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K-State Students Help Towns Design Their Websites If a friend jumped off a bridge, would you jump, too? Many of us heard that from Mom and Dad as we were growing up. Are there other scenarios in which this question about peer pressure and decision-making could be applied? Thomas Gould, Kansas State University assistant professor in mass communications, is applying the bridge question as it relates to the adoption of new technologies in rural areas. Rural areas do not generally jump into the use of new innovations right away, said Gould. In small towns, it takes time, and often, it takes local experts to encourage and sustain such growth. His work the last two years, supported by the Kansas Center for Rural Initiatives (KCRI), focuses heavily on creating community web sites that will help stimulate economic and community growth in small Kansas towns. He has worked with K-State students to build web sites in Liberal, Plainville, Phillipsburg, St. George, and Junction City, Kansas, all rural Kansas communities.. The teams then worked with Gould to train local residents to maintain the sites. In several cases, the students continue, on their own, to work with the communities and have maintained a strong bond with the towns. In the past, rural towns have used different techniques to spur economic growth -- often focused in increasing tourism. "First, many communities did brochures," said Gould. Next came videos of local attractions that were sent to travel agents, encouraging them to send visitors to the smaller towns, he said. Most recently, some web sites were launched to attract tourists. The problem with such web sites, at least locally, was that the creators of most sites were not local residents, but individuals from outside the community. Using a webpage template, they would create sites for the rural towns, then move on to the next town.. Initially, the project helped the rural communities, but in the long run, the towns were left without local expertise and know how to maintain their web site, said Gould. Some towns weren't even aware that they had a web site, he added. Gould's work trains individuals within the community to use the new media, making them local technology experts. "We want to identify leaders," said Gould. "We think that if a community decides what is important, more and more people will develop an interest in working with the site, and the knowledge of how to maintain these sites will be shared locally." The K-State teacher said his hope is that through connecting certain members of smaller communities with the new web editing software packages, and through this effort making them local experts, the communities will become able to help themselves. The key, he said, is that the community identifies what is important for itself. "We want community web sites to be self-sustaining," said Gould. Given that web sites are, by definition, never "finished," Gould noted, all sites must be maintained and changed as time goes on. "If a web site is to ever be of any value to a community, it must be created with community input, maintained by local experts, and be a cost-effective method of communication. This requires that updating be performed locally and that the cost of the site be minimal," Gould said. Too often, he added, the educational community, whether in a high school or university, is complicit in the creation of a pseudo-technological elite: "a special class of individuals with special powers to work on things like web sites. The clear message is that web sites are too complicated, too intricate, too remote for the average citizen to work on. That's rubbish. It's only too difficult when this elite make it too difficult, usually through special, and largely unnecessary coding." By helping communities create local experts, he hopes the whole community will want to "jump off" the hypothetical bridge once it realizes that this jump is a positive and possible move. "Maintaining a web site should be no more complex than writing a letter, and, perhaps even more importantly, no more expensive," he asserts.
http://www.jcks.com
Prepared by Christy Montgomery
For more information, contact Tom Gould
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