This fall, students in selected high schools in Madison Heights, Bloomfield Hills, Northville, Walled Lake and Detroit will be able to connect their classroom workstations to the Internet, allowing them access to such things as data from Voyager II, political debate with students in Japan and mentoring programs with U-M faculty.
Project Connect, a partnership between Merit Network, Novell Inc., the nine member universities of Merit and Michigan’s K-12 education community, will allow students in the five high schools to connect to MichNet through their local area network, and from there to access the wider world of the Internet. Novell Inc. has donated more than $150,000 in networking software to the project, which will enable the schools to directly link to MichNet without using a dial-up connection. Dial-up connections often result in busy signals or lost data, but the dedicated hard connection will allow uninterrupted telnet and file transfer functions.
“The network will bring the educational resources of universities and industry into the classroom, and can even provide dial-in access to the communities near the schools in the future,” explains Dana Sitzler, Merit computer systems consultant.
