The most American thing
about America is the
free common school system.
Adlai E. Stevenson (1948)
The movement to build a lifelong learning community in Bloomington-Monroe County cannot fully succeed without equitable access to the computing, technology and communications resources that are the catalyst to improve educational quality, the community's overall competitiveness and ultimately the standard of living and quality of fife of each citizen.
Critical is the need to develop an infrastructure which allows citizens, government and business, and parents, teachers and learners to communicate with one another and with experts, access information in distant data bases, and transmit data from homes, schools, libraries or businesses. To accommodate all the functions for education and lifelong learning, health and social services, and business and government, a Bloomington-Monroe County Telecommunity of interlocked but independent multimedia networks provides the resources and service to support the goals of the Community Alliance for Lifelong Learning.
While no one best model exists for the use of technology in education, government agencies or the community, each access point on the Bloomington -Monroe County Telecommunity must choose, through the use of planning processes which involve all appropriate members of the community, hardware, information and instruction systems that meet strategic needs and objectives and which enhance the roles and opportunities of learners, businesses, public servants and citizens. All such decisions must be grounded in the overall vision for the community and in the fiscal realities of purchasing and of technical and maintenance support capabilities.
Bloomington-Monroe County can be a center of information technology and must learn how to use this valuable resource to personalize learning. Reconceptualizing curriculum and instruction, restructuring the organization and management of schooling, and changing and expanding the way business is practiced need to be accomplished simultaneously with -- or immediately after -- the design and implementation of the Bloomington Monroe County Telecommunity.
Staff development and training activities must focus on assisting teachers and administrators demonstrate and facilitate integrating technology into the curriculum. Administrative and organizational restructuring and the pace and complexity of curriculum, instructional, and business change are dependent upon regular and systematic technical assistance to maintain the ability to interpret and communicate information effectively.
It is important that learners and users perceive the value of the tools provided in the telecommunications environment and experience a real connection to the world outside schools.