Lodis Rhodes: Building a Civic Network: The Austin Access Model
Three Exclamations - Lessons from a Small Experiment in Austin
(excerpts from findings and observations of LBJ School PRP research teams)
Lodis Rhodes
Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs
University of Texas at Austin
AbstractA major barrier to equitable access is lack of appropriate educational settings and effective teaching approaches. Appropriate settings foster informal, incidental learning. Effective teaching rests on two essentials: a trusting relationships between teacher and learner and engaging, relevant content. Setting and effective teaching are also keys to building sustainable civic networks. The partners developing the Austin Access Model, an approach to equitable access, view computer technology as a necessary but secondary factor in building and enhancing neighborhood level civic networks. Austin Free-Net and its model of equitable access has quickly gained standing in our local community. How did it happen ? What is being done to capitalize on the attention and turn it to building technical and civic networks which survive over an extended period of time?
This paper has two goals. One is to outline the strategies used, cite lessons learned, and describe a simple web-based tool which ordinary citizens can use to create content about their own neighborhoods and post it to the World Wide Web. The second is to identify the political, economic, and social factors which merged to create the free-net initiative in Austin.
LISTENING
"I can do it! I can do it!"
"Look! I Look! Come see this!"
"There ought to be a way!"
To set the stage for the Austin Access Model, I want to share a two tidbits of radical common sense. First, teaching is mostly listening and learning is mostly telling. Second, social capital is the interest, even the intrusiveness, of one adult in the activities of someone else's child. While I'd like to claim the wisdom as my own, the first tidbit is the theme line in Deborah Meier's book, The Power of Their Ideas. The second is the sociologist James Coleman's definition of social capital. These bits of wisdom are at the core of the Austin Learning Academy's (ALA) programming philosophy. ALA's philosophy, in turn, is the heart of the Austin Free-Nets training approach.
The three exclamations I start with are important lessons on listening. The objective in listening is to actually hear what learners want in from their learning experiences. Each exclamation is a story. Each story captures a telling experience of an ordinary citizen who had just been introduced to the expansive capacities of the Internet. Taken together, the stories teach important lessons about building effective community networks.
What are the themes in the stories? What should we learn from the lessons?
The recurring theme in each lesson is "choice and control." The concept of choice and control as a basic freedom must be present in real and virtual communities. The exclamations describe the challenges of fostering civic culture by making equitable high speed public access to the Internet a reality.
Here, then, are the lessons from the small experiment going on now in Austin.
"I can do it! I can do it!"
At 10:00AM the doors opened to the 'Nothin' But Free-Net' show-and-tell event. The event was staged at a public housing development one cold, wet Saturday in November, 1995. It attracted over 250 neighborhood residents, many of whom were participants in family learning programs operated by the Austin Learning Academy.
All of the kids and adults seemed to start off with the same question: "What can I do on the Internet?" We replied, "What do you want to do?" The children asked for games, information about their favorite sports teams and musical groups; the adults wanted to find information about job opportunities and read a newspaper from their home country in South America. With a little bit of coaching to get them started, they all found what they were looking for. They did not stop there, they kept exploring, talking to each other across the table and across the room about the new things they were discovering. Before too long, even the most reticent participants were engaged and excited.
There are a lot of reasons for their reaction: the novelty of having computers available, the satisfaction of their curiosity about the much-hyped Internet, the sheer scope and breadth of the resources available through it. But we think the most basic and powerful sources of their excitement were 'choice and control' and the opportunity to share with others what they were learning.. The Internet offered them a wide range of choices, and gave them control to go straight to the resources of their choice. These are values that transcend technology: people want options and the power to exercise them. This is in many respects the very basis of freedom. They are certainly qualities we prize in our most valued relationships.
Choice and control are two dimensions of liberty: choice refers to the right of citizens to exercise their liberties with judgment and due concern for the rights and well-being of others and of society; control refers to the means or the tools that citizens need to exercise choice. In the context of information technology, choice refers to users' right to decide what information and services (or content) are relevant and valuable to them; control refers to their ability to access any such content, as well as their ability not to access content that they find harmful or damaging.
These principles apply to content that users create as well as content that they access or use, the place where they come to use technology as well as the technical platform. Users should be able to exercise choice in what content they can develop for dissemination over a universal network, and control over how that content is produced, presented, and made available to other users.
"Look! Look! Come see this."
One of the early participants in our project, Yolonda Thomas, has translated her training on how to use the Internet into a new career. She begin building her technical skills by traveling - taking virtual tours to distant places. As she explored more, Yolonda was anxious to share with others her new adventures and guide them to new places. We often heard 'look, look, come see this.' It was a call to sit and explore together. In other words, it was a call to exhibit and to share with and teach others.
Yolonda received technical training through the Austin Learning Academy's (ALA) Family Learning Center during the time she was a volunteer in ALA's AmeriCorp program. In addition to her technical training, Yolonda says, her exposure to the Web expanded her horizons and made her aware of opportunities she had never known existed. She credits this exposure with helping her land a job in the City government and leave public housing to move to a better neighborhood.
Why was Yolonda's experience so successful? She credits both the quality and quantity of training that she received from ALA, and the fact that she was trained in a community location that was already known to her-a comfortable, familiar environment. The Learning Center already served as the focal point for a variety of education and family support activities in her community; when the public access site was created there, it fit naturally into the Center's mission, atmosphere and dynamic.
These pilot public access sites, particularly the library sites receive heavy use; but all are in dire need of more on-site training and assistance for users. This shortage of on-site assistance makes it much more difficult for someone like Yolonda to develop the competence and skill to extend their initial interests beyond retrieving information to creating it. That access and assistance needs to be available in the learning environment like those found at ALA's Family Learning Center.
The most significant barrier to meaningful choice and control among the people we've worked with is lack of training to help them learn what content is available, how they can access it, and how they can produce their own content to meet the needs of their community and their neighbors. This issue goes beyond learning how to use Web browsers or write an HTML program to develop information literacy. Information literacy is
To use the Internet effectively-or simply to become productive citizens in an information-driven economy and society-users must possess these skills. No organization structures or sophisticated screening tools can effectively substitute for individual responsibility and aptitude.
Most users of the Internet are well-educated, relatively affluent, and had developed a measure of information literacy before they encountered the Internet. New users from low-income communities rarely enjoy this advantage. Most come from low-quality schools, have comparatively low educational attainment, and have work histories in fields that don't require very much information literacy. The need for this type of literacy is especially acute for this population.
What our community partners have taught us: We have found a strong demand for training that people can use in community settings that are convenient and comfortable for them. In planning meetings with our community partners, the most frequently cited need is for a comprehensive training site in East Austin. Our partners believe that such a facility could promote ongoing public access efforts by (1) giving people inside the community a single place to turn for help in achieving information literacy, (2) giving volunteers and donors outside of the community one place to focus their efforts to improve information literacy on East Austin, and (3) producing information-literate East Side residents who can share their skills with others, building the capacity of the whole community to capitalize on the information economy.
The primary responsibility for providing this kind of training resides with community organizations: they have the locations, the existing relationships with people in the community, and the responsiveness to the particular needs of their neighborhoods. Both government and businesses should support training efforts by such organizations by providing funding, in-kind assistance, and technical support.
The first major project of this partnership would be establishing a comprehensive community networking center, charged with the following tasks:
The call to look is really a call to share and to teach a skill one has mastered. Yolonda learned a good bit about the technology and the Internet without ever enrolling in a training course. While the experiences which led here to new insights about the technology occurred in a deliberately structured and managed learning environment, I doubt that Yolonda ever felt that she was enrolled in a course and was being taught. All of these things were occurring but in significantly unobtrusive ways.
We have transformed these early lessons about choice and control into one of the pillars of our access strategy. Blend the community training center approach which characterizes some community networks with the strategy of providing low-cost, high speed access to the Internet used by other community networks. We've done our blending by defining equitable access as access in public spaces and for citizens who do not have computers at home. We've also defined it as technology and appropriate training. We "educate" by capturing teachable moments. That is, our curriculum stresses informal, incidental learning in natural settings.
"...There ought to be some way ..."
We met one new user at the Carver Library public access site. Formerly homeless and currently a volunteer for a local homeless shelter, this man was searching for information about Christian faith-based programs for the homeless. In his first encounter with the Web a few days before our encounter, he had performed a keyword search through one of the major search engines and came across a reference to a program in California. When he performed the same search on his second encounter with the Web, the reference did not appear. One of our class members spent about 30 minutes trying to help the man locate the reference by further tailoring the keyword search. But while the search turned up several other potentially relevant URLs, they failed to locate the desired reference. The man observed that a reliance on keyword searches is both a strength and a weakness of the Web: while he was frustrated by his inability to track down the information he originally sought, he was glad to have browsed through some Web sites that he may otherwise never have seen. Still, he concluded, "It seems like there ought to be some way to pull all those things (i.e., URLs related to faith-based programs for the homeless) together somewhere."
Background: The World Wide Web is rapidly evolving into the predominant interface with the Internet. Through Web browsers like Netscape and Mosaic, users can locate, view, and download text and graphical documents designed for the Web; download text, graphics, video, multimedia, and other types of materials stored in gopher and file transfer protocol (FTP) formats; participate in Usenet resources such as newsgroups; and send electronic mail. Yet for all of these capabilities, the Web is simple to use and is based on a straightforward, text based set of codes called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). However, it still lacks organizational features which would make it easier to find and re-find information.
The exclamation also tells us something more about new users. They quickly turn to figuring out new ways to use the technology. They begin to think of creative uses. What they need at this point are places to work with others to pursue their creative impulses.
An interesting sidebar on 'there ought to be some way' story is this Austin Free-Net volunteer who was introduced to the Internet through an Austin Free-Net station has filed to run for mayor in the upcoming city election.
We met one new user at the Carver Library public access site. Formerly homeless and currently a volunteer for a local homeless shelter, this man was searching for information about Christian faith-based programs for the homeless. In his first encounter with the Web a few days before our encounter, he had performed a keyword search through one of the major search engines and came across a reference to a program in California. When he performed the same search on his second encounter with the Web, the reference did not appear. One of our class members spent about 30 minutes trying to help the man locate the reference by further tailoring the keyword search. But while the search turned up several other potentially relevant URLs, they failed to locate the desired reference. The man observed that a reliance on keyword searches is both a strength and a weakness of the Web: while he was frustrated by his inability to track down the information he originally sought, he was glad to have browsed through some Web sites that he may otherwise never have seen. Still, he concluded, "It seems like there ought to be some way to pull all those things (i.e., URLs related to faith-based programs for the homeless) together somewhere."
Background: The World Wide Web is rapidly evolving into the predominant interface with the Internet. Through Web browsers like Netscape and Mosaic, users can locate, view, and download text and graphical documents designed for the Web; download text, graphics, video, multimedia, and other types of materials stored in gopher and file transfer protocol (FTP) formats; participate in Usenet resources such as newsgroups; and send electronic mail. Yet for all of these capabilities, the Web is simple to use and is based on a straightforward, text based set of codes called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). However, it still lacks organizational features which would make it easier to find and re-find information.
The exclamation also tells us something more about new users. They quickly turn to figuring out new ways to use the technology. They begin to think of creative uses. What they need at this point are places to work with others to pursue their creative impulses.
An interesting sidebar on 'there ought to be some way' story is this Austin Free-Net volunteer who was introduced to the Internet through an Austin Free-Net station has filed to run for mayor in the upcoming city election.
The Lesson in the Exclamations: Choice & Control
At the center of each story of a new user of the Internet is the issue of choice and control. Choice and control as values apply to all users of information technology. This includes individuals and communities. As individuals we want and expect the 'freedom to choose'. Being free to choose means having real options and controlling the decision to select an option. Communities should be able to exercise the same choice and control as individuals and businesses. This concept is the core principle of the Austin Access Model. It also accounts for our decision to focus on real neighborhoods as the measuring stick for equitable access. That is, we are interested in individuals and their social networks as the building blocks of a neighborhood's civic culture. Information technologies are significant in the Austin Access Model to the degree they are woven into the social networks of neighborhoods.
The dimensions of information technology over which users should be able to exercise choice and control include:
Though obvious, we learned that online access to content on the web needs to be organized more coherently. Novice users of the Internet and World Wide Web are uniformly impressed by the scope and value of information available through the medium, but they are quickly frustrated with the limited tools available to help them find the information they need. A few examples illustrate their frustrations:
Conversations with other new users at the public access site in libraries revealed a sense of being short-changed among some users. The library, seeking to avoid long waiting lists for the access station, imposes a 30 minute time limit for each user. We encountered several users, including some with considerable experience, who reported numerous occasions on which they had used their entire 30 minutes without performing even one successful information search. This should, of course, dictate that the library extend the time limit on the access station; but on a broader level, the fact that experienced users could spend this much time searching the Web with no success clearly illustrates a barrier to choice and control.
At "Nothin' But Free-Net", our public event in November 1995, a child asked one volunteer to help her find games that she could play online. The volunteer used a search engine to search for "games interactive"; the first 10 URLs returned were adult-oriented pages that appeared to contain strong sexual content. Those who were watching (four children and two adults) laughed when they saw how the search turned up information so wildly different from what was intended. One of the adults remarked, "I guess you never know what you'll turn up, huh?"
The difficulty of locating relevant information online presents not just an inconvenience, but a barrier to achieving the goal of real universal access. User-directed searches and user-assembled indexes are and should continue to be essential tools for locating content over large electronic networks like the Internet. But as more and more types of content emerge on such networks, and as the diversity of users, interests, and needs increase, it will become less and less effective to continue to rely on these tools alone.
Our programming approach puts the responsibility on the individual to become information literate. Even the best-designed search tools and protocols for organizing information can not substitute for users who know what information they're looking for and where to look for it. Community organizations, government, and business should support the efforts of individuals to develop information literacy. This means supporting community networking initiatives and training programs. Secondly, there is a need for software that allows casual users of public access to store on diskettes e-mail addresses, URLs, FTP sites, or other information they want to record. This would allow people to bring in a floppy disk with an organized directory of Internet resources, and then just double-click on a particular item and have it launch the appropriate program. For those facing restricted lengths of computer use at public access sites, a disk like this could save them immense amounts of time.
Based on these experiences, our development team is designing an experimental website which could be used for several purposes. It is an easy-to-use piece of software. Ordinary folks can quickly learn to use it (the site) to create content about themselves and their neighborhoods and then post it to the World Wide Web. The website should be structured as a database with data organized in ways that ordinary folks think about or look for information. The website also should be a window through which ordinary folks can literally see themselves, their neighborhoods, and their interests in useful ways. AFN-Neighbor is the website which Austin Learning Academy is developing jointly with a research team from the LBJ School of Public Affairs. One can consider AFN-Neighbor is a web publishing system. It can be used by those with little or no computer training or knowledge of html. One can also consider AFN-Neighbor a database of community information which is directly generated and maintained by neighborhood residents, community organizations, voluntary associations.
TIMING AND STRATEGIC ALLIANCES
Success rests on preparation and luck. The partners building the Austin Access Model are well-prepared. However, we have been very lucky. By lucky I mean that our work has benefited from the timely convergence of several events. While space will not allow me to fully develop the significance of each, I want to list them. If time permits, we can discuss the importance of each event and their cumulative positive impact on equitable access and the Austin Access Model.