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Whether rural communities flourish in coming
decades or become increasingly isolated may depend, in part, on how they
exploit new information technology. Such is the belief of many rural community
development experts and the reason behind a new proposal between NCSA
and the agriculture community.
"How will rural America fare in the Information Age?" asks Scott Lathrop
from the Education Division at NCSA, the Alliance's leading-edge site.
"Will people telecommute and explore data resources using GIS technology?
Will teachers use technology like collaboration tools or VR in education
so that rural schools offer the same quality of education found in larger
cities? This group is [at NCSA] to help define the needs and determine
how to make communications technology benefit their communities."
The group Lathrop was referring to consists of 70 rural community development
experts who recently visited NCSA for a hands-on introduction to everything
from online discussion tools to virtual reality. Their visit was part
of a planning grant funded by the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA)
Fund for Rural America (FRA)
and organized by the Laboratory
for Community and Economic Development (LCED) in the College of Agricultural,
Consumer, and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). ACES is partnering with the 12-state North Central Regional
Center for Rural Development (NCRCRD) at Iowa State University and
ADEC, a national consortium of state universities and landgrant institutions
that provides distance education programs and services. These institutions
are proposing to establish a four-year partnership that will help rural
communities throughout the Midwest, particularly in Illinois, use information
technology to strengthen the economic, environmental, and social fabric
of their communities.
"We're trying to bring advanced technology to an area of economic development
that has not seen this kind of thing before," says Cornelia Flora, director
of NCRCRD who, along with LCED's John van Es and NCSA's Scott Lathrop,
is a principal investigator for the proposal.
The major obstacles to economic development in rural communities are
distance and dispersion, says Flora. People are far from information and
opportunity as well as from each other. The new center hopes to shrink
these geographic barriers through practical applications of information
technology, especially networking and distance education tools being developed
by the Alliance, that bring people together electronically. The applications
may be as straightforward as virtual town meetings or as complex as long-range
medical diagnosis. The goal is not to replace existing social networks
but to strengthen and build new ones.
"We don't want to just get the technology out there--we also want to
evaluate how it is used and how it can be better applied," continues Flora.
"Our emphasis will be on networking technology that will help people take
control of their future."
Rural America is undergoing wrenching change.
The population in most areas is declining as farm size increases and overall
employment opportunities decrease. As people move away, the ability of
a smaller population to support good schools and healthcare services also
declines. Exacerbating this long-term demographic trend, is a recent downsizing
of federal programs that is forcing agriculture to switch from a government-subsidized
system to a free market. Subsidies for commodity crops such as wheat,
corn, and soybeans are being eliminated. Life will become riskier for
farmers no longer guaranteed minimum prices and markets for their crops.
The stability of rural communities heavily dependent on government programs
will also become less certain.
Within this context of change, the Fund for Rural America is a mechanism
for radical shift," says Flora. "We are expected to do something big,
fast."
With only four years in which to achieve tangible improvements in rural
communities, the approach the CRCD team is advocating will leverage existing
human networks and technologies to develop models that can be tested,
evaluated, and customized for other communities. These processes and models
should, in turn, take on a life of their own. The idea, says Flora, "is
not to create a permanent center but to establish processes and models
that will be sustainable."
The approach also is three-tiered to account for the discrepancies in
infrastructure. "We have a partner in North Dakota representing an Indian
Reservation who said many communities there still lack telephones," said
Ben Mueller, an Extension Specialist in community development at UIUC
and the director of the proposed new center. For communities with no Internet
access, they will first provide information on getting connected, then
encourage the use of communications tools like email and Web browsers.
There will be other models for those "middle ground communities" with
basic Internet setups and for "high-end communities," which already have
high-speed access and sufficient computing equipment. These latter groups
are less concerned with access than with the quality of information.
In focus studies by Mueller's group, community representatives said there
is plenty of information on the Internet, "but it is not always available
in ways that are useful or accessible to them." For instance, some communities
want to provide current demographic and economic data to businesses interested
in locating in their area but they lack the resources to do so. The FRA
partnership can help these communities form a Web-based collaboratory
for sharing information and ideas. Some of the technology the center
hopes to incorporate into its models is being tested during the proposal
process. The team members planned portions of the proposal on asynchronous
and synchronous discussion forums. Also, the visitors to NCSA who were
community representatives recruited by the CRCD team for grassroots inputs
will use similar technology for submitting feedback. The team has set
up online roundtables on the Web.
Big changes are already underway.
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