[DDN] Poor schools, rich targets Law, software fuel new 'digital divide' using NCLB
Technology amid need http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-te.software21sep21,1,2780480,pr int.story?coll=bal-home-utility The new digital divide is on clear display in Camden, one of the poorest cities in America. Just across the Delaware River from the skyline of a rejuvenated Philadelphia, much of Camden remains a bleak grid of weed-filled vacant lots and abandoned buildings. The school system's 19,000 students are almost entirely African-American and Hispanic, and nearly all from low-income families. They've become accustomed to occasional shortages of workbooks and other supplies, with the district having faced deficits as large as $40 million in recent years. Step inside the schools' Compass Labs, though, and the atmosphere of need vanishes. Rows of gleaming Dell computers fill the labs, complete with large headsets that students use to receive audio instructions and encouragement from Compass Learning, a San Diego-based company that is owned by WRC Media and used to be called Jostens. The district's superintendent signed the $8 million, three-year deal for the software in early 2001, the same year the district agreed to a $2.6 million deal for Lightspan educational video games that run on Sony PlayStations. At the time, New Jersey, like many other states, was raising its testing standards amid the accountability movement that would culminate in the passage of No Child Left Behind. ( rest of article at URL listed above) ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
Re: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving A Semantic Web
Technical solutions attract money -- because so many still believe there *must* be a silver bullet? What if the technology world took the approach to have a three year moratorium on such things as the Semantic Web? What if they could attract the same resouces and put those resources to put in place wider - much wider - application of that which is already invented? affordable? under-used? Don't we need more soft power humans? More cyber-cafe's? More models that show concrete, tangible results? Particularly ones which were scaleable? John Hibbs http://www.bfranklin.edu/johnhibbs At 7:20 PM +0545 10/15/04, Layton Montgomery wrote: Reading through these exchanges and through the Technology Review article was my first attempt to understand what the Semantic Web really is. Personally, I can see clear value in this, both from the view of refining searches to a much higher degree than is currently possible; and from the view of being able to synthesize disparate data across web pages and computer applications. For instance, I might want to do identify conferences being held in 2005 in Nepal having something to do with the Internet. Presumably, a Semantic Web search engine would allow you to not only identify keywords or phrases, but also what type of data they are. So I would search for something like: date = 2005, country = Nepal, event = conference, and theme = Internet. Of course there would need to be a lot of fuzzy programming behind that so that the search engine would identify reasonable variations of my search terms, but search engines today already do this, so I would not see any problem in this way. Web site authoring tools would be able to create or identify the existing files which contain the types of data in the web page; for many forms of data, they might do so automatically. ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
