High-Tech Tools, Old-Fashioned Volunteerism

Thousands of volunteers in Orange County and across the state will roll out of bed Saturday and gather at local schools to take part in what amounts to a high-tech barn-raising--the kind of endeavor that would make the Amish proud. That is, if the Amish had any use for modems and Internet accounts.

NetDay 96, as the event is called, is an ambitious attempt to help pull the state’s schools into the information age by enlisting volunteers to install high-speed data lines and other equipment needed to link classrooms to the Internet.

So far, about 12,000 people have volunteered statewide, and companies, including Pacific Bell, have agreed to supply hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of phone cables, jacks and other devices, said Carole Teach, manager of computer network planning for the California Department of Education.

Teach could not say how many schools will take part in the program, but officials in Orange County said dozens of local campuses have signed up, including three in the Fullerton School District.

Tony Anderson, director of information and planning services for the district, said about 12 volunteers will meet at the campuses at 8 a.m. to pull cable between classrooms and computer labs. The schools will then be linked to a computer network the district is constructing that someday--perhaps five years from now--will link every classroom in the district to the Internet.

Students and teachers alike “are looking forward to being able to break down some of the walls of the classroom,” Anderson said. And Teach said access to the Internet will let students and teachers share their work with other classrooms around the globe and do research on the World Wide Web.

But Anderson cautioned that Saturday is the first step in a long technological journey most schools have to make. “Funding for technology has been very minimal, and California ranks near the bottom,” he said. “A lot of our technology is very old. We have computers bought in 1979 still in service.”

NetDay is privately funded, and was organized by a researcher at Sun Microsystems, a large computer company based in Mountain View, and an executive at a public television station in San Francisco.

For information about NetDay and local schools that still need volunteers, visit the NetDay web site at https://www.netday96.com.

Greg Miller covers high technology for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7830 or at greg.miller@latimes.com.