[DOWNLOAD] "World Wide Wonder? Measuring the (Non-)Impact of Internet Subsidies to Public Schools (Research)" by Education Next # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: World Wide Wonder? Measuring the (Non-)Impact of Internet Subsidies to Public Schools (Research)
- Author : Education Next
- Release Date : January 01, 2006
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 189 KB
Description
Like the television revolution, which brought electronic boxes into schools in the 1960s and was supposed to turn classroom teaching on its head, computers were rolled into schools in the 1990s and connected to the worldwide web with the expectation that education would never be the same. TVs never really caught on as chalkboard replacements. Although they are still around, they seem to be used primarily as "educational film" filler by substitute teachers. The wired computer invasion has been very different. We never saw classrooms filled with rows of children sitting in front of televisions. And there was no national Marshall Plan to close the "television gap." The Internet, in fact, was something of an answer to the "vast wasteland" of TV; and it came with such promise for education that a new national anxiety, the "digital divide," was born and with it a rush of educators and philanthropists wanting to make sure that the poor would not be shut out of the worldwide promised land. The best evidence of the concern over the digital divide was the speed with which the federal government interceded to help close it. A program offering generous subsidies to schools and libraries for the purchase of Internet technology was made part of the massive overhaul of the Telecommunications Act in 1996. (In Internet time, this was almost prehistory: Amazon and eBay didn't open their online doors until 1995, and Google was still two years from birth.) The subsidies were apportioned on a sliding scale, with poorer schools receiving more. Known as the E-Rate (education rate) program, the schools and libraries subsidy was funded by a tax on long-distance telephone service. It quickly became the most ambitious federal school technology program in history.