Reassert Your Relevance

High-tech schools connect with Main Street

By Andrew Trotter

Andrew Trotter is associate editor of Electronic School.

You might see the information highway as a conduit to move information from across the globe into your schools, but a growing number of educators are using it to tap valuable resources from across town. These educators are experimenting with community networking, a marriage of community organizing and modern communications technology. Current forms of community networking are taking just the first halting steps toward what eventually might be thoroughly wired communities.

But already the concept has become a buzz phrase mouthed by government officials looking for efficient ways of delivering public services, by activists in search of tools for community development, and by corporate representatives promoting new markets for technology and commercial services. Telephone and cable television companies are especially avid about community networking, because their communications systems would be at the heart of many of the competing schemes.

And as you might expect, the needs of your schools are a prime concern of community networking advocates of all stripes. Supporters envision schools being linked electronically to homes so students can use school software from the convenience of their bedroom or so parents can exchange messages with teachers or examine their children's school records. The same technology would let students take electronic field trips to zoos and museums or could foster mentor relationships with local professionals. School districts could use such networks to cooperate more closely with social service agencies, to build partnerships with local businesses, and to air public debates on school issues.

In almost all cases, however, schools are just one element in the community networking picture, not the whole show. Some school districts might be satisfied managing a simple homework hot line or a Web site on the Internet. But the full benefits of community networking require the participation and expertise of entire communities; the concept itself cries out for partnerships.

A number of corporations are already cooking up their versions of partnerships for community networking. The Carlsbad, Calif.-based Lightspan Partnership Inc., for example, hopes to use broadband cable or telephone networks to shuttle its interactive educational software to schools and students' homes. Set-top boxes attached to television consoles would turn the TVs into interactive displays that operate much like computers. The company envisions including features to allow parents to trade messages with teachers and to monitor their children's academic progress via a school district database.

Lightspan currently is testing its educational software and at-home learning methods in 12 schools. The pilot tests employ CD-ROM players in homes to simulate the delivery of the software by a broadband network. Bernice Stafford, Lightspan's director of market planning and development, admits "the connectivity [between schools and homes] via the technology is certainly not there yet; that's dependent on the technological infrastructure." Like other community networking projects and commercial game, entertainment, news, and information services, Lightspan is waiting for the broadband infrastructure to be developed and installed, a complicated and costly endeavor when applied on a metropolitan scale.

Pioneering in Boulder

Some communities have decided not to wait for broadband -- or for corporate-designed versions of community networking. These communities are using local resources, grants, and current technologies, such as the World Wide Web, as well as active partnerships with key corporations and local companies, to explore the potential for community networks to address existing problems.

One of the best examples of this approach is in Boulder, Colo. In that community, a student, sick at home, checks his E-mail to review his homework assignments and to read a consoling note from a classmate. A senior citizen goes on-line to preview a trip to Italy -- and to find the bus route to a Boulder shopping mall. An unemployed single mother searches a computerized job bank. A parent, using a computer at the public library, calls up the agenda for the next school board meeting, then sends an E-mail comment to the board president.

Community networking has cropped up in Boulder partly through the efforts of key officials in the local university, the Boulder city and county governments, and the area's two school systems -- the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) and the St. Verain Valley School District. Companies such as Apple Computer and USWest have contributed equipment and expertise -- as have elements of the local business community. This cooperation has led to the development of the Boulder Community Network (BCN), a nonprofit community information service on the World Wide Web. BCN publicizes services, schedules, and other information from scores of local government agencies, private organizations and companies, and the two school districts. (See sidebar: A Web Network Slowly Grows.) Anyone can visit this information clearinghouse by dialing it up with a computer and a modem or by tapping in through the Web.

Just as important, community networking has arrived in Boulder in other, less-organized forms due to a gradual cultural revolution. Ahead of most metropolitan areas, Boulder has gone on-line. Residents of the City of Boulder, Boulder County (population 238,196), and the county's scattered villages on the front range of the Rocky Mountains enjoy a high per-capita income (the 1990 median annual family income in the county was $43,782) and claim to have more home computers per capita than any other U.S. city. In some circles, the Web is as familiar as a cup of coffee. From the fashionable Pearl Street mall downtown, you can stroll into Caffe Mars and sip cappuccino to Beatles music while using one of nine computers linked to the Web. University students consort at a virtual coffeehouse, an on-line forum where electronic chatter wanders from chaos theory to keg parties.

Enough residents are getting Internet accounts to support 15 Internet providers. Others get on the Web through jobs at the University of Colorado at Boulder, small scientific firms, and a new growth of local software companies. Families are beginning to use E-mail for routine communication -- especially as the schools install Web access and begin to provide free Internet accounts to students.

BVSD (PreK-12; enrollment 24,780), which covers Boulder City and the northern half of the surrounding county, plans to complete installation in all its schools by fall 1996, says Libby Black, the district's Internet project director. Already 3,500 BVSD students and 350 teachers have school-funded Internet accounts, Black says. Students are rushing to create their own Web sites, adorned with their pictures, personal ephemera, and links to the home pages of their closest friends.

Boulder educators and students like to highlight their national and international uses of the Internet: Last year, for example, middle school science classes traded messages and data with classrooms in Australia, Canada, and Italy. BVSD Superintendent Dean Damon emphasizes the Internet's potential as a means of distance learning and "to give our kids virtual access worldwide" and "to link our staff to people around the country." But conversation about the Web often leads to local uses -- such as checking area weather forecasts or ski reports on BCN and using E-mail to connect classrooms to the Boulder community. And Damon does note, "I've had E-mail feedback from people getting information through BCN."

The quiet growth of local Internet applications contradicts a widely held expectation that the Internet erases geographic barriers, observes Kenneth Klingenstein, head of BCN and director of computing at the University of Colorado in Boulder: "We got so enthralled that we could defy geography [with the Internet] that we forgot to acknowledge [geography] at all."

Projecting messages

One of BCN's most popular information offerings is Vocal Point, an electronic publication produced by students at BVSD's Centennial Middle School (6-8; enrollment 600). (Technically, the publication is on the school system's Web site, connected by a Web link to BCN.) Vocal Point exists to express "kids' ideas of adult issues that are well-researched and well-founded," says Scott Dixon, the teacher in charge of the publication, so "kids aren't just consumers of information, but providers."

Vocal Point first went on-line in June 1994 and now appears five times during the school year. Students select themes for the issues, such as poverty, free speech, animal rights, and the Internet. The student staff reaches further into the community by inviting contributions from other BVSD middle schools and by supplementing research conducted on the Internet with interviews conducted locally using video or digital cameras. The resulting product has crisp graphics and solid journalism.

In addition to garnering scholastic journalism awards for Vocal Point, Dixon's students have received the immeasurable benefit of "adult recognition at a professional level for their work," he says. E-mail praise for the publication has come from across town and from as far away as Japan. And because of Vocal Point, several Centennial middle school students have been hired by Boulder companies to get a Web site up and running and to produce videos on school technology.

Erasing isolation

Eighteen miles from the City of Boulder, up a winding road on an approach to the Indian Mountains, Holly Hultgren is hoping the Internet will move her school a little closer to town. "Everyone lives here by choice," says the elementary school principal, who lives in the tiny village of Nederland -- a skiing and mining outpost with a one-block business section and no public library -- "but isolation isn't necessarily what they're here for."

Nederland Elementary School (PreK-6; enrollment 510) is a modern, low-slung facility that blends into a wooded hilltop and has a curriculum emphasizing science, mathematics, and technology. The solitude has lessened somewhat since the school got direct Web access last year, Hultgren says. Her faculty was already being trained in using the Internet for instruction, and the school received new hardware through a grant to develop Internet-based teaching methods for rural educators.

Now Hultgren's students are starting to use E-mail and, she says, are "getting beyond [E-mail] to some curriculum-based projects" using the Internet.

Hultgren adds that similar changes are happening at Nederland Secondary School, a 1970s-style school building up another mountain road. Last fall, she says, gifted and talented students in grades 8 through 10 exchanged E-mail with scientists at the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and at sites in Seattle and Nebraska. Students were given problems to solve with the help of the scientists. "It was a very structured program and very successful," Hultgren says.

The town of Nederland and the elementary school have applied jointly for a grant to set up a Nederland community Web site, Hultgren says. The proposal envisions connecting Nederland to other small villages in the southern Rocky Mountains -- as well as to the city below -- to allow professionals and citizens alike the chance to trade news, health, and social services information. If the project goes forward, isolation would still be an option in Nederland, but not a mandatory condition. (At press time, Hultgren had just been transferred to become principal at a new school elsewhere in BVSD.)

Business links

Back in the city, a group of BVSD high schoolers have discovered just how much geography still counts in the Internet age. On a Friday afternoon at a Boulder hotel, six students give Web-surfing lessons to some 30 employees of the Valleylab Inc., a local subsidiary of the Pfizer Corp. The students are repaying a debt from a year ago, when Pfizer and Valleylab contributed $15,000 to pay for the school's speedy T-1 connection to the Web. "The one stipulation [to the donation]," relates local Pfizer representative Linda Finney, "was that when we get our Internet [access] going, your students have to come to help us." As a first payment on that debt, the students demonstrate how they use the Web to conduct academic research and to identify resources such as scholarship information.

The New Vista students demonstrate other ways that the Web can be applied to the community, says their teacher Stevan Kalmon. Students at the experimental school are required to complete a "community experience" program. The experiences don't have to involve technology -- some students simply take jobs -- but other students have chosen projects that use the Internet, Kalmon says. One student, for example, has translated the BCN home page into Spanish; others have given Internet lessons to elementary students. Kalmon notes that another student used the Internet -- without authorization -- to organize local opposition to school district budget cuts.

BCN's Klingenstein delights in such examples of community networking in Boulder schools, which he regards as one of the most important untapped areas of growth. "My sense is that the linkage between the community network and schools is just beginning," he says.