Vision of the ICN

Perhaps in the knowledge needed to pass a test to earn a degree to get a job. Maybe in the skills needed to acquire a certificate to get a promotion. Possibly in the information needed to answer a question, write a report, present a proposal, fix a problem, settle a dispute, understand an issue . . . or simply learn something new. More and more, personal growth, professional achievement, workplace advancement, and economic security depend on knowing and learning. Increasingly, success depends on being smart. Being smart means being connected to knowledge, to information, to the tools for learning. At the threshold of a new century, Illinois is on the doorstep of a learning revolution that will propel economic growth for individuals to get jobs, for business to be competitive, and for states to be prosperous. Whether Illinois becomes a leader in this emerging world of educational innovation depends largely on the willingness to deploy the technology to make learning available virtually anytime, anywhere.

The Illinois Century Network is that technology.

The network will be a vast and powerful telecommunications river flowing throughout Illinois, with tributaries to colleges and universities, public schools, libraries, museums, businesses, and homes. It will bring education to students, training to workers, and counsel to people in business, government, agriculture, health care, and a variety of other fields. The Illinois Century Network, or ICN, will be a telecommunications pipeline sufficiently big, fast, and reliable to transform education and hence fuel economic success for Illinois and its citizens in the next century.

The value of the ICN is its capacity to meet a network of needs, all sharing the common thread of education. It will expand access to education and unleash creativity in the classroom. It will unite a galaxy of emerging education networks in Illinois into a community of learners throughout the state. It will position Illinois at the head of the states in competing in a global economy increasingly trafficking in information and technology.

Who needs the Illinois Century Network? Everyone with something to learn.

Foremost, the ICN will be a learning network,

able to harness the teaching potential of a vast array of skilled, knowledgeable resources throughout the state and the world an indispensable tool for success in the classroom and workplace.

Take, for example, Michael Dickson, the executive director of the Center for the Application of Information Technologies at Western Illinois University. Mike logs on to the Internet from his office, and in a blink he is inside the Shedd Aquarium along the Chicago lakefront. With skillful manipulation of his mouse, Mike navigates through a virtual tour of the Shedd Aquarium, enters a room with a collection of artifacts on a table, moves in for a closer look, reaches out and picks up a shark's jaw, holds it up, turns it around, views it from top and bottom and sideways, much like a student in a biology lab might do if there was a shark's jaw on hand in the classroom. On the computer screen, next to the picture is a written explanation with clickable links to related resources. Says Dickson: "For a student, say, in Christopher, Illinois, who is six hours from Chicago, this lets him look at something he would not otherwise be able to see."

Or take Jim Victory, history teacher at the Illinois Math and Science Academy in Aurora, who sends students in his American Studies class not just across the nation in search of resources, but across time. From their classroom, students studying, say, modern race relations can reach out through the World Wide Web to discover such valuable historical documents as the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 speech on "Lincoln and the Race Problem"; Thomas Jefferson's treatise, "Commerce between Master and Slave"; Frederick Douglass' 1852 speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"; Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and a host of others. Using technology as a tool, students enrich their education with an extensive supply of resources that add both depth and breadth to their classroom lessons.

Or take an engineer for Caterpillar Tractor Co. connected via computer networks to the CAVE at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The CAVE is a virtual reality environment that simulates conditions or objects, helping, for example, a meteorologist to go inside clouds to study storm formation or a biologist to go underwater to examine the effects of pollution on fish egg migrations. When a Caterpillar engineer, located in the Far East, saw a simulation of a design for the company's new earth-moving equipment, he noted the bumper appeared to be too low to accommodate soil conditions in Bangladesh. The observation, made from half a world away, averted a potentially costly engineering mistake. Or take Darrel L. Good, a professor and Cooperative Extension economist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Good is among the experts at Cyberfarmer, an online service operated by the University of Illinois, where farmers can turn for, in Professor Good's case, authoritative information and advice on grain markets, price analysis, and the supply and demand outlook for corn, soybeans, and wheat. A soybean farmer worried about, say, charcoal rot symptoms can tune into Cyberfarmer for an explanation of the disease, a picture of it, and advice on what to do about it. A hog farmer wondering how much elbow room a hog needs would learn from Cyberfarmer to give each pig weighing between 125 and 260 pounds 8 square feet of space. There is advice on soil conditions, studies of fertilizer, seeds, production methods, yield maps, even on barnyard pets. It is a tool almost as valuable as a tractor.

The ICN will be a:

• Teaching network, allowing colleges and universities to share the expertise of their faculty with students, businesses, farmers, health professionals, and others in an efficient, timely, and cost-effective way.
  
  

• Knowledge network, opening up to students vast reservoirs of knowledge at libraries, museums, art galleries, research centers, governmental agencies, and others.
  
  
• Training network, helping workers to upgrade their skills, assisting industry in targeting education to particular needs, and sharing the most up-to-date information, techniques, and technology.

It's 11 a.m.

and Nancy Leigh clips on her microphone, smiles to a camera, and 75 high school students in 13 states take pencils in hand and set about mastering polynomial, exponential, logarithmic, and trigonometric functions; in other words, college calculus. Nancy teaches her Advanced Placement calculus course from a studio at Western Illinois University, and it is now available free to any Illinois student. This is not just a significant opportunity for students but an exceptional bargain for small, rural school districts where the need and resources for advanced mathematics may make hiring an advanced mathematics teacher prohibitively expensive. The hitch is that students must have a satellite downlink to plug into Nancy Leigh's calculus course. The Illinois Century Network will make her course available to Illinois students everywhere. Free.

At a time when success in the classroom, in college, and in the workplace increasingly depends on access to high-quality knowledge and information, the Illinois Century Network will make education resources ubiquitous. The ICN can help narrow the gap in educational opportunity between haves and have-nots. For example, the Network can expand not only the reach of Nancy Leigh's AP calculus courses, it can bring other advanced courses physics, college English, Japanese into classrooms in every nook of Illinois. Notes Michael Dickson: "This is the newest utility to access information."

One of the Illinois Century Network's principal virtues is its unique ability to increase access by consolidating the resources of all centers of learning in Illinois (and beyond) for the benefit of all Illinois citizens. It is like a Mall of America, multiplied a thousand-fold and filled with knowledge instead of consumer goods. And it will be available not just to those who can travel to it, but to everyone from preschool to grad school, from Chicago to Cairo, from the workplace to the living room.

The Network expands educational opportunity through what David Barr, the director of technology at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, describes as the "multiplier effect." A statewide telecommunications pipeline with the power and reach of the Illinois Century Network multiplies:

• Who is taught. The Network can make learning available to nontraditional students whose jobs, family responsibilities, physical disabilities, or other circumstances limit their educational options.
  
  
• What is taught. The Network will open up the traditional offerings of schools, colleges, and universities to more students, like Nancy Leigh's calculus course. It also will make new sorts of offerings available, a virtual visit a distant museum, gallery, or library; a computer simulation of natural phenomena or mechanical devices or human endeavors from the University of Illinois' supercomputer; pictures from the Hubble Telescope; rare historical documents; court decisions and legal resources; the list is endless.
  
  
• How teachers teach. Face to face is the traditional way; the Network expands the how to include layers of links probing the depth of an issue; multimedia presentations combining video, audio, and text resources; e-mail and chat rooms that enhance student participation and faculty feedback.
  
  
• Where learning happens. The Network will bring the classroom into the local library, the workplace, and the home.
  
  
• When learning occurs. The Network will redefine time, making courses available at the convenience of the learner, giving students immediate feedback from professors, allowing learners to learn at their own pace. Multiply the Who times the What times the How times . . . . The Illinois Century Network, says Barr, "can support learning as we know it to more people, in more places, in more ways, at more times." To some degree, technology already is multiplying learning. There are, right now, networks in Illinois that serve a variety of purposes and constituents - the State Board of Education's LincOn network for K-12 schools, the Department of Central Management Services' statewide telecommunications network, the Illinois State Library's network of interactive video sites around the state, the distance learning network created by the Illinois Community College Board and the Board of Higher Education, plus a collection of local and regional higher education and community networks. The Illinois Century Network can bring these disparate networks together and improve the level of service. It will give students and teachers, schools and colleges, libraries and museums, government and industry, workers and employers a whole that vastly exceeds the sum of its parts by enlarging the reach, power, and potential of technology into a dedicated, fast, and reliable learning network.

The Illinois Century Network will connect teachers, students, researchers, workers into a genuine community of learners.

Cathy Gunn is in charge of a school her father calls "Fantasy U."

There are no ivy-covered buildings, no tailgate parties, not even any parking problems. Her school is virtual, and its reach is everywhere. She is director of the Illinois Virtual Campus, a clearinghouse of courses and programs available online. The Illinois Century Network can make Fantasy U. a reality for more people, at more times, in more places. "We can operate without the Illinois Century Network," says Gunn, "but we can't reach everyone who does not now have access. The ICN gives access to the have-nots." The ICN could help Gunn reach her vision of the Virtual Campus becoming a matchmaker between the needs of business and industry for just-in-time training and the resources of colleges and universities. She believes the ICN would enable the Virtual Campus to expand beyond the student support partnerships with community colleges to include career centers, adult education schools, K-12 districts, and local libraries. Through the ICN and the Virtual Campus, citizens could gain access to an online tutorial on technical writing or a seminar in grant writing, obtain a reading list for setting up a community garden, visit a cyber-café hosted by a legislator or other public official. The Network can, says Gunn, "make the whole state of Illinois a school." Indeed, the marriage of the Illinois Century Network with the Illinois Virtual Campus would epitomize what may be the ICN's most compelling advantages: the ones we don't yet know about the ones that lie over the horizon. History teaches us that humans are savvy at taking something invented for one purpose and finding new, more useful purposes. Who, for example, would have predicted 30 years ago that the computer would become the fastest growing communications appliance in history?

The Illinois Century Network is a communications tool with the over-the-horizon potential to transform education as we know it. Unlike the Internet, which has no gates at its on-ramps, the ICN's engineering design and dedicated use will make it capable of handling huge volumes of traffic fast and reliably. The Internet seeks the path of least resistance, and thus may route a transmission from Chicago to Springfield via San Francisco, slowing it down and running the risk it may not arrive or be damaged along the way. The Illinois Century Network will have no paths of resistance, because it cannot afford to. Interrupted service in a chat room may be a small inconvenience; interruption of a distance learning lecture is an unacceptable disruption. The ICN pipeline will be big enough to handle a variety of transmissions (data, audio, and video) needed for educational applications.

The ICN will be an educational tool that will take students and workers reliant on technology to places they otherwise could not go, and do so conveniently, quickly, dependably, and economically.

Notes David Barr, of the Illinois Math-Science Academy: "Learning is the labor of the future. The Illinois Century Network won't change the world. The information on the Illinois Century Network will change the world."

In a world where learning is the future, the Illinois Century Network is the ticket to ride.

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