ADEC Infrastructure Development Award
NSF Team:
University of IllinoisUniversity of Maryland-College Park
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
North Carolina A&T State University
North Carolina State University
University of California
Washington State University
This ADEC team worked tirelessly over nearly 18 months to plan, develop and test a prototype satellite network for bringing Internet to rural/remote areas, tribal colleges, historically black institutions and Hispanic serving institutions. This initiative, now funded for three years and $4 million, has the potential through the research and development initiative to bring a much larger number of Americans into the research and education arena through the Internet.
Don Riley, University of Maryland-College Park, took the initiative to catalyze this effort. Dan Cotton, Dale Finkelson and Valerie McAlpin made major contributions to the project paper development. The entire team worked tirelessly on weekly audio conferences and via the Internet in refining the proposal, working through the arrangements with private sector partner Tachyon, clarifying project goals, objectives and procedures, conducting discussions and negotiations with partners including Internet2. The resulting program is very strong and represents an innovative way to look at infrastructure development. This team continued to argue that the research and development work with the infrastructure was very necessary and exciting; however, working only on the technology would not necessarily result in educational effectiveness and desirable community outcomes.
The collaborative pre-test, publishing of the results, the webpage including collaborative work tools, national sharing day in November are all outstanding and have been impressive to NSF. Because of this outstanding start, the ADEC NSF project has attracted highly competent staff and interest of additional funding sources and potential partners.