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Guest Thinkers

Internet in a box

Internet access in developing countries can be prohibitively expensive and

cumbersome (e.g., thousands of dollars per month for speeds that often are less than dial-up).

Now imagine if someone identified a wealth of high-quality educational materials

on the Internet, downloaded them using web site ‘scraping’

software, and then made them available on an inexpensive hard drive that could

be plugged into an existing server network. All of a sudden, individuals could

access many of the incredible resources on the Web quickly, easily, and cheaply,

without consuming expensive bandwidth. Can you imagine how empowering that would

be?


The Internet

in a Box.

‘ That’s the idea behind the University of Iowa eGranary Digital Library

project, which is making web sites, books, journals, and educational software

available to universities, schools, clinics, and libraries in the developing

world. This is a pretty nifty idea (and I’m not just saying this because I’m a

U. Iowa alum). I encourage

you to check out the eGranary fact

sheet

, content

catalog

, list of

subscribers

, and other

materials

.

I wonder how this could intersect with the One Laptop per Child initiative. Also, wouldn’t it be a great school project to raise money to buy these for some institutions in other countries?


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