 |
Taking Action |
|||||||||||||||||
One direct way to close the digital divide is simply to provide the technology and resources to get the job done. Many digital companies and their employees are doing just that. Some of these efforts are focused on kids and schools. Others focus on under-served communities, from isolated Native American reservations to inner-city neighborhoods to community groups or non-profit organizations serving communities around the world. A few efforts seek to engender a global community or to use the Internet as a means of solving global problems. Still others focus on connecting their own workers in the United States and abroad. By any measure, the outpouring of philanthropic and charitable efforts intended to provide access and skills to the digitally disconnected is remarkable.
Kids and Schools Sean aspires to go to college and become a graphics animator. Latoya is directing a movie and has used the Web to research colleges where she can pursue her newfound interest in science. Both credit the Computer Clubhouse at Boston's Museum of Science with giving their lives direction. More than a cool place to hang out after school, the Clubhouse offers youths from age 8 to 18 mentors, access to technology, and the chance to develop their own projects, together with skills and self-confidence. Now Intel and the MIT Media Lab are working with the Museum to spread the widely-acclaimed model. The Intel Computer Clubhouse Network plans to create 100 clubhouses around the world by 2005. In addition to financial and technical support, Intel will provide clubhouse mentors from its employee volunteer program. Hewlett-Packard is providing computers, printers, and digital cameras, while Covad Communications is providing high-speed Internet links. The Network makes a special effort to attract young women, setting aside Mondays as Girls Day, a feature that attracted 15 year-old Latoya. The project expects to open 20 additional Computer Clubhouses this year and 100 worldwide over the next several years.
Taking a similar approach, PowerUP aims to help under-served youth succeed in the digital age by providing access to the Internet, mentoring, and a safe learning environment. The initiative brings together major corporations, federal agencies, and non-profit organizations to create or enhance technology centers in U.S. schools and communities. PowerUP will provide technology centers with 50,000 Gateway computers from the Waitt Family Foundation, 100,000 Internet accounts from AOL, and 400 AmeriCorps*VISTA members to serve as full-time mentors. AOL has also developed an online, interactive system for PowerUP that helps kids find information and develop useful skills. Taking aim directly at schools, Sun Microsystems' Open Gateways Program enables expanded access to curricula and reference materials for students and teachers alike by integrating network computing into primary and secondary schools. The program also helps teachers share lesson plans and lets school districts become more efficient by linking all their schools together. Sun forms partnerships with schools interested in adopting network computing, concentrating especially on assisting those in economically disadvantaged communities. Sun and its employees are also assisting America's Promise, contributing 20,000 hours of service in schools and $5 million in equipment and teacher training to help prepare youth for lifelong learning in the 21st century. Another school-oriented effort is Compaq's techs4schools Program, a Web-based "virtual volunteer" or mentoring effort that the company helped to develop and launch in April 2000. The program establishes a technology coordinator for each school or school district, then links coordinators over the Web with a team of volunteer mentors who have specialized skills in areas such as computers, networking, software, or Internet technologies. The mentors answer questions channeled to them by the coordinator via the techs4schools Web site, so that U.S. schools can get the help they need quickly and easily, regardless of their geographical location. The techs4schools effort is part of TECH CORPS, a national non-profit organization dedicated to improving K-12 education through effective use of technology, which Compaq also sponsors. Even where classrooms have computers, effective integration of these tools and the Internet into education remains a challenge. WorldCom and a number of leading educational organizations have developed dynamic lesson plans, links to approved educational Web sites, and educational materials for many curricula and grade levels -- a complete set of Internet content for the classroom. These tools are available to teachers on WorldCom's MarcoPolo Web site and the sites of its partners, and cover six disciplines from geography to humanities to mathematics. The WorldCom Foundation also assists in teacher training in all U.S. school districts.
One of the more remarkable efforts to close the digital divide through education started in a Rio de Janeiro slum. Rodrigo Baggio was a middle class schoolteacher when he decided to start a school for poor kids to teach them both computer skills and citizenship skills. He got corporations to donate old computers, and trained his best pupils to become teachers themselves. The result is the Committee for the Democratization of Information Technology (CDI), which has grown into a network of self-supporting schools in slums and disadvantaged communities across Brazil. Providing equipment for these schools are major digital companies including IBM. CDI has attracted interest and imitation in a number of other countries.
One novel computer-equipped classroom is located at Myeka High School in rural South Africa. Solar panels power the computers, a television, and a satellite-linked connection to the Internet. According to its principal, the new equipment has transformed the school, which previously had no electricity, few books, and fading morale; now enrollments have risen, new educational materials can be downloaded, and neighboring communities are clamoring for access. The school is a project of the U.S.-based Solar Electric Light Fund, which plans to work with companies and foundations to create similar schools in other rural areas. Instead of assisting schools, some companies start their own. Cisco Systems now has Network Academies in 83 countries around the world. The program is aimed at creating a talent pool and helping to solve the skills shortage that plagues the industry. The academies offer a four-semester course that trains students to design, build, and maintain networks through both formal instruction and hands-on, practical training. Students learn skills needed to qualify as Cisco Certified Network Associates, positioning themselves for jobs or engineering studies at a college level. Communities and Civil Society In the economically depressed town of East Palo Alto, Hewlett-Packard is piloting its Digital Village Program, aimed at making information and skills broadly accessible in under-served communities. The company will develop programs for K-12 education, help adults and kids in after school settings learn how to explore and communicate via the Net, and help families with home-based Internet tools and information. These components -- HP@School, HP@ Neighborhood, and HP@Home -- will be developed in a three-year partnership with East Palo Alto and other communities so that they serve the community's real needs. The company will contribute up to $15 million in cash and equipment to three pilot communities.
A different but similarly-named Digital Villages project takes place in South Africa. Managed by Africare with support and technical help from Eastman Kodak, Microsoft, Intel and other companies, it creates computer education and resource centers that provide training and access to information technology for children in disadvantaged communities throughout the country. Volunteers from Lucent Technologies and eBay are providing computers and Internet access for a school and an entire community in rural Guatemala. To build ties between non-governmental organizations and business and foster innovative uses of technology within civil society, Ericsson's Internet Community Awards (ERICA) Program runs a worldwide competition to select the best ideas for Web sites designed to serve social purposes. Winners each receive $100,000 in Web development services. The ERICA 2000 winners were announced at the Creating Digital Dividends conference in Seattle and included the Fiji School of Medicine, which will build a Web-based telehealth network; an Atlanta-based group, Pathways Community Network, that assists the homeless and will equip its outreach teams with mobile access to shelter information; and the Gould League, an Australian conservation group that plans an online learning simulation to promote citizen education. Additional winners were a project to link up and help math teachers in rural South Africa, and the U.S. National Down Syndrome Society. An additional prize, chosen by the public through online voting, was awarded to Alley Cat Allies, which works to reduce the estimated 60 million stray and wild cat population through sterilization programs. To help minorities and low income families gain access to the Internet, 3Com's Urban Challenge Program provides networking equipment and consulting services to 10 U.S. cities, including Baltimore, Maryland, and Glasgow, Kentucky. Grants to 10 additional cities will be announced in January 2001. Glasgow, for example, is building a citywide network to link all residents to public schools and city services. In New Orleans, 3Com is helping install computer kiosks throughout the city that will link students who have dropped out of school to training and employment opportunities. The Urban Challenge program builds on successful earlier efforts in Boston and San Jose. Helping minority groups to build Internet-based "tech centers" in cities is the goal of an AT&T effort. Working with the National Urban League and the NAACP, the company is supporting neighborhood centers in seven cities with high minority populations. The centers provide online training for children, parents, and guardians as well as a place for children to go after school. A similar effort by SBC Communications will help the NAACP upgrade its own national information network that links its headquarters and seven regional offices. The organization hopes to offer online services to its more than half-million members, helping to close the gap in the availability of such services to minorities. A Global Reach Could the Internet someday link all of humanity into a global family? Something like that vision underlies the Planet Project, an Internet-based poll of millions of people from all over the world. Launched by 3Com in November 2000, with the help of many other companies, the project combined technologies in novel ways to capture a portrait of the human condition across geographic and cultural differences. The project also sent thousands of volunteers to remote locations to include people who are not yet linked to the Internet. The results of the poll are available in eight languages at www.planetproject.com.
The Netaid project takes a similar global stance, using the power of the Internet to tackle global poverty. Based on an unprecedented partnership between the United Nations and Cisco Systems, it enables Internet users to become directly involved in causes they care about, track donations to specific projects, and see the difference they make. The project guarantees that every dollar donated reaches the intended recipients. Visitors to www.Netaid.org can give money, volunteer a few hours of their time, or help enlist others.
Launched with rock concerts broadcast over the Net, Netaid now supports youth projects, provides materials needed for children to develop basic learning skills, and gives expectant mothers safer birthing kits. In Peru, for example, where half the population lives in poverty and nearly one in four children leaves school before the fifth grade, Netaid is channeling support to help reduce the dropout rate. The "Two for One" project is coordinated through the Peruvian Ministry of Education and UNICEF. The project selects children at the bottom of their class, typically from families in poor communities that have little or no education. These children often have no exposure to reading materials, so the project helps these first and second graders develop the basic skills needed to read and write by teaming at-risk children with high school teens who give them individualized attention and encouragement. The children gain skills and self-confidence, while the teenage mentors develop leadership skills -- hence the "Two for One" name. Groups of eight children and three teen mentors meet weekly for two months to play educational games and research topics of common interest. The results include higher scores in standardized tests and lower dropout rates. Netaid support, provided by thousands of individual donors, gives critically needed supplies and training for the project, which hopes to reach 16,000 children by the end of December 2000. Microsoft's International Community Affairs Program also has a global reach, providing $21 million in support in 67 countries over the past year. To support learning through technology, the company has opened 500 new computer centers over the past year in schools, orphanages, community centers and libraries, in partnership with local organizations in dozens of countries from Malaysia to Ecuador. Additionally, the company helps train laid-off workers in China, inmates of juvenile reformatories in South Korea, and disabled people in the Czech Republic in IT skills that can create employment opportunities. Microsoft also supports disaster relief efforts through refugee registration kits and databases to help reunite families. To help field test new IT-based development ideas, the World Bank's Information for Development Program manages a global effort to pool public and private sector resources in support of innovative projects. Working with Motorola and other companies, the program has provided grants to more than 90 projects in all regions of the world. Projects have ranged from a computerized mobile bank in Ghana to computer training for poor women in India to creating an information network linking women's groups across Africa. Motorola also fosters digital entrepreneurship among Latin American business students in partnership with over 60 universities, through its Mission XXI program.
Empowering Employees Some of Corporate America's most imaginative efforts to bridge the digital divide have come from main-line manufacturing or transportation companies. Ford and Delta Air Lines generated headlines and delighted their employees when they announced commitments to provide their workers with personal computers and low-cost access to the Internet. Ford, for example, will give every one of its 350,000 employees worldwide a home computer, color printer, and unlimited Internet access for $5 per month. The monthly fee will be lower in developing parts of the world. Ford hopes to boost the computer literacy of its workforce, help workers become savvier about the needs of their customers, and accelerate the company's push to use e-commerce in every aspect of its business. It also expects to improve the company's ability to communicate with its workers and save money in the process; an e-mail about a new benefits package with a link to the company's Web site is far cheaper than mailing a bulky package of documents. Ford CEO Jacques Nasser already sends a weekly e-mail to many of the company's workers. Delta's Wired Workforce Program will do much the same for its 72,000 employees, offering unlimited Internet access costing $12 per month. Besides home computers, the company will offer laptops to employees who travel, so they can log on from Rome, Rio de Janeiro, or almost anywhere to schedule flights, check benefits, and communicate with their families. As Delta points out, even its baggage handlers now use digital tools, so the company expects to gain from the increased computer skills of its workers. Enron, Avon, American Airlines, and The New York Times have begun similar programs.
|
