TCNJ News
For Immediate Release
November 27, 2007
Students to help Trenton’s El Centro clients to “live in a virtual world”
EWING, NJ … A group of students from The College of New Jersey have created a computer station and Website at El Centro, a community center in Trenton. The computer station will enable residents to stay connected with their cultures and hometowns/home countries via the Internet and a specially designed Webpage for El Centro clients.
TCNJ students will be providing instruction to El Centro clients on how to use this new technology on Thursday, November 29 at 10:00 a.m. in Social Science Building room 21 (on TCNJ’s campus). The students, who have also designed the site to keep El Centro’s clients in touch with their home countries, are members of a freshman seminar class titled “Living in a Virtual World.”
The course examines how the Internet shapes our lives, from the very personal to larger global and economic issues. Additionally, the digital divide and its implications are considered, with the students participating in a 24-hour “net fast” in which they are cut off from the Internet for 24 hours.
“To say the least, many students were stunned to realize their dependency on the virtual world,” said Janet Mazur, the course professor.
This experience lead the students to explore the digital divide in their own community and, after visiting El Centro several times, they discovered that many people just a few miles away from TCNJ’s extensively wired campus do not have access to the Internet at all. After several visits to El Centro, the students determined that the consumer population would benefit from Internet access, connecting them to jobs, social services, news, and their home countries.
The students faced a series of challenges in developing the presentation for El Centro clients, the biggest of all being the language barrier. To overcome this hurdle, the students found ways to translate their instructions and even created a series of bilingual “flash cards” to assist with the learning process.
“Our hope is that their initial experience is pleasurable and they come to have a positive association with the Internet,” says Mazur. “Gradually, our hope is that they learn its full scope and ultimately use it as a bridge to improve their lives.”
Upon completing the presentation and leaving the campus, El Centro clients will be supplied with a listing of places where they can access the Internet, so that they can further hone their new skills. Students from the College's Bonner Community Scholars Corps will continue working on this project in the spring semester, with the goal of establishing a computer station at El Centro, which will feature this Website and the linkages.
As part of the First-Year Experience program at the College, students are required to participate in such community engaged learning activities. The Bonner Center works with faculty to develop class-based projects that address the needs of the community. There are 19 first-year courses working on community engaged learning projects this semester. Bonner Scholars--the College's 'domestic peace corps' program—mobilize the rest of the first-year students to participate in one-day service learning projects—after holding meetings to identify the issues they care about (e.g. hunger, homelessness), students complete these projects in teams with the residence hall floormates.
By mobilizing small communities of students from every floor in the freshmen dorms, periodic service events, such as this one, have been arranged to allow students to learn, serve, and reflect together. The events focus on a range of themes including environment, homelessness, and diversity issues.
Each event has four main components: learning, hands-on service, reflection, and visions for future service.
“Our goal is to create opportunities for students to learn while they are making a contribution to the local community,” said Patrick Donohue, the Bonner Center’s director of community-engaged learning. “We want them to think critically about their society and to see that they have an important role in addressing some of these challenges in collaboration with their professors and our community partners.”
About The College of New Jersey
TCNJ currently is ranked as one of the 75 "Most Competitive" schools in the nation by Barron's Profiles of American Colleges, is rated the No. 1 public institution in the northern region of the country by U.S. News & World Report, and is one of Kiplinger's Personal Finance's top educational values in the country. In 2006, the College joined an elite group of institutions when it was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Fewer than 10 percent of the nation's colleges and universities share this honor.
