How the Blacksburg Electronic Village will Lead to Changes in Careers

1) Internet Now

• 20M users
• Cortney's Web Picks
• Fox's Links
• Digital Libraries (April 1995 CACM)
• National Information Infrastructure: e.g., TIIAP
• Global Information Infrastructure
• New "place" for commerce, government, education, entertainment
• Growth and guru phase

2) History of BEV

• BEV History Project
• Initial Partners: Blacksburg, Virginia Tech, Bell Atlantic
• Bell Atlantic Switch
• Assistance by: Busch Enterprises
• NSF Grants: Planning, History
• Public Library (Jan. - Aug. 1994)
  • Ran 70 workshops.
  • Trained 500 users.
  • Logged 20K Internet sessions.
• Downtown Office
• Ethernet to Schools

3) Current Status

• BEV Home Page
• 10K users (1/3 Blacksburg population directly on Internet), 51% not affiliated with university
• 20% of businesses on internet
• Users spend average of 78 minutes/day.
• 450 apartments with T-1
• 6 of K-12 schools with T-1

4) Information Literacy

4a) Tools and Skills

• email
• bulletin boards and listservs
• video conferencing: CU-SeeMe, Being There
• collaborative tools: shared files, whiteboard, applications
• FTP, fetch
• gopher
• WWW and browsers (Mosaic, Netscape, ...)

4b) Knowledge

• word processing, document processing
• electronic publishing: markup, SGML
• multimedia
• hypertext, hypermedia: navigation, writing, linking
• searching
• browsing
• interactive learning

5) Changes

• Jobs
  • Losses in many areas
  • Gains in high tech jobs
  • Retraining, lifelong learning, distance learning
• Shrinking distance barriers
  • Distance education
  • Virtual travel
  • Collaboration
  • Communities connected by networks
• Shrinking time barriers
  • Breaking credit-contact barrier in education
  • Asynchronous activities instead of synchronous
  • Time zones world-wide
  • More interactive, real-time
• Shrinking interpersonal barriers
  • People communicate before meeting
  • Less sensitivity to gender, race, age, appearance, disabilities
  • Reduced influence of education, rank
  • More learning from questioning and answering

6) Conclusions

• Shrinking world
• Shifts in jobs
• Information literacy will prepare for lifelong learning
• Remember these are tools
• Try to avoid abuses, following along lines of other technologies
• BEV is a model for what will occur around the nation and world
• Your college activities will help prepare you for the Information Age.

This page, and all contents, are
Copyright (C) 1995 by Edward A. Fox