Project uses students to measure access to high-speed Web

BYLINE: BY DAVID SMITH ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

MONTICELLO - About 200 students from 10 Arkansas high schools are taking part in an intensive project to gauge the accessibility of high-speed broadband Internet in six south Arkansas counties.

And while they're at it, they have the opportunity to use their research to start a business.

All are students in classes of the Environmental and Spatial Technology Initiative - better known as the EAST Initiative.

A Greenbrier High School teacher started what is now the EAST Initiative in 1995. Since then, as many as 12,000 students in more than 150 Arkansas schools have received in-depth training in such areas as video production, 3D animation, architectural design, geographic information systems, global positioning systems, virtual reality development and 3D modeling and engineering. The EAST program, headquartered in Little Rock, has expanded to six other states.

Students from Ashdown, Dierks, Drew Central, Foreman, Hamburg, Mineral Springs, Monticello, Nashville, Star City and the Southeast Arkansas Community Based Education Center in Warren have worked for months on distributing and analyzing surveys on Internet access in their counties.

The Arkansas Science and Technology Authority approached the EAST Initiative this year and asked if some students could conduct surveys on Internet access in rural Arkansas counties. The agency had about $150,000 in grants from the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation to use, in part, to determine availability of broadband Internet access in Arkansas.

Broadband refers to telecommunication in which a wide band of frequencies is available to transmit information at higher speeds. Broadband Internet access is typically available through cable; digital subscriber lines, or DSL; and even satellite connections; but it usually is faster than most other connections such as dial-up, said Robert Weih, director of Spatial Information Systems and the Spatial Analysis Laboratory at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

"The Science and Technology Authority is interested in, among other things, improving the quality of high school graduates in science, technology, engineering and math," said John Ahlen, president of the agency. "We're very familiar with the capabilities of the EAST students. We're also interested in creating new business opportunities, and in rural places part of the necessary infrastructure for that is broadband connectivity." One of the recommendations in a report from the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation was to link EAST to an entrepreneurship program, Ahlen said. So the Science and Technology Authority decided to try to connect these interests into the project to map broadband access in south Arkansas.

Ahlen said his agency is interested in building an awareness among the EAST students of entrepreneurship as a possible opportunity for them after they complete high school or college.

"In many ways, entrepreneurship is marketplace problem solving," Ahlen said. "And we know that the generation of students in high school today have been raised in a digital environment. Because of that exposure to digital technology, they have a whole different grasp of what is possible and desirable and what they would like to have in products and services. So we were hoping to provide [the EAST students] with an entrepreneurial opportunity for them to solve a market problem." METICULOUS PLOTTING About 30 of the students attended a camp at the University of Arkansas at Monticello this month to meticulously plot the location of each business and home in the survey on a geographical information system satellite map with coding depending on answers to the survey questions.

Surveys were formulated by students and teachers at Ashdown and Nashville high schools. They were handed out in Ashley, Bradley, Drew, Howard, Lincoln and Little River counties. The counties were chosen because of their rural makeup and because there were EAST students there who could tackle the project.

"And they are good places to seed the entrepreneurial smallbusiness development aspect [of the project]," said Matt Dozier, national director of the EAST Initiative.

The surveys, which had about 20 questions, were given to businesses and residences and included questions asking whether a computer is in the home or business, if Internet service is available, the speed of the Internet connection, the cost of Internet service and if the respondent would pay a premium for broadband high-speed Internet.

The Federal Communication Commission has maps that show where broadband Internet access is throughout much of the country, down to the zip code level, Dozier said. But if a zip code has a handful of homes or businesses with broadband access, the entire zip code is considered to have broadband. That often is not the case, especially in such rural areas as the six counties surveyed, Dozier said.

The FCC map of Arkansas implies that most of the state has widespread broadband coverage, Dozier said.

"But that just is not the case," Dozier said, even in the more urban counties. "The truth is, in Pulaski County there are areas that don't have good broadband coverage. So we're taking the best available data from a federal agency and the kids are improving it considerably." The maps, completed at the camp in Monticello, provided much better information about broadband connectivity in the six counties than previously available.

"These kids have been working back and forth with each other, on the Internet and e-mails," said Ron Hardy, a field director for the EAST Initiative. "They've had little regional meetings to compare notes. It's been very much a student-driven project." WAKE-UP CALL EAST students at Ashdown High School and Nashville High School have worked on the project more than a year, before the Science and Technology Authority asked this year that the project expand to other counties.

"I think this will be helpful to Ashdown," said Alisha Proksch, a senior at Ashdown High School. "Now people in Ashdown know that they have opportunities they didn't know about and that people actually care about their slow Internet. Students know that highspeed Internet is on the way." When the information is made available to leaders and economic-development agencies in each county, "hopefully [Internet service providers] will get a wake-up call" and start offering broadband access, said Jared Wagnon, a senior at Warren High School.

"These students will go back to their communities and work with other students and businesses and community leaders so when the [broadband access] gets there, they'll know what to do," Dozier said.

Many people in rural counties don't have the expertise or knowledge to use high-speed Internet access to help them solve problems, Weih said. But realizing that can help the counties themselves plan for ways to grow and improve, Weih said.

"If I learned that about my county, especially if I was in economic development, I would try to address that," Weih said. "If they want to be competitive, they have to have Internet access and broadband. If you're building an industrial park and you have an area that doesn't have broadband Internet access, that may not be a good location." Experts from several Internet and telecommunications businesses - such as Alltel Corp., AT&T and Aristotle Internet Access - told the students at the camp how to use the information they have to start a business if they'd like to try it.

"It was very informational," said Trent Mullikin, a ninth-grader at Star City. "They really got into the ideas that creating your own business is not as simple as everybody thinks it is. They talked about how to handle expenses of your business." The EAST students will be encouraged to write a business plan for their own business and enter it in a contest. The top four ideas will win cash prizes.

This article was published 11/26/2006