Technology in the Classroom: AmeriCorps & Project First

Recognizing a critical education reform issue, the Public Education Network applied to the Corporation for National Service (AmeriCorps) in 1994 for a grant to improve educational access to and use of technology. The resulting initiative is Fostering Instructional Reform Through Service and Technology -- Project FIRST. Project FIRST works to integrate technology into public school curricula and to increase community involvement in the process by using the unique resources and capabilities of local education funds (LEFs) and their business partners.Project FIRST and other similar programs are helping public schools across the country to become technologically sophisticated educational institutions. Project FIRST's considerable progress has come about, in part, because it addresses the need to modernize the instructional norms of many classroom settings. Project FIRST is effectively promoting information technology as a means of enhancing teaching and learning -- for both teachers and students.For many students from disadvantaged backgrounds, including most racial minorities, these advances will not be enough to bridge the computer experience gap. According to a study published in the April 1998 issue of Science Magazine, white students in high school and college are still much more likely than black students to have computers in their homes and to use the World Wide Web. While 73 percent of white students had a home computer, only 33 percent of black students did, even when accounting for differences in income, according to another report compiled by Vanderbilt University researchers. Elevating the level of technology use and access in schools located in disadvantaged communities to that in other schools throughout the nation is a challenge of enormous magnitude. There is still much work to be done to ensure optimum learning environments and outcomes for all students. Project FIRST's efforts are a step along the way

Village of Schaumburg v. Citizens for a Better Environment, 444 U.S. 620 (1980)

Constitutional Law-FREEDOM OF SPEECH-ORDINANCE RESTRICTING SOLICITATION OF FUNDS BY CHARITIES RESTRICTS FREEDOM OF SPEEC

Watsuji and Deleuze and Guattari in the Climate of Culture

Seth Jacobowitz, in his paper Watsuji and Deleuze and Guattari in the Climate of Culture, analyzes theories of cultural properties in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari\u27s A Thousand Plateaus alongside Watsuji Tetsuro\u27s prewar Climate and Culture. At stake in these investigations is the status of the West as a universalizing particular ratified by these authors in the instance of its own critique. We are confronted on the one hand with Deleuze and Guattari\u27s exoticized, Orientalist promise of an alternative economy of meaning derived from the Balinese term for plateau and the morphology of the rhizome and, on the other hand, by the human geography in Watsuji Tetsuro\u27s Culture and Climate, which explicitly places itself under the sign of racial science. Jacobowitz seeks to disclose how despite their articulation over and against Eurocentrism, these two theories in fact reify the cultural properties of the West and remap them on a global scale