Big sky telegraph

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Dec 1993/Jan 1994 by Odasz, Frank

Big Sky Telegraph began operation in 1988 as an electronic bulletin board system with the goal of linking Montana's 114 one-and two-room schools to each other and to Western Montana College (WMC). Today, the Big Sky Telegraph (BST) enables the formation of "virtual communities" linking schools, libraries, county extension services, a women's center and hospitals. Montana high school students who are studying Russian can now communicate with Russian students, and science students can participate in a course on chaos theory offered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Founded with grant funds from the M.J. Murdoch Charitable Trust and the U.S. West Foundation, Big Sky began its role as a rural telecomputing testbed by offering an online course via modem to rural K-12 teachers. Its focus quickly branched out to the broader one of community networking--the community as classroom.

During the last five years, BST has offered free access and online lessons to all citizens interested in learning the benefits of telecomputing. Its prime goal has been to demonstrate low-cost, low-tech, high imagination, scalable networking models. It runs SCO UNIX on a 386 computer with a 550 MB hard drive, eight dialup modems and an additional 16 ports linked to 60 terminals on the WMC campus and full Internet interconnectivity.

Big Sky has created six community bulletin board systems (BBSs) which are being outfitted with Internet e-mail, Internet self-teaching lessons, K-12 telecurricular projects, NAPLPS graphics and both customized and commercial databases to demonstrate free, local, global teleport capabilities to serve K-12 education, entrepreneurship and general community support, development and citizen teleliteracy.

Its software allows the sharing of Internet newsgroups as FidoNet echo conferences and the teaching of a course simultaneously via long-distance dial-up, direct Internet access, local BBS access and Autodial Point disks.

BST serves as a global K-12 telecurricular clearinghouse for projects running on a variety of networks, on community networking models using free, local, bulletin board networks for scalable public access to Internet e-mail (and coming soon, ftp mail, gopher mail and wais mail). It can technically share Internet newsgroups with community bulletin boards as FidoNet echo conferences and vice versa.

EXAMPLES OF WORKING MODELS

LOCAL MODEL. A "tiny-sky" community network running on a 286 PC, Macintosh or Apple IIe (with hard disk) can provide an entire community free local access to the information and discussion conferences that a community desires. Automated single, nightly phone calls exchange whole conferences and single messages with other community systems and the Internet. The system can be used for proprietary, encrypted communications with individuals on similar local community networks. This type of "seed" system is only the first step in the evolution of more sophisticated networks and technologies, the pace of which will be dictated by economics.

OFFLINE READER. A class can line up at the school-based BBS and individually insert their disks to quickly receive all new message in their selected conferences. Students can then go to their microcomputer workstations to read incoming messages and write their responses. At the end of the period, students reinsert their disks and the BBS will bold their outgoing correspondence until midnight, when it will make the single nightly phone call to exchange information globally, costing under $50 a month. This model could serve an entire community, until residential PCs are acquired.

Everyone is welcome to visit. We're always looking for K-12 resources, expertise and innovative project ideas to collect and disseminate. We have 600 K-12 lesson plans available for the taking, though we'd prefer to trade resources with you.

Frank Odasz is the director of Big Sky Telegraph. He has worked as a Wyoming oil field roughneck, independent carpenter and dude ranch manager. He is also a professor of computer education at Western Montana College.