Supporting Rural Citizens' Access to Knowledge: One More Aspect of e-Democracy

The paper considers the potential offered by lifelong learning as a tool for capacity building and development in rural areas, especially through the exploitation of contemporary technologies. The challenges and opportunities connected with small rural schools are particularly focused upon, and teachers working in them are proposed as ideal change agents potentially powerful to catalyse bottom-up developmental initiatives in the local context. The experiences from a series of relevant teacher professional development initiatives in this direction are presented, and some of the main findings and questions arising