ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, March 5, 1997 TAG: 9703050075
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: DUBLIN
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
A conference that included virtual classrooms and other new educational technology led off with a virtual speaker Tuesday at New River Community College.
Gary Warren, president and chief executive officer of Unified Research Laboratories in Hampton, found his car dead when he started to drive to Dublin.
No problem. He talked by telephone to 20 people attending a conference on schools and the Internet. His visuals? They were sent by computer and downloaded at the college for display as he talked. Warren outlined how one computer connection system could link different school systems.
Jeff Young, who works with computers in the Giles school system, told the conference, "We cannot get out computers into the classrooms quickly enough." Giles is one of the localities with schools linked to the Internet. Each school in the county has a teacher overseeing its system.
The link allows students in Giles, even though it is a rural area, to get onto the information superhighway as fast as anyone anywhere, Young said. "We have students who are writing and sending e-mail to virtually anybody in the world," he said. "They're having fun, but they're learning."
The conference on linking schools to the Internet was sponsored by Columbia Pulaski Community Hospital in conjunction with the Southwest Virginia Governor's School and the community college.
The Governor's School provides computer links for the Giles schools and other localities, but is not the only institution providing computer links. Jeff Crowder, communications systems lead engineer at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, introduced participants to Net.Work.Virginia which has linked all of Virginia's community colleges, several government departments and a number of other colleges and universities.
"Virginia is the only place in the world which has built this thing under the auspices of a public-private partnership," Crowder said. "The community college [system] has committed up front to connecting all of their sites."
New River Community College was one of five pilot sites to start the program, he said. Connections range in cost from a little more than $12,000 a year to $146,676, depending on the level of technology.
John Wenrich, network director at the Southwest Virginia Governor's School, who put Tuesday's conference together, recalled stumbling on information about Burkes Garden in Tazewell County while seeking something else entirely. The information came from somewhere in Utah, he found.
"That was something that just happened," said Norm Dodl, a Virginia Tech professor emeritus, and shows one way in which teachers' learning plans will have to change in the computer age.
The teacher will not be the central director of how research progresses, he said, but computer usage must be part of teacher planning.
"I think we're going to have to face that as a reality," he said. "Because of the Internet, curriculum changes a little bit. .... There should be a lot of change in instruction."
Dodl recounted his experience in researching a paper on acid rain. He found more than 46,000 references in a computer search program, with the first documents giving him more data than he needed. "That could not have been done by the average teacher with average access to average resources."
Teachers can get a huge number of responses by floating questions on a topic on the Internet, too, he said. "There's something magic about the Internet," he said, in that people with knowledge of a subject are eager to answer questions.
A side benefit is familiar to any student who has nodded off to sleep while trying to read that last chapter in the textbook late at night. "Something about the static page in a book does that to me," he confessed. "How often have you sat in front of a computer screen searching actively and gone to sleep? ... You're wide awake because it's a challenge all the time."
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