INTERNET ACADEMY: THE STUDY (EXCERPTS)
The Internet was just an intangible among Romania's academic elite before George Mason University's International Center for Applied Studies in Information Technology came on the scene in the early 1990s. The country's prestigious Academy of Sciences had produced a Nobel Prize winner, but its researchers had never accessed the information superhighway in any significant way. Now, thanks to an Internet School developed by ICASIT director Stephen Ruth and his staff at George Mason, as part of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Internet is a critical tool for Romanian scientists in accessing software and research papers, networking with peers and improving the quality of academic research.The Internet Academy is one of the most complete Internet training initiatives in Eastern Europe as well as a successful cooperation effort between mainstream American and Romanian organizations. Here, accomplished scientists and their researchers learn the concepts of Internet applications and immediately apply them in their work. By training the "technologists" as well as the humanists in Internet technologies, prominant researchers further leverage their expertise through using the Internet and increases 1) their ability to collaborate and expand professional networks, 2) their exposure to relative and up-to-date information in their disciplines, and 3) the timeliness and reliability of communications. Underscoring these points was economy in the low-cost nature of Internet communications.
