Connect a School, Connect a Community

Speaking at a International Telecommunications Union meeting in India, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski shared some experiences with crafting the National Broadband Plan, but keyed in on the relationship between broadband and education.

"It is hard to identify anything more important than education," he said, "for our children, and no technological innovation in our lifetime has greater potential to transform education than broadband Internet." With broadband, any school library can become a portal to more information than the proverbial library at Alexandria, Egypt. Children living in the poorest and most isolated communities in the world can have access in their classrooms to the best teachers in the world. Up-to-date e-textbooks can replace outdated versions that might well have been written before broadband existed. The expression that the Internet opens up new worlds of discovery is not just a metaphor. In West Virginia, a rural, lower-income part of the United States, a 15-year-old student recently discovered a rare type of star using data from a national observatory. She was able to do so only because her school had a broadband connection. To seize the opportunities of broadband for education, the broadband plan makes several recommendations:
First, ensure that there is a predictable, reliable funding mechanism.
Second, expand the focus from schools and classrooms to students and teachers.
Third, recognize that facilities and infrastructure alone are not enough to seize the opportunities of broadband for education.
Fourth, support public-private partnerships for broadband and education, inside and outside the school.