Margins are interesting places. As the development in recent years of pharmaceutical company sweeps of local, Third World pharmacoepia has made clear, what is going on at "peripheries" has valuable lessons to teach metropolitan and commercial centers. We conceive of "margins" in a variety of ways, encompassing those working in resource-rich areas who are decidely non-mainstream as well as those working in resource-poor arenas (and these geographies are not just physical; local micro-politics, too, determines who is "rich" or "poor.") We want to honor the wisdom, hard thinking, and serious work embedded in marginal projects,  hopefully with less colonial effect than that embodied in pharmaceutical company R & D.

We are believers in radical democracy. Our goal in working on distance ed projects is to educate people (particularly but not exclusively women) to empower them--to enable them to reach goals related to better jobs and financial security, and to offer tools toward gaining political power, and hence services, representation, and access to economic power. Part of what this means is that we want to figure out what people need. Everyone--from children to elders--knows a lot about their particular corner of and perspective on the world. Our goal is to figure out how to work with and help people improve on what they already know, not treat them as "empty vessels" waiting to be filled. In so doing, we may have to throw out some of what we wanted to "fill" people with, and this is always troubling and hard. But it also keeps our teaching fresh and responsive, and helps us figure out what is absolutely essential to teach. Canons are calcified.

While there are many valid arguments for high-tech approaches to making the Net and distance learning more accessible and friendly to a variety of users, we want to make an argument for low-tech paradigms. We're thinking of pretty standard Web tools--email, threaded discussion, simple-format web pages. First of all, more complex and graphic-intensive software tools (Flash comes to mind) are very hard to make accessible to people with disabilities (recent article on disability and access issues). Second, the more sophisticated the software, the more capacity the hardware is required to have. Assuming and expecting that your users can buy a new computer every 2-3 years seriously limits the number of potential students in your pool. Furthermore, the easiest computers to get in the hands of people who don't have one are used--those that the high-tech user throws away (or sells for a pittance) as no longer useful because outdated. Finally, sophisticated software also assumes a certain quality of infrastructure. What if we started from the assumption that our students have neither reliable electricity nor phone service? It certainly changes our goals with respect to ever-better graphic interfaces; instead, we would seek simple, fast-loading formats.