ABSTRACT
At the conclusion of the first chapter on rural science education (Oliver, 2007a) for the previous Handbook of Research on Science Education, a question was posed to readers in this way: “where do we leave the question of technology and its potential to bring universal access to knowledge to all persons regardless of location?” (p. 366). As one of the current authors (JSO) concluded the research for the first chapter, that question seemed to be the most important one looming in the future for rural science education. As we began to think of structures and themes that have now formed the backbone of the new chapter, the many possibilities of how technologies could impact (and were impacting) the educative lives of rural science students across the United States and around the world again emerged as a highly visible and potentially transformative issue. In our present day, the number of schools that are isolated from the Internet and its huge cache of knowledge resources is diminishing rapidly.
