A number of School for Scanning participants asked me for updates on the Digital Promise project. This is a proposal by Newton Minow and Larry Grossman to earmark a part of the billions of dollars from public spectrum auctions for a Digital Opportunity Investment Trust, or "DO IT." The money would go to schools, universities, libraries and museums for digitization and related projects to reach outside their walls to millions of people in the U.S. and throughout the world. It would support research and development of new educational models and prototypes, and is modelled in spirit after great American educational innovations of previous centuries such as the GI Bill of 1944 and the Land Grant Colleges Act of 1862 that helped transform the nation's economy and strengthen its democracy.
Read more about it and ask your senators and representatives to support legislation by Christopher Dodd (D-CT), Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA).
Last spring, Congress passed FY 2003 Appropriations Bill directing $750,000 to the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust. The funds will be allocated through the Federation of American Scientists to be used to develop a detailed proposal for DOIT.
Comments