I ran across an article by Evantheia Schibsted at http://www.edutopia.org/. She has written about the Alice Springs School of the Air (ASSOA) that has been providing educational opportunities to children in the Outback of Australia since 1951. This school was established by Adelaide Meithke. She used the RFDS’s two way radio network to put classroom lessons into distant rural homes. The radio network was used until 1995 when they began using computers and the Internet.
I was fascinated by the fact that Ms. Meithke saw the need for distance education long before we even knew it was possible. What a visionary! The article is worth reading. It can be found here.
Such a good use of the technology in a place where distance learning is probably the best opportunity. Think how difficult it would have been to do it with a radio network. Visual learners must have had a terrible time.
ReplyDeleteWow- That's awesome!
ReplyDeleteI presented last week to a group of educators, and asked when the first communications network spanned the globe- everyone was talking about the 70's and 80's and i reminded them we had mail service globally around the 1600's! We don't realize how long things have been possible at one level or another, even with distance ed and technology in education. Good stuff!
d.i.