I AM SHARING AN IMAGE that includes some people who never connected to the internet because they represent a constituency I want to represent in Ireland's Knowledge Society.
The adults in the photo had life sorted. They had the essential things like heat, electricity, and food as part of their routines. They didn't check in, tweet or even read Facebook wall posts. They didn't need the burden of a computer (although an iPad might do just fine) and as pensioners, they wanted to avoid the recurring expense of an internet connection.
But in the 50-year-old home, there's music from a radio, a satellite television connection and CD players in the kitchen and car. There connection points for MP3 players and mobile phone audio.
I think about these things because I have third level students who try to follow online course notes while in bedsits without broadband. This happened to us while in our rental house. I reckon fewer than 500,000 Irish today cannot get high-speed internet access today because hundreds more free wifi nodes bring the internet to kitchen table tops. But that still leaves a big cohort in Ireland without access to a bountiful landscape of internet choice.
Getting people connected means giving them a more productive lifestyle. Bringing a window of our Irish life to my Pennsylvania mother would mean more smiles in her life. It's something I've talked about to four brothers who could wire up the house as an open wifi node, connecting three generations in eleven distinct locations across eight time zones.
There's also the issue of just making audio CDs for mom (the great grandmother) to play in her kitchen. I listen to MP3s on an old iPod and also rewind interviews on my Sony digital dictaphone. Some of that audio is special family moments. I also have podcasts, open mic sessions from college sessions and student showreels. I have enough new audio every day to fill every waking minute away from the office. I have at least 20 GB of audio content that has never been edited and shared. That has to change.
I also want to change the listening habits of college students who are taking the four different modules I teach at LIT-Clonmel. I would like to discover that some of my students subscribe to the audio feeds of my blog or to the main podcast page.
There's also a long-standing to-do item of making audio CDs, MP3 playlists and downloadable audio content that might enter circulation through our campus libraries. If we did it right, local people with CD players in their cars could listen to a mash-up of podcasts and lecture materials without needing to get a computer. This is a vision for access to education I've long maintained. With a little post-production, our academic programme could deliver a broadband experience to people without the need for either a computer or an internet connection. I developed correspondence materials like this before while working for an accredited home study programme in the early 90s. What worked then works for me today in my broadband-challenged world. I think it should work for students and adult learners who live in the same disconnected world. And the underlying technology would bring a lot of joy to mom in the photo, to her grandchild and to her great grandchildren.
