Proposal to the National Science Foundation for SGER Funds to Conduct an Evaluation of Nelday Impact on School Telecommunications Infrastructure. submitted by ROCKMAN ETAL San Francisco, CA Netday is a widespread grassroots initiative to help schools connect to the national information infrastructure. It is a high-tech barn raising where volunteers in partnership with businesses and other organizations install high- speed data wire in K-12 classrooms. It is a national, yet distributed effort, begun in California about one year ago. Unsubstantiated estimates from the Netday organizers suggest that more than 250,000 volunteers installed cable in more than twenty percent of the nation's classrooms in the California and national Netdays. Netday represents an important opportunity to bring Internet connectivity to all students but there are serious policy implications that speak to the nation's goals for creating a powerful and dynamic telecommunications infrastructure for education. Netday is a strategic and important piece of the puzzle because it focuses on the local infrastructure inside the school. In combination with the possibility of reduced access costs under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it has the potential for bringing the Internet to the desktops of millions of students to use for science and math applications. Netday is defined as a project to install data wire in classrooms; wiring a school site for a network is a necessary condition to get all students connected to the Internet. Netday has resulted in many wired classrooms, however, we know little about the schools' efforts to finish the task of connecting the schools to the information infrastructure and preparing teachers to use it effectively. In spite of the significance of this phenomenon for changing the nature of schooling, almost no reliable data about Netday exists. We need to know: if this is primarily an event for the well-off suburbs that has the consequence of increasing the gap between the information haves and have-nots; if the model of pulling wires to five classrooms and not addressing the Internet service to the building or the instructional applications of the Internet limits the impact of the volunteer program; the funding sources for the other parts of the puzzle and whether these are differentially distributed according to wealth of the local community; the immediate and long term roles of volunteers from the community and from businesses in helping schools developed their infrastructure and change teaching and learning. ROCKMAN ET AL 1
