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Antonia "Toni" Stone (b. 1930 – d. November 21, 2002, Watertown, Massachusetts) was an educator and pioneering activist against the growing digital divide who created the United States' first community technology center. After 20 years as a mathematics teacher in New York City private schools, Stone changed her focus to technology education for poor communities and formerly incarcerated adults.
Stone grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut. In 1952, she earned a degree from Sarah Lawrence College.
Stone began her efforts to bridge the burgeoning digital divide between the rich and poor through her collaboration with the Fortune Society, an inmate advocacy group, to instruct former prisoners on how to use computers. In 1980, Toni Stone set up Playing to Win (PTW), a nonprofit organization dedicated to countering inequities in computer access. PTW looked to serve inmates and ex-offenders by teaching them computer skills and offering technical assistance to prisons and rehabilitation agencies. In 1983, Stone and PTW Corporation opened the Harlem Community Computing Center. This center was located in the basement of a Harlem housing project and it provided the neighborhood with public access to personal computers. Taking advantage of the success of PTW, Stone created a network of centers known as the PTWNet.
The Playing to Win Network went on to form alliances with six other technology access programs in Harlem, some parts of Boston, Washington, D. C., and Pittsburgh, by 1990. In 1992, Playing To Win was given a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation in order to provide neighborhood technology access to the northeastern United States.
Three years later, Stone changed the PTWNet name to the Community Technology Centers’ Network (CTCNet). CTCNet led the movement for the adoption of community technology centers (CTCs), with over 1,000 centers established through the U.S. by the early 21st century.
Today, the CTCNet includes more than 600 member sites connected by the Internet. CTCNet is still working to provide computer literacy programs in Harlem. CTCs went on to be federally funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Additionally, they were privately funded by the Benton Foundation and AOL-Time Warner.
In 1997, Stone left CTCNet but continued working and advising in the area of technical literacy. Stone received the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professional for Social Responsibility Award in 1994 and the Eugene l. Lawler Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1999 for her work in humanitarian application of computers. In 2001, Stone was awarded an honorary doctorate from DePaul University. Stone also received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Harvard chapter of Women in Technology.
Antonia Stone died on November 21, 2002, due to complications from myelodysplastic leukemia.
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Antonia Stone, 72; Provided Computers to Poor
Antonia Stone, a prep-school mathematics teacher who left the classroom after 20 years of teaching and devoted herself to instructing the poor and the imprisoned about the importance of personal computers, died on Thursday at her home in Watertown, Mass. She was 72.
Ms. Stone was an early critic of the so-called technology gap between the rich and the poor and set out to narrow it by providing computers to people who otherwise might not have access to them.
She began by establishing a program with the Fortune Society, a group that advocates for inmates, to teach former prisoners how to use computers and to bring computer-education courses into New York prisons.
In 1983, she created Playing to Win Inc., a computer center in the basement of a public housing project in East Harlem. At the center, local children were encouraged, in a casual setting, to use reading, math and geography programs on the computer. Ms. Stone attracted her first participants by canvassing the local playgrounds and talking to children about the crucial role that computers played -- and would continue to play -- in society.
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Playing to Win, renamed the Community Technology Centers' Network, caught on and eventually opened affiliates across the country and in Europe, Central America and Japan. With more than 1,000 community-based technology centers worldwide, the group tries to create ''a society in which all people are equitably empowered by technology skills and usage,'' according to its Web site, ctcnet.org.
Ms. Stone was raised in New Canaan, Conn., and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1952. She taught math in several private schools in New York City during the 1970's and eventually became the chairwoman of the math departments at the Town School and the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School.
She received many honors, including the lifetime achievement award from the Harvard chapter of Women in Technology and an honorary degree from De Paul University's College of Computer Science.
She is survived by her partner, Tim Barclay; her sons, Christopher Stone of Brooklyn, and Nicholas Stone of Falls Church, Va.; and her daughter, Rebecca Stone of Brookline, Mass.
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