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Wiring Around the Country

Aired December 6 and 7, 1997

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This is Internet On The Air. I'm Todd Mundt. All Internet access is not created equal. Details in a moment.

Funding Credit: Internet On The Air is a production of the University of Michigan School of Information and Michigan radio, made possible by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Northwest High School is located in Jackson, Michigan and has a student population of 1,000. The school is faced with shrinking budgets and has six classrooms wired with Internet connections.

Huron High School is located in Ann Arbor and has a student population of 1,800. This school hopes to have its classrooms wired to the Internet by the end of the school year, and already maintains its own home page. There are many schools located throught Michigan whose classrooms are not connected to the Internet.

"Universal access" is a buzz word adopted by politicians and educators. A recent study confirms suspicians that rural and some urban schools trail the suburbs in making the leap ahead in computer technology. But a study funded by the National Science Foundation finds that access is actually more evenly distributed than first believed. Either way, most experts agree it's important to train teachers and students to use the technology. And some researchers conclude that the government might not have to get involved to narrow the gap.

Non-profit organizations and state and federal funds currently help schools strapped for funding get affordable access to the Internet. Groups like the American School Directory provide free e-mail accounts for students and teachers, put up Web sites for schools, and connect teachers, students and parents across the country.

To learn more about non-profit and government initiatives to get schools wired, visit our own Web site at www.iota.org. For Internet On The Air, I'm Todd Mundt.

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Related Links

To find out more about the studies, check here first:

• Education Week report: "Technology Counts"
  
  
• Taub Urban Research Center study: "Leaders and Losers on the Internet"
  
  
• Taub Urban Research Center study: "Telecommunications Policy and Cities"
  
  
• Taub Urban Research Center study: "'Net Equity: Class Divisions Emerging on the Net"
  
  
• Taub Urban Research Center Telecommunications and Cities Resource Page
  
  
• "The Evolution of Advanced Large Scale Information Infrastructure in the United States" by Shane Greenstein, Mercedes Lizardo and Pablo Spiller. NBER Working Paper No. 5929 Note: The study may be downloaded with Adobe Acrobat. It is in a PDF format.
  
  
• Advanced Telecommunications in U.S. Public Elementary and Secondary Schools, Fall 1996, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education,1997.

To learn about government and non-profit initiatives to help wire schools, check these sites:

• NetDay Home Page
  
  
• American School Directory Home Page
  
  
• Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide
  
  
• A Report to the Legislature and Governor on the Findings and Recommendations of the Michigan Universal Service Task Force
  
  

To read recent articles about the use of technology in classrooms and about wiring across the country, visit these sites:

• NYT article, "Video Games and Teaching Tools: Overselling the Wired Schools"
  
  
• NYT article, "When Laptops are Required, How Does Campus Life Change?"
  
  
• NYT article, "School Technology Report Becomes Plea for Research"

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The Interview

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Last Updated January 26, 2000