It is axiomatic in historical studies of science that new technologies both produce new social relations and reproduce old ones. The question about the web in general and distance education in particular is, to what extent it will simply place more resources (information, capital, production capacity, education, etc.) in the hands of the global "haves," and in what ways it offers radically democratizing potential to put resources in the control of the "have nots."  In this web site, we explore some models for distance education (broadly construed) from the margins, as it were, including the "web-back" performance pieces of Guillermo Gomez Peña, the production of virtual favelas in Brazil, rural education models from the Philippines and Malaysia, and our own efforts to produce an intellectual and institutional infrastructure to design a multi-university distance ed certificate program targeting predominantly rural women, thinking in particular about Native American reservations and chicano border towns in the U.S. Southwest. We ask how these various projects recruit and (hyper)textually imagine their students, and what models of virtual education and empowerment they create.

Some questions we asked: