Life can be tough in the Canadian Maritimes. The summers are short, winters bitter, and economic conditions perpetually harsh. When the federal government says you can't fish or log anymore, and McDonald's stops buying your potatoes for french fries, Maritime job opportunities get up and go. Still, Maritimers hang onto their can-do attitude and have proven they aren't afraid of working hard and taking risks.
To a Maritimer's way of thinking, education is the key to breaking out of seemingly endless economic doldrums. An educated and highly skilled work force, so the story goes, will attract new industries, thereby providing more jobs and a higher standard of living. Education, in fact, was what took me to the Maritimes nearly 20 years ago, when I went to Prince Edward Island--the small island province across from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick--to teach school. Except for the clean-smelling locker rooms, the schoolhouse itself wasn't much different from those I'd grown up in and taught at. But for the students--many of whom attended one-room country schools the previous year--stepping into that new building was stepping into the future.
Buildings, however, are expensive to construct and maintain, not to mention hard to get to when the snow's howling off the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Consequently, the province of New Brunswick has launched TeleEducation NB, a project aimed at delivering education via information technology. But TeleEducation, also known as the "New Brunswick Distance Education Network," is more than the high-tech information-highway smoke we've grown used to inhaling. TeleEducation is up and running and delivering province-wide educational services ranging from high school- and college-level classes to in-house corporate and extension training.
New Brunswick citizens have at their fingertips classes on astronomy out of Mount Allison University and health care from the University of New Brunswick. Farmers are taking animal-husbandry courses at nearby agricultural extension offices, police officers are studying law at the local hoosegow, and employees of McCain Foods are participating in training sessions from their desks. Within its first six months, TeleEducation was delivering coursework to nearly 2000 students. The ultimate goal, says project director Rory McGreal, is for 60 percent of New Brunswick's population to eventually participate in some form of distance education.
There's nothing particularly exotic about New Brunswick's network. A standard TeleEducation site is a 486 PC with a 240-Mbyte hard disk, 8 Mbytes of RAM, a low-cost digitizing tablet, and a 14,400-baud modem. On the software side, each Windows 3.1-hosted PC runs Smart Technologies' Smart 2000 conferencing system, which enables students to communicate with each another in real time, sharing graphics, text, and images. In a typical scenario, the student dials the TeleEducation modem bridge (a 486/66 PC with multiple modems attached) and begins communicating in peer-to-peer fashion with teachers and fellow students over the province-wide digital fiber-optic network. This communication consists of receiving, annotating, and sending electronic worksheets, or even launching applications. In the near future, the project will move to TCP/IP and communicate over the Internet, bringing every school in the province online. Eventually, the network will provide one-stop shopping for government and private-sector services--driver's licenses, health-care information, water and electric bills, and the like--via kiosks or home PCs.
But projects like TeleEducation need more than hardware and software to work. They require vision, leadership, clearly stated goals, and purpose--all present in the New Brunswick project.
The fundamental principles that define TeleEducation are that it be open, available, and affordable to all citizens. As stated in its strategic plan, "the network forms part of the province's strategic agenda for supporting local entrepreneurship in the knowledge industries and achieving economic independence by raising the general level of education of the province_. In this manner, the government hopes to promote the spirit of self-reliance and entrepreneurship."
To turn this vision into reality, New Brunswick has created the Ministry for the Electronic Information Highway. Reporting to the Minister of Economic Development, this new department is charged with promoting the development of the information highway by making government a model user, while at the same time encouraging private-sector involvement.
Clearly, U.S. high-tech interests could learn from New Brunswick. Most of what we've heard are vague generalities and promises; most of what we've seen are demonstrations of what someday might be. From radio and TV commercials that redefine the information highway to their particular advantage to Rush Limbaugh labeling it as a liberal plot, everyone is talking about the information highway, but no one is doing much about it--except for the likes of New Brunswick. The technology is here now. What's missing is the vision, leadership, and commitment to use that technology to create a better society. Until we find these, the information superhighway will likely remain nothing more than a back alley.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
Copyright © 1994, Dr. Dobb's Journal