Ohio Digital Divide Working Group

A coalition of community technology advocates, public interest organizations and educators have formed the Ohio Digital Divide Working Group to put the issues of broadband infrastructure and access into the political conversation this election year. The group has met with staff of gubenatorial candidates and was a major influence on the broadband goals proposed by Democratic Candidate Ted Strickland. Dubbed the "Ohio NextGen Network" Strickland proposes using unused optic fiber set aside for Ohio's research universities to connect rural communities to high speed internet. His plan also includes $5 million in funding for community technology centers, community centers where citizens can find internet access, computer skills training, and often adult education and GED preparation classes.

I'll affirm once again, as I did earlier, Educators need to be advocating for their interests in telecom policy. Ohio has over 40,000 distance learning enrollments through public colleges and universities. So when I think of broadband access, I think of access to learning environments, access to multimedia learning material, and online student-teacher and student-student collaboration. As an instructional technologist, I see emerging many powerful learning technologies that cannot be fully realized without robust broadband connections.

Social and economic forces are driving colleges to deliver more online instruction. Students want it because the learning is meaningful and convenient to their busy lives. A rapidly changing global economy demands that we all be lifelong learners able to access knowledge anytime and anywhere to either solve problems or keep our skills current. Cash-strapped colleges save infrastructure costs by delivering instruction on-line.

When citizens lack broadband access, or have prohibitively expensive broadband access, we inhibit our education, and we weaken our state's economic competitiveness and quality of life. Likewise, if educational content does not have equal network priority with commercial content, we hurt Ohioan's ability to learn.

We need to ensure Ohioans have open and affordable high speed broadband access in their households and in public spaces. And where the market fails to serve all citizens adequately, government must be free to act to achieve these goals for its citizens.

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