@Jeffrey: I would hope to avoid the Matthew Effect you describe by making available federal grants to get programs up and running. That may seem like a US-centric POV, but I plead ignorance as to the workings of other countries’ educational systems (that’s why I’m glad you and Paul stopped by – can you give some perspective?). Also, the access is only half of it – I also think that awareness and literacy is the other vital component.

Also, I agree that Net connectivity is getting cheaper and easier to come by, which is why I think schools could accelerate the process with minimal cost, esp. if the aforementioned grant monies come into play.

@David: I’m usually in agreement re: “not our responsibility”, but I wonder how we can expect our community members to support technological initiatives if they don’t know anything about them. To me, I see this as a short-term investment that will yield long-term results in terms of community support.

@Paul: Thanks for inspiring me to think this out – is something that’s happening in the UK on a widespread basis?

Looking forward to continuing this conversation!

However, if you’re talking about school staff and administration planning and running these programs, I just think we start getting into an area that schools don’t need to be in. Schools are asked to intervene and help for so many societal problems outside of education. Do we really need to give schools more responsibilities?

will schools become community hubs for internet resources & education?

isn’t it sort of a catch-22? the schools that have the resources to do this are likely ones that have a higher percentage of homes with access to the web, while those with fewer resources are also likely to be the districts that would most benefit from this kind of scheme.

but are communities going to inevitably become more connected to the www? yes.

in some countries, like indonesia for example, more people access the internet through their mobile device than on a computer. follow the 1LPC project, it seems like we won’t be too far away from seeing a world that is truly connected, in a widespread and powerful way.

bridging the technology divide…hmmm…as the web gets cheaper and cheaper, will there come a point when there is not such a huge difference (regarding technology access) between the haves and the have-nots?

or is this my conservative bent coming through and wanting to ignore yet another tangled-up knot of a problem?