Internet in a box
For the staff and students of a secondary school it has many advantages to have access to the Internet. But it also has disadvantages. The main disadvantages have to do with sufficient capacity and security. Both of them have technical and economical difficulties. The bandwidth, if available anyway, in Africa can cost up to hundred times what it costs in Europe and the US. The next years will see improvement in East-Africa because the glass fibre ring around Africa will become reality.
Many kind of threats make it necessary to invest a lot in security measures. For instance a firewall is needed to protect the inside (the LAN: the local area network) from the outside. Installing and maintaining a firewall is expensive.
To have the advantages of having access to the Internet without all those disadvantages, a so called "Internet in a box" seems a good solution. This solution consists of several staps:
1. select the information that is of interest to the educational institutions
2. ask the providers of this information for the necessary rights to copy and distribute it
3. collect the information in a central place
4. distribute the information to the educational institutions
5. update the information regularly
This means a lot of organization. The eGranary Digital Library is such an Internet in a box. It is realized by the WiderNet project. For more details see http://www.widernet.org
Thanks to TEEA Mackay College has an eGranay Digital Library.
