driven exploration and communication with the world outside of Blacksburg, not within the BEV community itself.

Melissa Matusevich, one of the public school teachers associated with a Virginia Tech project, says a lack of equipment--especially of multimedia computers--prevents many schools from taking advantage of BEV. Once teachers perceive the potential of the Internet and realize they don't have enough equipment to get on-line, Matusevich says, they feel as though "they've been given a Ferrari and a cupful of gas."

Almost 40 percent of the schools do have access to the Virginia Public Education Network (VaPEN), but Matusevich says there's a one-hour time limit on its use and "it's text-based and very slow." Apparently, the Virginia Department of Education underestimated how many teachers, administrators, and office personnel would take advantage of the VaPEN system, which during 1994, could be accessed through a toll-free (to the user) number. The number wasn't toll-free to the state, however, and after it received more than $500,000 in bills, the department of education had to limit VaPEN's use.

Going large

Although Blacksburg educators believe that the Internet holds tremendous learning opportunities for students, the Clark County (Nev.) School District, which includes Las Vegas, is focusing on using its community-school network to create stronger communication within the district. Clark County's approach stems from its size: The school district is the 10th largest in the United States--with a student enrollment of about 167,000--and one of the fastest growing. Spread over 7,910 square miles, the district is larger than the state of Massachusetts.

Clark County has a secret weapon in managing its problem of scale: the Clark County Public Education Foundation, led by executive director Judi K. Steele. In four years, the foundation has raised $6 million for a variety of projects. One of those projects was the creation of a network, called InterAct, that would support the school community as well as reach out to the community surrounding the district.

With InterAct, principals can easily look up school district policies--a feature that "really helps with school-based management," says Bruce Daley, one of InterAct's architects. Teachers can get lesson ideas from a database of lesson plans, and if they're called away from school suddenly, they can fax or e-mail their lesson plans to substitute teachers.

One of Steele's goals is to cultivate better communication between the local business community and educators. When she first helped start the Clark County Public Education Foundation, she noticed a tension between the business community and educators. Neither group felt supported by the other. She considers it part of the job to help provide better communications between the two. So the next group of people she plans to include on the InterAct network are major employers; they, in turn, could allow their employees to use the network to communicate with their children's schools.

Although Clark County's network offers its community many resources, there's a need for more. For instance, educators and working parents tend to have more access to InterAct than stay-at-home parents. Students benefit from the support their teachers receive on InterAct, but the network doesn't offer students many direct resources. Still, part of the reason InterAct is successful is that it was designed, first and foremost, to serve the education community. As the network grows, Steele plans to expand the network so that it will benefit stay-at-home parents and more in-school students.

Steele isn't the only one who is expanding. So are Project DIANE's Shao and Blacksburg's Matusevich, in their own ways. Shao is busily adding schools, new community sites, and new technologies. Matusevich is applying for grants so more teachers and students can tap into the learning resources on the Internet.

Each says they are expanding in response to a demand from others in their communities--teachers, students, business people--who want to participate in the network. Shao and Steele say the networks have drawn their respective communities and schools closer together, partly because the networks bring faraway resources to the people who need them, when they need them.

But perhaps the biggest reason the networks are successful is that they help create "communities of learners." People who have an interest in school administration or sign language or any other subject easily can find other like-minded people with whom they can commune. As Matusevich says, "[With the network] we're building a small-town sense of community again."