Scattered across the barren 88,000 square miles of Alaska's North Slope Borough - the largest and northernmost county in the US - are eight tiny towns. Most of the residents are Inupiat Eskimo. Most still hunt and whale, and many speak little or no English. Here there is no infrastructure, and pedestrians are concerned about maulings from polar bears, not muggings from street thugs. Here, also, thanks to an ambitious school district and millions in oil-derived revenue, is a pioneering digital classroom for many of the Borough's 2,000 public school students.
Now in its second year, the program, called Distance Delivery, emanates from a studio in the high school in Barrow, the Borough's ranking metropolis (population 3,800). Two studio cameras bring the instructor, text, and graphics into each remote site. Along the way, the signal is digitized, compressed, multiplexed, microwaved, and up- and downlinked via full-time dedicated circuits. Instructors have two monitors - one to see themselves, the other to see the classrooms, which are shown one at a time, security-monitor style. When a student in one of the classrooms speaks, the camera pans to the source of the voice, so everyone can see who is talking.
Distance Delivery allows the Borough to bring courses like trigonometry to the far-flung villages. This term's most popular class, however, is Inupiat Studies. The irony of using digital-age technology to teach age-old tradition was brought home one morning when a non-English-speaking village elder was brought in as a guest lecturer; much class time was spent teaching the elder how to use the remote control to address specific sites.
Amazingly, it took just one year to plan, design, build, and install the entire US$3 million system (it costs $300,000 annually to operate). Martin Carey, director of information and technology, North Slope Borough School District: +1 (907) 852 5311
- Jerry Franklin
ELECTRIC WORD
Of Whaling and Trigonometry
