Education and Community: The Collective Wisdom of Teachers, Parents and Community Members

Education seems to have become everyone's business. Everyone has a stake in education yet everyone doesn't have access to the educational process. Most frustrating has been the lack of real interaction between schools and their communities. Those schools that succeed all have a common thread: community involvement. Connecting all schools to their local communities in a viable way has been physically impossible. It is the contention of this paper that real connections between communities and schools can be made by the Internet. The Internet not only connects scholars in the schools to outside resources, but it also allows the community to observe the performance of its local scholars as telementors. Telementoring ultimately connects communities to their schools and creates more effective learning environments for all.

Ted Nellen

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_2/nellen/