Appendix

This two-part perspective should be central to our analysis of the NLTs and the infrastructures associated with them, helping us decipher what we want and what we don't want.

The transmission model lens can help us critique some of the trends I referred to earlier. For instance, 1), the privatization of public education from within, as global multi-media conglomerates, information and systems providers bid on contracts for everything from distributed learning resources to learning-instructional administration. 2) the move toward a two-tiered education system, with women getting the no-frills digitally delivered, machine-managed stuff. And 3) the exploitation of desperation in selling "skills for the new economy" with no reference to meaningful contexts and opportunities to apply those skills.

Let me end with a short list of what we might consider as an ecological model for using the NLTs. A list which I hope will resonate with the questions which Jennifer and Linda set down at the end of each chapter in their wonderful report.

Ecological Model for using the NLTs

1. a practitioner's model; not a production/consumption model. Stresses adjusting technology to learners, not adjusting learners to technology.
   
2. Technology. geared to extending local and personal knowledge, and to building local knowledge bases.
   
3. learning always linked to life: active connection and continuity with the activity to follow, be that a job or self-employment, suggesting a social responsibility around relevance.
   
4. is open-ended, holistic;
   
5. technology supporting person-in-community as well as personal autonomy. This is along the lines of Liz Burge's call for a balance between autonomy and connection.
   
6. public-sector commitment essential (though this could be defined in ways other than the "industrial" model of centralized bureaucracies.)

And, finally, I have a dream: A dream of CCLOW in its journey away from gov't lobbyist to more active agent itself in policy-making and making things happen. I see CLLOW taking the lead in some of the networking we need to do among educational/learning institutions in developing tech.-assessment tools for women and other users of the NLTs. Perhaps too serving as a broker in creating cooperative joint ventures of praxis around this model of ed., putting it to use, eliciting commitments from various colleges and universities to make it their policy too.

I also see this as part of the kind of national dialogue we need to articulate public policies through which we can preserve a democratic participative culture in this country and resist current moves to destroy it.

In the absence of leadership by the gov't, we are the extra-parliamentary opposition. Thank you.

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1. Charles Piller & Liza Weiman, 1992. "America's Computer Ghetto," quoted in Vincent Mosco (1996), The Political Economy of Communication. London: Sage, p. 219.