Information On-Ramp Crosses a Digital Divide

[Marco Trotta]

Information On-Ramp Crosses a Digital Divide
By BARNABY J. FEDER
Children who show up for basketball camp at the Carl
Russell Recreation Center will find some unexpected drills
on their schedule: computer lessons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/08/technology/08DIVI.html?th


WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Children who show up this month for basketball camp
at the Carl Russell Recreation Center here will find some unexpected drills
on their schedule.

Aaron Bailey, the recreation center's director, plans to take advantage of
breaks in the hoops action to send the campers to the center's newest
addition, a computer room stuffed with 10 refurbished computers, all with
high-speed Internet connections. The aim is to  help make the youngsters as
agile on computers as they are on the courts. "I might even send the
campers in before I let them play basketball," Mr. Bailey told a visitor
recently.

Mr. Bailey's center is being linked to 35 other sites around Winston-Salem
- recreation centers, churches in the city's poorest neighborhoods,
libraries, schools and a homeless shelter -  in the first phase of
WinstonNet, one of the most advanced and broadest efforts yet by public and
private groups in an American city to bridge the so-called digital divide
between the haves and have-nots.

For years, community activists and politicians around the country have
talked about the need to help people who  have been left behind in the
digital revolution because of poverty, disabilities or fear of new
technology. Without computer literacy, the argument goes, disadvantaged
groups will become more excluded in the high-tech economy. Yet many efforts
have meant little more than making it possible for people to surf the Web
from a library terminal.

WinstonNet - which is based on a fiber optic ring that surrounds the city
center and links to Internet 2, the newest, highest-capacity piece of the
Internet -  goes beyond providing free access to  computers for those who
do not own them.

It will allow any resident with a library card to have an e-mail account;
transact business with the city, like payment of parking tickets; and store
homework or other documents on a central server so  they can be easily
retrieved from any site on the network.

Documents can be stored in a private file, in a file available to a limited
number of other users or in a file open to the public. Parents  can gain
access to school assignments and communicate with teachers by calling up
Learning Village, a software program donated by the I.B.M. Foundation.

Perhaps most important, the plan focuses on giving first-time users plenty
of computer training. Instructors at the WinstonNet site in the basement of
the Union Baptist Church, for instance,  helped teenagers from a nearby
housing project learn to use computers  in creating business plans for
their own summer businesses.

"The digital divide problem has been defined mainly in terms of access, but
it needs to be defined more broadly as a matter of skill," said Karen
Mossberger, an associate professor of political science at Kent State
University in Ohio.

As a bonus, the training process can  also  open the door to mentoring
disadvantaged youngsters.

Winston-Salem officials say WinstonNet, in addition to doing social good,
can be an economic  catalyst for the city, best known as the home of the R.
J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.  The city is struggling to reduce its
dependence on tobacco and manufacturing.

The fiber optic ring will  provide a broadband communications link for
engineering and biotechnology businesses that need to send and receive huge
masses of data. Targacept, an RJR spinoff that is developing medical
products based on nicotine, is expected to connect to WinstonNet by the end
of this year.

Tying so many organizations into the same system will make it easier to
train many more  users, said Johannes Boehme II, associate dean for
academic computing  at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, who
serves as WinstonNet's volunteer president.

"Very few communities do this holistically," Mr. Boehme said.

While that may be true, some social service organizations and communities
had digital access programs long before WinstonNet.

Boys and Girls Clubs of America, for example,  has used $100 million in
software and cash from Microsoft to create more than 1,000 community
technology centers around the country where children use computers to do
homework and learn skills like designing Web sites.

The Blacksburg Electronic Village, a project of Blacksburg, Va., and the
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, says it has helped 87
percent of the community's residents and most of its businesses become
connected to the Internet, with more than 60 percent receiving low-cost
high-speed connections from local cable and phone companies.

And Atlanta estimates  it has attracted about 15,000 residents, over
one-third of them children, in the last two years to 15 community
technology centers in poor neighborhoods. That program also includes a
mobile computing center in a bus that carries 12 computers with wireless
broadband connections to poor neighborhoods, according to William Lindsey,
a spokesman for the Mayor's Office of Community Technology.

"We think we are making big strides to eradicate the digital divide," Mr.
Lindsey said.

But some experts have their doubts. Dr. Lynette Kvasny of Pennsylvania
State University recently published a study that concluded that Atlanta's
technology centers and a program in La Grange, Ga., offering free Internet
access for subscribers to a city-owned cable television system, did little
to improve the lives of the poor.  The Atlanta model was criticized by some
regular users of the centers for providing inadequate training, Dr. Kvasny
said.

Some critics  say the digital divide evolves so rapidly as technology
advances that big initiatives, especially those driven by government
policy, can lock users into obsolete  technology.

"It's misguided to look at it as a serious social problem that needs to be
dealt with with aggressive subsidies," said Adam D. Thierer, director of
telecommunications policies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian policy
group in Washington.

In fact, Mr. Thierer said, computer technology is spreading to underserved
segments of society unusually rapidly compared with other innovations.
Nearly two-thirds of American homes now have a computer, according to
Odyssey, a research firm based in San Francisco.

But the gap between those who are able to use computers effectively and
poorer citizens with little exposure may actually be widening, said W.
Frank Newton, executive director of the Beaumont Foundation of America,
which focuses on digital divide programs.

Government has become less eager to pay to bridge that gap.  President Bush
has tried  to eliminate technology access programs created by the Clinton
administration in the Education and Commerce Departments to help
communities bridge the digital divide.  Just under $50 million of the cuts
was  restored by Congress in the spring after a lobbying campaign by a
coalition of more than 180 groups.

And while a controversial universal service charge on long-distance phone
bills, established by Congress in 1996,  helps some schools and libraries
connect to the Internet, that multibillion-dollar fund cannot be used to
finance broader projects like WinstonNet.

State financing for such programs has also been sharply reduced because of
budget problems,  according to Kavita Singh, executive director of the
Community Technology Centers Network in Cambridge, Mass.

WinstonNet began to take shape in flusher times. It grew out of Wake Forest
University's drive in the 1990's to make itself a leader in using computers
in education.    Wake Forest has been giving every student a laptop since
1996. It decided in 1998 to replace the first-generation broadband lines
connecting its medical school with the main campus on the other side of the
city and a  research center downtown, replacing them with the ultimate in
broadband, a private fiber optic highway.

That network, later sold to a telecommunications subsidiary of Duke Energy
, had enough spare capacity to spur community discussions about who else
might use it.  Among the groups involved were Forsyth Technical  Community
College, which trains student volunteers to refurbish donated computers and
wire them into the network; Winston-Salem State University, a historically
black college that has extensive outreach programs into the city's most
depressed neighborhoods; and several local government agencies.

"Turf was removed as an issue at the beginning," said Claudette Weston,
who represented the library system in the meetings. "People came to
cooperate."

Each WinstonNet host site pays its own operating costs, including monthly
fees to local phone or cable service providers for access to WinstonNet's
broadband ring. Hosts are also responsible for developing their own
filtering policies.

Now there are discussions about allowing individuals to connect to the
WinstonNet system through local phone or cable lines, without going to a
WinstonNet site. The local Habitat for Humanity group is proposing that all
its renovated homes come equipped with WinstonNet access.

"As people become more aware of it, the pressure will mount for more
access," predicted Don Martin, superintendent of the Winston-Salem/ Forsyth
County Schools. Mr. Martin said one possible WinstonNet expansion would
create a site in the sprawling Hanes Mall south of the city. "One thing
we've learned is that everyone can find their way to the mall."