Report Says Schools Need 100Mbps Per 1,000 Users

alphadogg writes "American schools need mega-broadband networks — and they need them soon, a new report says. Specifically, U.S. educational institutions will need networks that deliver broadband performance of 100Mbps for every 1,000 students and staff members in time for the 2014-15 school year. That's the conclusion reached by the State Educational Technology Directors Association. Why the need for speed? For one thing, more and more schools are using online textbooks and collaboration tools, said Christine Fox, director of educational leadership and research at SETDA. Broadband access must be 'ubiquitous' and 'robust,' she said, adding that schools should think of broadband as a 'necessary utility,' not as an add-on. The report, called 'The Broadband Imperative,' further suggests that schools should upgrade their networks to support speeds of 1Gbps per 1,000 users in five years."

Comments

Moar speed!

[Sparticus789]

All the better to torrent with, my dear!

OMG Need More Moneyz!

[Anonymous Coward]

Title says it all. The more we pay for education, the less we get. Throw out the bottom 2% (students and administrators) and let the teachers teach.

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[alen]

and define the bottom 2%

in NYC a teacher that teaches in one of the most elite schools in the city was ranked one of the worst. reason her kids didn't improve from last year. they are already the best in the city but because they didn't improve she's a bad teacher

or what if all your kids never do homework and never study because their parents don't care?

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[lambent]

the story you're referencing was a bit more nuanced than that. the students blew off a standardized test that didn't matter; that was part of it. also, she wasn't just ranked one of the worst. she was ranked the absolute worst teacher.

amazing.

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[YrWrstNtmr]

Someone has to be at the bottom in each school. But the "bottom 2%" can't be by individual school, IMHO. You'd be getting rid of some good teachers. I'm sure that in some districts, the 'bottom 2%' in any particular school would be in the 'top 25%' of teachers in another school in the same district.

So maybe cut/fire by district instead.

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[nedlohs]

That usual expected outcomes versus actual outcomes.

Obviously first year in students have no history of prior outcomes in order to base the statistical expected outcome on,so you'll need to pre-test or something.

The statistics will end up telling you how to weight things, maybe an increase in outcomes of 5 points (on some arbitrary scale) at the top end is equivanent to an increase in outcomes of 20 points in the middle, etc. Maybe the expected outcome at the top end is negative, and hence no improvement is actually great.

Of course you also have things like student's parents both die in a car crash that year and that's really why his performance dropped, etc. You either need to make sure the sample size is big enough to cover that (which might mean you can't do it yearly) or special case things (which means empoying those administration workers everybody wants to get rid of).

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[Hatta]

Somehow it seems that school administrators are even harder to educate than their charges.

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[drkstr1]

You're right, parents who don't care are the primary problem, but Iv'e yet to see an effective, politicaly plausible approach presented to fix that in the US.

Get rid of the law that makes it mandatory to go to school. Problem solved.

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[jmorris42]

> but because they didn't improve she's a bad teacher

You say that like it is a bad thing. If the kids didn't improve from when they came in at the start of the year that means the teacher sucks. Or give me a definition of 'good teacher' that includes 'kids don't improve'.

I don't want to hear any blah, blah excuses either. If the kids wasted a year in that classroom there is no reason to inflict that teacher on another batch without major corrective action and/or retraining. Or would YOU put your kids in that class if they posted their last year entry/exit scores on the door?

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[DaFallus]

or what if all your kids never do homework and never study because their parents don't care?

In Texas, teachers get admonished for having more than a certain number of F's in their classes. It doesn't matter if all of your low grades are from kids who simply refuse to do any work, teachers will end up having to raise their grade averages to avoid being fired.

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[LordLucless]

You say that like it is a bad thing. If the kids didn't improve from when they came in at the start of the year that means the teacher sucks. Or give me a definition of 'good teacher' that includes 'kids don't improve'.

How about this: a teacher is "good" if the results 50% of teachers would have gotten in the same situation, would not have been significantly better.

Weighing teachers against each other based on their student's results is inaccurate, because you have no control. All classes are not equal; a "bad" teacher with a self-starting, highly-motivated class with involved parents will do far better (on your metrics) than a good teacher with a bad-attitude, frequently-delinquent class with an education retarded by their last three lousy teachers. Swap those teachers around, and the ones with the best class will come out on top, not the one with the greater ability.

The problem with my metric is that it's impossible to measure. It just has some relationship to reality, which is an advantage over the currently-used metrics.

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[jmorris42]

> Weighing teachers against each other based on their
> student's results is inaccurate, because you have no control.

Every time the notion of judging the performance of teachers by their output, exactly like EVERYONE else with a job is judged, promoted and fired.... this red herring is thrown out. It is crap.

You test at the start and again at the end of the year. Any problems in the students aren't lilkely to change during the year, if the parents have been defective, apathetic, etc. in the past they are (as a group) likely to remain so, involved parents probably won't suddenly stop caring. So you certainly can draw conclusions from the difference unless it is your position that it is normal for there to be no measurable difference year over year, that the teacher, school, hell; just the passage of a year is expected to make zero difference in what a child knows. Or is it your position that there is no reliably measurable difference between a 'good' and a 'bad' teacher?

In fact a GOOD teacher would probably want a class of slighly at risk kids since if they can fire the imaginations of even a quarter of em the potential will be there to make a vast swing in the average. Meanwhile a class of upper class kids already operating at or above grade level would be a lot harder to inspire any such large improvement in.

And guess what? As a matter of public policy we probably want the best and brightest teachers choosing to work with that exact group of kids, slightly behind but salvagable. Amazing how often the market driven goal is the right one.

> The problem with my metric is that it's impossible to measure.

Which means it is useless. Mine is chosen almost entirely on the basis of being actually measurable and thus IS useful. Come on over to the reality based community, it is sane and it works every time it is allowed to be triumph over unreasoning emotion.

Really. How many other professions are there where the people in charge will openly assert that it is impossible to measure their output, immoral to even try and oh, by the way we insist on being granted tenure even though the notion is utterly inapplicable to K-12 education. And please continue bankrupting the public coffers thowing ever increasing sums of money at us, recession or not, just don't expect anything to improve.. or to even be able to know if things are getting better since measurement is a null concept in our industry. But if you DON'T give us more money it is a certainly the children will suffer.

That madness has went on for decades now but things are so bad nobody believes the schools are working so things are going to change. Choose whether to be part of the solution.

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[LordLucless]

Every time the notion of judging the performance of teachers by their output, exactly like EVERYONE else with a job is judged, promoted and fired

Which industry do you work in? Because other than factory line workers and sales people, nobody I know is judged, promoted and fired like that. People I know are usually promoted/fired based on the opinion of their superiors on the quality of their work.

Or is it your position that there is no reliably measurable difference between a 'good' and a 'bad' teacher?

Pretty much. My position is that there is a difference between a good and bad teacher, but that it's not possible (or at least, simple) to reduce that difference to numbers in a way is both balanced across the different nature of classes, and impossible to game. It's a problem I find with most metrics other than the most simple of jobs.

In the same way, I believe that there are good books and bad books, but judging the quality of the book by using, say, average number of syllables in a word, is a really poor way of doing it. When we want to judge the quality of a book, we rely on human opinions (reviewers). In the case of people, we should rely on the opinions of supervisors, who have a greater grasp on context than does an algorithmic metric.

Which means it is useless. Mine is chosen almost entirely on the basis of being actually measurable and thus IS useful.

Just being measurable doesn't make it useful. Lines of Code is a perfectly measurable metric, but still sucks when it comes to determining the productivity of a software developer.

Come on over to the reality based community

The reality is, you need to base decisions on personal observation, not on some clunky algorithm that doesn't produce the correct result.

Really. How many other professions are there where the people in charge will openly assert that it is impossible to measure their output, immoral to even try.

How many other professions are there where your output is entirely determined by a third party, over whom you have no authority? The ability of teachers to effectively control their students has been diminishing year by year. Many of the students know it too, and know that there'll be nobody in a school willing to call them out on their actions, for fear of legal liability.

and oh, by the way we insist on being granted tenure even though the notion is utterly inapplicable to K-12 education

I'm in a different country. We have the same current trend towards metrics, but none of our K-12 teachers have tenure, although, as government employees, teachers are just as difficult to fire as any other bureaucrat. I agree with you that the solution to the problem is getting rid of the under-performing teachers; I disagree that a simple mathematical formula is able to determine that accurately.

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[jmorris42]

> People I know are usually promoted/fired based on the opinion of their superiors
> on the quality of their work.

And unless you work for a small private company, odds are there are productivity metrics. Try firing someone without em and watch how fast they lawyer up these days.

> Pretty much. My position is that there is a difference between a good and bad teacher,
> but that it's not possible (or at least, simple) to reduce that difference to numbers in a
> way is both balanced across the different nature of classes, and impossible to game.

But we judge the STUDENTS by the very clearly defined metrics you abhore applying to teachers, because we have to use something other than measuring the warm fuzzies to decide whether to pass them or hold them back. Nobody really disagrees with the notion because nobody can propose a better solution. Many of course object to the specifics various school systems around the world test on, but the notion of testing students itself isn't really debatable. Yet it is somehow wrong to then judge the productivity of the instructors and the schools based on the exact same metrics the schools themselves judge the success or failure of the students on.

It is the job of the schools and teachers to teach, if the students aren't learning who else do we hold accountable? If we aren't to judge them by their work product what do we judge them on? It would be like a factory that carefully tested each product before shipment but union regs forbade them from observing which workers/shifts/etc had the highest defect rate on the grounds that the product testing metrics were useless. Oh? Come again? You reply that my analogy is flawed, and I should assume some of the parts coming in are in defective batches and because some shifts just happen to get those cheap Chinese parts it isn't their fault. To which I'd reply, true unless we ALSO measure inputs. Which I do propose, test in and out. Also if some workers could work around bad parts by noticing them and culling them or otherwise fixing the defects on the fly I'd keep those and lose the stupid ones and not lose much sleep about the fairness or unfairness of it, even if the stupid ones were doing everything 'by the book.'

As to your complaint that it can be gamed, ok. Welcome to reality, any system can be gamed because any finite system of rules can't describe all possibilities and humans (some) are damned clever. The trick is to design the system to reward gaming in such a way that society wins along the lines I discussed above, where the smartest ones will gravitate to students where they are most needed because the teachers can 'game' the system to maximize revenue. Getting there will require a lot of tuning over years. But if we set metrics, competition, rewarding success and punishing failure as goals it is a market driven theory that will almost certainly yield results whereas the current system is proven not to work.

The current system also has pretty simple rules and is easy to game. Sit through an Edu Degree, get a job and expend some effort for a couple of years until tenure. Then you win. Do pretty much whatever the hell you want until you reach retirement age.

And that is the bottom line. The current system does not work. Defending it only makes you part of the problem. So option #1 is to admit that you are ok with the current notion that the school system is run for the benefit of the adults (if you don't vote, pay union dues or write grants you aren't important to the current system) and then STFU. Or you can admit something need to change and either sign on to my notion of measuring performance or tell us your different ideas to actually fix it.

> When we want to judge the quality of a book, we rely on human opinions (reviewers).

Not outside the art houses. In most of the book trade it is sales, a very quantifiable metric. In the academic book racket it is more often citations in other books and journals than raw sales. Reviews ca

Re:OMG Need More Moneyz!

[LordLucless]

And unless you work for a small private company, odds are there are productivity metrics. Try firing someone without em and watch how fast they lawyer up these days.

Yes. But they're not the sole criteria. You don't just fire the people who come up bottom of the metrics. The metrics are a warning signal that something might be wrong - you need human intervention to interpret them.

But we judge the STUDENTS by the very clearly defined metrics you abhore applying to teachers,

No we don't. We judge the students by their work. You're wanting to judge the teacher's by the student's work.

It is the job of the schools and teachers to teach, if the students aren't learning who else do we hold accountable?

Um, the students? The old adage about leading a horse to water springs to mind. It's impossible to forcibly teach someone. You can present the knowledge all you like, but you can't force it into their skulls for them.

In reality, if the student's bright, they're going to be learning despite the teacher. If they're not interested in learning at all, they're not going to, no matter how good the teacher. If they're average, then they'll learn well under a good teacher, and poorly under a poor one.

You reply that my analogy is flawed, and I should assume some of the parts coming in are in defective batches and because some shifts just happen to get those cheap Chinese parts it isn't their fault.

If the parts were sentient beings in their own right, who had entire lives and their own issues going on in the context of being assembled, then your analogy may have some point. As it is, it's simply a poor analogy, no matter how many caveats and addendums you add. A teaching environment needs to be symbiotic, with the student willing to learn, and the teacher able to teach. Factoring out the student as a widget, and putting the entire focus on the teacher is simply not a good model.

Also if some workers could work around bad parts by noticing them and culling them or otherwise fixing the defects on the fly I'd keep those and lose the stupid ones and not lose much sleep about the fairness or unfairness of it, even if the stupid ones were doing everything 'by the book.

So the teachers you'd keep are the ones that could play the political game well enough to shuffle the undesirables off onto other teachers. Those that try and educate their students to the best of their ability (do things by the book) are the ones that get the shaft. Great system.

The current system also has pretty simple rules and is easy to game. Sit through an Edu Degree, get a job and expend some effort for a couple of years until tenure. And that is the bottom line. The current system does not work. Defending it only makes you part of the problem.

Did you even read my post, or just start ranting as soon as the reply pane had loaded? In my country, teachers don't get tenure. I agree that tenure for K-12 is a stupid idea, and part of the problem. But just because a stupid idea is the cause of the problem doesn't mean another stupid idea's going to fix it.

Not outside the art houses. In most of the book trade it is sales, a very quantifiable metric.

And again, your love of metrics leaves you measuring the wrong thing. Sales measures the commercial success of a book, not its quality. I don't know of one single person who chooses what book to read by perusing the publisher's P&L statements. They choose what to read by reading reviews and following the recommendations of people they trust.

Caching?

[Aviancer]

I suppose that local caching of something as relatively static as a textbook is out of the question? My dead-tree edition books were often cached for 5-20 years. Really, how frequently does arithmetic change from year to year? Literature? Science and "Social Studies" I buy as being a little more dynamic, but still within a year?

Re:Caching?

[skids]

That would be contrary to the whole "send it to the cloud" trending mentality, which is aimed at saving local-server tech support costs.

Re:Caching?

[betterunixthanunix]

Yeah but then how do you enforce copyrights on those textbooks? You know, so that the school does not continue to use textbooks without paying the monthly access fee.

Re:Caching?

[Aviancer]

I was never very good at adhering to fashion fads. I suppose that's why I wasn't very popular at school.

Re:Caching?

[berashith]

The corporate overlords realy dont want you purchasing something that can be used for 5 - 20 years, when they can enforce a new version of licensed content every year. The big win is that they dont have to go through full publishing costs, but the student access must be fully renewed every year.

Re:Caching?

[betterunixthanunix]

I suppose that local caching of something as relatively static as a textbook is out of the question?

How do you ensure that the recurring fees are being paid? After all, the point of online textbooks is to bring in money for textbook publishers; making information available to students is just an unfortunate side effect.

Re:Caching?

[Hentes]

Most "material" that the broadband is used for is already saved on local servers.

Re:Caching?

[skids]

Actually schools' needs for high quality video conferencing is pretty pressing. Nothing less than 384Kbps is even passable. 768 is workable for some lectures, but a higher bandwdith and lower latency telepresence is needed for anything that involves more than a lecturer at a chalkboard. The crummy youtube-level quality web users put up with just doesn't cut it in an interactive learning environment.

Figure a class size of 24, 1000 students would be 20 simultaneous classes, and assume 10 of them have distance learning inbound or outbound, you're then up to at least 14Mbps of low-latency demand, which means more raw bandwidth than 14Mbps. 100Mbps per 1000 student is not much of an overestimate.

Re:Caching?

[tepples]

By dropping the non-free textbooks entirely and switching to freely licensed textbooks developed using resources provided by Wikimedia Foundation.

Re:Caching?

[skids]

1000 students would be 20 simultaneous classes, and assume 10

change propagation fail... that's 40 classes assume 20.

Re:Caching?

[betterunixthanunix]

With that attitude, you would think that the point of textbooks is to pass knowledge on to other people, rather than to make money for textbook publishers...

Re:Caching?

[poetmatt]

A school's need for relevant content is unlimited, explicitly. You have no idea what a school needs, unless you have a bunch of horrible teachers who teach from the book. Not all content is static, nor is this correct. Nor does it define whether a proxy is needed or not. Simply not relevant. Sorry, I disagree with you.

Don't think youtube/khan academy isn't/is useful, do think about how much bandwidth it would require for 1000 users simultaneously.
Proxies should be in place anyway to make bandwidth more efficient, but that's not an answer, it's one step of a much larger solution: network compression would benefit just as much as a proxy would as well.

Other schools ask questions via facebook, g+, etc for example.

Re:Caching?

[QuantumRiff]

I think its more for the "rent per year" charging for access..

Re:Caching?

[skids]

Well, on a more serious note, most schools already squid heavily, because it's built into their content filtering suite as an add-on feature.

But then, how often do you actually download truly "static" webpage that wasn't dynamically generated these days?

Re:Caching?

[AmiMoJo]

Kids need to learn how to find and investigate stuff online, not just access text books. Responsiveness is key to maintaining interest and attention too.

The focus in education has moved away from memorization towards being able to find the information you need. Obviously that has to be underpinned by strong basic skills in things like English and Maths, as well as good general knowledge of the particular subject being studied. Even when I was at school in the early 90s studying history there was as much emphasis put on being able to take a source and evaluate and interpret it as there was on being knowledgeable about the time period, which makes sense since I doubt many of us used out knowledge of WWI and the 1920s/30s much later in life.

Re:Caching?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a huge difference between a gigabit ethernet within the school, connecting to a cache, and a connection to the broader internet.

Re:Caching?

[ColdWetDog]

It appears that you've gone off your meds again, number 980855.

Please return to the reeducation cell immediately.

Re:Caching?

[Greenspark]

Aging textbooks were not old because they didn't need updating -- they were old because the publication, printing, and distribution an entire volume to modify a few elements was foolishly expensive. Therefore, textbooks were carefully written so as to exclude information that was would quickly become obsolete. We don't have to keep doing it that way. Examples can be current and relevant, and provide for a much more enriching experience. Links to web resources can be perpetually maintained. It's a very exciting new paradigm and we should be looking for ways to capitalize on its strengths rather than hobble it with the limitations of different media.

Re:Caching?

[a-zarkon!]

I have two children two years apart, in the public school system in the northeast US. Our school district is rated fairly well for the state, better than most but not as good as some.

Now that the context is established, let me say that I have been shocked and somewhat dismayed to see the annual changes to curriculum and approach at the elementary school. While I do understand that gains have been made in understanding childhood development and education, I really struggle to understand this constant churn from year to year. The students struggle with it as well. This is particularly noticeable in basic approaches to reading, spelling, and math. As an example, one year the focus will be on memorizing a list of 10 words, spelling them, and using them in sentences. The next year, the spelling quizzes are gone completely. Maybe this is a response to the standardized testing regimen that all schools are focusing on, but I have a tough time not feeling like this is some kind of ill-considered trend-chasing experiment and our communities' children are the unwitting guinea pigs.

While I'm in rant mode let me also express my surprise to find that precious little time is being spent on learning basic math facts. These children are being exposed to grouping, estimating, while they still don't know their basic addition/subtraction/multiplication/division tables. Having these facts committed to memory up front will save them a lot of time and effort down the road when they are trying to digest weightier subject matter. (Before you jump all over me, yes as a parent I have worked with my offspring to get them to know their math facts) Rote memorization may be boring, but it too is a skill that must be learned and why not learn it early on in the same way that's worked for at least the past 200 years? It's *not* broken!

OK so now that the rant is over - yes, caching is good and should be encouraged. Even if the texts are changing daily or weekly and being served "from the cloud" - there are still major performance gains and efficiencies to be found on the network with a little simple cache engine.

Re:Caching?

[BronsCon]

And you buy that equipment once and stop paying for it. Internet connectivity is an ongoing expense. Internet connectivity at the rate of 1gbps per 1000 students means an OC-24 for every 1200 students. So you're saying it doens't matter whether you need to spend $40k once or $40k monthly? Also, keep in mind that this is *per 1200 students* so a school with 5000 students would need 4 OC-24 connections to *ALMOST* neet that requirement, at a cost of $160,000 per month.

You need to spend the $40k initially in either case; but if everything is cached locally, an OC-3 should more than suffice for even the largest schools.

Re:Caching?

[SirGeek]

And if its for a classroom, why wouldn't they do ONE machine and an projection screen for the entire class to view it at the same time (instead of between their facebook and twitter updates) ?

Re:Caching?

[Chris Mattern]

Not if it was cached on the student's own hardware.

Re:Caching?

[Anonymous Coward]

The ability to update textbooks on the fly presents an opportunity for too much bias to enter into them.

Last years updating crew really didn't like president X, and while they are professional enough to not write up a case study on libel, it's easy to see a bit of a slant one way or another.... only to be swung back the following year when a new editing crew comes on-board, and they really like president X, but hate president Y.

Not to mention things that haven't entirely come to light. Should American history books include info about Stuxnet/Flame and our alleged involvement? Would anything have to be redacted a few years down the road? Keep textbooks on a 5+ year schedule at LEAST, so that enough time and peer review can be undergone for everything to be fully vetted by professionals. And that's just for Social Studies or other subject that are prone to change. How often do we really need to update our math books? Unless Euclid of Alexandria plans to rise from his grave and revise his (in)famous proof... I think we can keep Algebra course books static year in and year out.

Re:Caching?

[skids]

Generally they do this very thing, using a Polycom or BT set-top unit. That's what the above math represents -- the bandwidth cost of ONE classroom-quality bidirectional conferencing feed to a conference bridge.

Now if you are cheaping out and not using an outside conferencing service, which is common, any video-conference with more than two endpoints is going to require one of the particpants to run the multipoint bridge on their local codec. That means for that site they need to be able to support one session for each endpoint other than themselves. So a single 4-participant distance learning session can pretty much fill a T1 connection completely at the hosting codec's site, even when you are using crummy 384Kbps connections.

Re:Caching?

[DrgnDancer]

The whole point of this kind of this is that students can work at their own pace. Kids with greater aptitude in, say, writing will finish those "courses" quicker, whereas kids with greater math aptitude might finish those courses quicker. Teachers are there as a kind of facilitator/tutor to help when a kid gets stuck or appears to be bottle necked. I can't comment one way or the other on the effectiveness of this a learning tool (at least for younger children, it's always worked for me at the adult level), but to make it one computer and projector pretty much misses the entire point.

Re:Caching?

[Shadow99_1]

Having spent five years as the IT head for a school district I can tell you that much of it is following the trends in their field. Real data is hard to find and does not in fact always go to plan when you try it on your district's children. So the administrators see a growing trend to teach in XYZ form and the given improvement can be 10-30%, so they opt to try XYZ at their school. A year is typical for any such thing, so even if it doesn't seem to be working for them they will continue it for that period and evaluate it during that time. At the end they may have seen a -10% change in their students which decries the trend and rather than continue with it to see if the change reverses (because the teacher(s) teaching to XYZ were new to it or any of a hundred things) they instead decide to try another trend, say KXT instead the next year to see what effect it has.

Most of the gains and trends are caused by people looking at schools doing 'well' and trying to emulate them. However each group of children are different and respond differently, so the results vary. Three years ago I had looked at One-laptop per child programs and the reported stats varied all over the place. Some had 60% improvements in certain areas, others had neutral or slightly negative results. So when I discussed the topic I said that the highest gains are as much as 60% and the average was more like 10% with some results even being slightly negative. My CAO (Chief Academic Officer, equal to a superintendent) said "When you go in front of the board don't give them all that crap just say it's 60% gains! We would never get it approved if they didn't think this was the best course of action at least for the next year. After that we already have the stuff, so it doesn't matter."

Btw on the whole caching issue, I can say I'd never have gotten funding for it. I couldn't even get them to replace a partial working (it would freeze once every 14 days and require a reboot). They don't see a reason for large expenses of cash. It however is much easier to say we need an 'X' increase a month for added bandwidth. My school district had a shared 3 MB connection and as they transitioned to more and more online based resources we could clearly all see the effects. I was advising we go above our basic needs to around a 20 MB connection (when what we needed was more like 10) for some future-proofing. However no one could offer us 20 or even 10 and so we went to 7 instead.

Re:Caching?

[dnahelicase]

I suppose that local caching of something as relatively static as a textbook is out of the question? My dead-tree edition books were often cached for 5-20 years. Really, how frequently does arithmetic change from year to year? Literature? Science and "Social Studies" I buy as being a little more dynamic, but still within a year?

I'm not the person that would ever use the term "rofl", but if I ever did, it would be about this comment.

I find your rational thought and naivety amusing.

Caching a textbook locally would require a huge license and licensing system, or would certainly be illegal. Are you a pirate? Pirates would think that they can make local copies for their own use and the use of others in the name of education, but they would be doing harm to the industry. (Potentially millions or even billions of dollars in harm.)

Also, every textbook has to change every other year, or else the entire educational system dies. Everyone knows that. Being able to change every other week, while having an adjoining resources website, blog, and twitter feed will ensure that students are able to temporarily license access to this knowledge without any of the inherent evils that dead-tree format provided - such as copying, borrowing, reselling, or using once graduated.

Re:Caching?

[MickyTheIdiot]

Every time I mention a point like this it causes someone to do a knee-jerk "you commie, you think all profit is bad!!!11!!one" reaction, but this hits the nail on the head.

The general unspoken assumption by a large part of our society right now is profit can drive everything and the market can magically fix all problems. That's bunk because there isn't ONE human system that solves all problem, whether it be the free market system or Open Source software.

As a society we will have to get through this idiocy and eventually get back to the idea that there are some processes that we don't necessarily need or want to be for profit. I expect we will be a rough ride until then.

Re:Caching?

[cpu6502]

Just because you CAN buy a gold-plated car doesn't mean you should. Money is finite. We don't need to be spending ~40,000 a month (or ~$500,000 a year) on a high speed internet line when $10,000 worth of reusable textbooks can do the same task for an entire decade.

Re:Caching?

[zlives]

yes but the advertisements that will be displayed with the book pages change every few seconds...

Re:Caching?

[timeOday]

There is an unprecedented level of discontent with public education right now, which is resulting in an explosion of experimentation. Nobody is getting patted on the head for "sticking with what works" because there is no consensus on what that might be. Charter schools, for example, exist for no other reason than to create the "freedom to be more innovative" - and of course churn is the flipside of that.

The shift towards standardized testing, meanwhile, is meant to allow a variety of pedagogical methods, while putting them on an equal basis for evaluation. (Of course it has many issues of its own.)

As to your second rant, "back to basics" (including a shift back towards more rote memorization) is certainly among the fashionable movements now.

Re:Caching?

[Aviancer]

Bullshit.

A publisher could easily offer (as an example) a PKI based scheme to cache content for a specific period of time.

There are easy technical solutions to a variety of these kinds of issues.

Re:Caching?

[zlives]

so the students are not present at the schools... then you must take into account 80% (pulled it from thin air) of students surfing porn/playing games/whatever else these whipper snappers do these days... so BW needs really isn't that high ;)

Re:Caching?

[Reverand Dave]

This. Someone mod parent up please.

Re:Caching?

[Reverand Dave]

Based on the tacking cookies in your browser!

Re:Caching?

[Bengie]

Most schools/etc don't need the enterprise quality of an OC-24, cheaper fiber technologies exist. My state offers 1Gb dedicated connections for $10k/year to schools, where the fiber infrastructure exists. That's non-profit at-cost pricing.

Re:Caching?

[jimicus]

I don't know how it works in the US, but in the UK if it's not formally approved and blessed by various government and pseudo-government bodies, if it doesn't comply with at least a dozen different sets of regulations - regardless of how relevant they are - and it's not sold by a company that loudly proclaims itself to be a specialist in education that guarantees it'll work with existing end-user PCs, it's going to have the devil's own job being accepted by many schools.

Re:Caching?

[bugs2squash]

Every last one of the teachers at my kids' elementary school has qualifications out of the wazoo and you're telling me that they can't create a 5th grade math curriculum, even when permitted to share ideas with other teachers and collect together information from some of the many rich sources on the web ?

My 9th grade math teacher, whom I loathed, created all of his own worksheets hand-written and reproduced on a ditto machine and worked through the problems with the students, it was a highly effective approach.

If I were a teacher I might struggle with many things, the kids would probably run wild in the classrooms, but lack of suitable reading/'riting/'rithmetic examples and study material would not be the problem.

Re:Caching?

[itzdandy]

It is broken, America's schools underperform vs other 1st world countries. That is a real problem, in fact it will be the core problem in our country in the near future.

I don't argue that the fundamentals of +|-|/|x are essential, and that multiplication and division tables up to 12 are critical to core math skills. Massive amounts of memorization interferes with cognitive learning. Memorization does not contribute to higher skill sets beyond the basics, cognitive learning allows people to do advanced work with minimal research. Children do not need to memorize hundreds of equations, only to fundamentally understand how the equations work so that they can solve problems with ANY equation, for which they can discover quickly will all the data available to us.

maybe the core issue is the lowest common denominator education. maybe trying to find new, novel ways to teach every kid to be a math wiz is time that should have been spend identifying and elevating kids with potential in that subject matter.

Re:Caching?

[Dcnjoe60]

Schools needs for relevant content from the internet is fairly limited. Moreover, most of the content in question is static. This is the perfect place to deploy a forward proxy cache like squid.. this can reduce the need for expensive fat pipes to the internet.

Or just use real books. Yes, books are expensive, but if they last three years between replacements (and often go five), that cost per student goes down. However, even after the initial cost of going to these high speeds per 1,000 students, there is still the cost of maintenance of equipment and salaries. If cost is a factor, then fat pipes is not the solution.

Re:Caching?

[BronsCon]

An OC-24 is a bundle of 24 optical cables. To get the speeds offered by an OC-24 using optical cables, you need 24 of them. Therefore, what is being offered to the schools in your state is, in fact, OC-24.

But, you've still missed the point. An OC-3 can be had for $4k/mo, retail, in most places where fiber is available. Following the math, that would put an OC-3 in the $1k/year range for schools in your state. The $40k infrastructure buildout still needs to happen and, if done correctly, won't need to be upgraded for 5-10 years. In that time, the difference between $1k/yr and $10k/yr per 1000 students is $45-90k per 1000 students. In my example of the school with 5000 students. That's $225-450k the school district won't have to spend on that school during the lifetime of the installed infrastructure. To put it in terms of a single school year, consider a school district with 10 such schools; that's $450k per year wasted in the name of not caching.

But no, let's not cache content. It's not like our schools are facing a budget crisis or anything.

Re:Caching?

[cdrguru]

I saw this in the 1960s... well, I didn't see it as much as I experienced it. I went to 1st grade with a "Dick and Jane" book and I learned how to read. Pretty well, if I do say so myself. My sister went to the same school 4 years later and came home with an entirely different book that stressed some kind of phonics where words were spelled "phonetically" rather than using English. She did not learn how to read.

The fevor over experimentation has increased since then to the point today where there are hundreds of curriculm packages available to schools and little guidance as to what makes one of them better than another. In many districts you end up with a decision being made by a local school board, in others it is mandated by the state education board.

In my opinion the basic problem is the mainstreaming of children of vastly different abilities in the same classroom. Today we have in a single elementary classroom children that have been reading for a long time, children beginning to learn to read and children that are seemingly resistent to learning to read. This is extremely frustrating for the teacher which certainly does percolate up through the entire heirarchy to the school board. The result in recent years has been to shove a curriculm package into the teacher's hands and tell them to "teach this" and everything will work out fine. It isn't working out fine. And the outcomes are, well, predictable.

The "new age" philosophy that everyone has to succeed and there are no "losers" just winners is one thing. The problem is the schools are faced with a societal problem that there simply is no "new age" solution for - you cannot take a child that doesn't know how to read in the 2nd grade and put them in a classroom with students that are reading with the hope they are going to pick it up by assimilation. What ends up happening is not that the lowest performing children pick things up by assimilation or that the children help each other. What does in fact happen is the classroom ends up operating at the lowest common denominator so the lowest performing students are not left behind staring out the window. Of course, this isn't fun for the students that have already mastered the material being covered again for them. And there is little fulfillment for the teacher.

We got ourselves into this situation because parents will not accept that their child is not the smartest kid in the school. Their lack of acceptance of the state of their child translates into potential lawsuits for the school unless they conform to the parent's beliefs about their child. When this happened in the 1950s (and it did even then) it wasn't common so the school could brush it off and eventually someone acquainted the parents with reality. Now, 60 years later it is entirely too common and it cannot be brushed off. The schools know they have to "mainstream" everyone so there are no special students and nobody has to repeat a grade. This means the spectum in the classroom is from the special needs student that isn't understanding to the exceptional student that is a grade level or two ahead of everyone else.

The situation is terrible for the teachers and the administration solution is to keep throwing different packages at the teachers to try to make it managable. It isn't working very well.

Re:Caching?

[KingMotley]

Connections to schools aren't that expensive. Most of the infrastructure is all bought and paid for through the 1996 telecommunications act. Schools, universities, and libraries get internet connectivity at absurdly cheap prices. In fact, in the state of Illinois, they don't even have to connect to the internet directly, they only have to get a line to one of the very many connection points to the state funded network, which has more than enough connectivity to the internet to handle any workload.

Re:Caching?

[AthanasiusKircher]

I don't argue that the fundamentals of +|-|/|x are essential, and that multiplication and division tables up to 12 are critical to core math skills.

As someone who has actually taught high school math, including trying to teach algebra II students who could not do basic arithmetic (I'm talking things like 12 minus 5), I dare you to try to think of ways to get students to actually understand how algebra works, what its applications are, etc. when they can't manipulate even the most basic equation without a calculator to tell them that 12 - 5 is 7.

Is it possible? Yeah, I managed to do it with some kids. But these kids mostly had a fundamental barrier preventing them from doing just about anything in higher level math, because they simply couldn't manipulate even small numbers on a basic level.

Knowing basic arithmetic is not just memorization -- with it should come some more intuitive understanding about how numbers relate to each other, and elementary schools should try to convey that information along with any memorization task. The issue isn't so much that a particular student doesn't happen to know the exact fact of 12 - 7 as much as that the student has no intuitive grasp of what the relationships between "12," "-," and "7" are, which should at least give him an intuitive sense of what the answer to that relationship might be.

Massive amounts of memorization interferes with cognitive learning.

Not true, unless it becomes too dominant in the curriculum that it doesn't allow time for anything else. I'm not a huge fan of lots of memorization in schools, but actually having some knowledge in your brain is not only incredibly useful for solving problems that require that information, but it also makes it much, much, much more likely that you'll ever meditate upon that information and make higher-level connections within it.

Memorization does not contribute to higher skill sets beyond the basics, cognitive learning allows people to do advanced work with minimal research.

I have no clue how one can do "cognitive learning" without knowing any facts about anything. I've heard hundreds of hours of educational theory BS yammered at me in numerous pedagogy classes and conferences, but the reality is that critical thinking requires something to think about. If your brain is empty, you can never make connections beyond whatever is on the page or the website in front of you, which improverishes your ability to think with any breadth.

I'm sorry, but you assertions are a load of crap.

Re:Caching?

[itzdandy]

I don't argue that the fundamentals of +|-|/|x are essential, and that multiplication and division tables up to 12 are critical to core math skills.

As someone who has actually taught high school math, including trying to teach algebra II students who could not do basic arithmetic (I'm talking things like 12 minus 5), I dare you to try to think of ways to get students to actually understand how algebra works, what its applications are, etc. when they can't manipulate even the most basic equation without a calculator to tell them that 12 - 5 is 7.

If it wasn't clear by my statement that fundamentals are essential, that is what I meant. I think that 12 -5 = 7 certainly falls below the high water mark of multiplication and division tables. In other words, you are beginning to argue a point that needs not be argued

Is it possible? Yeah, I managed to do it with some kids. But these kids mostly had a fundamental barrier preventing them from doing just about anything in higher level math, because they simply couldn't manipulate even small numbers on a basic level.

And these kids should probably have extra effort put towards then understanding the critical math that is required in day-to-day life and not be pressed into more advanced mathematics studies. Subjects that are hard for students to learn (hard in the sense that they fall behind the other students) is likely to be nearly impossible to retain or recall. These kids skill set may be in another subject. Don't waste any time on the more advanced stuff that they will not learn or retain.

Knowing basic arithmetic is not just memorization -- with it should come some more intuitive understanding about how numbers relate to each other, and elementary schools should try to convey that information along with any memorization task. The issue isn't so much that a particular student doesn't happen to know the exact fact of 12 - 7 as much as that the student has no intuitive grasp of what the relationships between "12," "-," and "7" are, which should at least give him an intuitive sense of what the answer to that relationship might be.

I agree. My point was that memorizing formulas and functions rarely benefits the average student/adult. Understanding the methods is what should be taught. The basics still apply though and swiftly solving any addition or subtraction well into the hundreds is very manageable with very little memorization. Beyond that, the average person will not have the memory when they reach 21 years old to do in their head anyway (some say as little as 7 digits are easily remembered and available for doing mental math). Techniques to overcome these limits would be a good part of the curriculum.

Massive amounts of memorization interferes with cognitive learning.

Not true, unless it becomes too dominant in the curriculum that it doesn't allow time for anything else. I'm not a huge fan of lots of memorization in schools, but actually having some knowledge in your brain is not only incredibly useful for solving problems that require that information, but it also makes it much, much, much more likely that you'll ever meditate upon that information and make higher-level connections within it.

I believe it has been stated, with various degrees of truth and accuracy, that most people do not memorize well in school settings. I believe that interest in a subject matter is the only way students or adults pursue higher level mathematics (or any subject). Those students with aptitude and interest should definitely be moved into classes that challenge them, while disinterested students should probably be guided to subjects they are more apt too (again, not ignoring the basics)

Memorization does not contribute to higher skill sets beyond the basics, cognitive learning allows people to do advanced

Re:Caching?

[jmorris42]

> An OC-24 is a bundle of 24 optical cables.

No. An OC is roughly the same as a copper based T-3 which is of course based on the classic T-1. which is itself based on carrying two dozen 64Kbps calls multiplexed together. An OC-24 is therefore about the same as two dozen T-3 lines but would normally be delivered on a single pair of fiber. I know the single pair of fibers on our wall that currently delivers only 30Mbps can deliver anything up to 1000Mbps with nothing more than a phone call and a signature on an updated contract, no truck roll needed.

Re:Caching?

[jmorris42]

> Connections to schools aren't that expensive.

Yes they are.

> Most of the infrastructure is all bought and paid for through the 1996 telecommunications act.
> Schools, universities, and libraries get internet connectivity at absurdly cheap prices.

And because they don't see the true price of it they buy services they would never consider if they actually paid fair market value for it. But there is no bandwidth fairy, there is a reason there is a whole subculture of ISPs servicing SLC funded sites, it is great money with little risk because they are all government customers and most of the actual money is OPM. But it is being extracted in taxes from each and every one of us who uses a phone or accesses the Internet in the form of a special tax labeled "Universal Service Fund" on your bill. It also pays for the newly discovered 'right' to have a cell phone paid for by someone else and plans are afoot to jack the tax another notch to pay for the about to be discovered 'right' to Internet access even if you choose to live in a spot where it isn't practical.

> In fact, in the state of Illinois, they don't even have to connect to the internet directly,
> they only have to get a line to one of the very many connection points to the state funded
> network, which has more than enough connectivity to the internet to handle any workload.

On the other hand, this is a very good idea. Too bad we would never consider it around here in Louisiana.

Re:Caching?

[guises]

While I'm in rant mode let me also express my surprise to find that precious little time is being spent on learning basic math facts. These children are being exposed to grouping, estimating, while they still don't know their basic addition/subtraction/multiplication/division tables.

No. No no no, this kind of crap is why people hate math. If you do the grouping, the estimating, all of the interesting problems, the physical problems, the engineering and financial problems - the really routine stuff, all of the adding and multiplying, will fall out from that. You don't need to treat math like it's a chore, where you endlessly work through mindless repetitive route problems.

Re:Caching?

[Shadow99_1]

Actually I looked into multiple connections and bonding them at our end, but I couldn't get them to sign off on hardware to do the bonding and no ISP really wanted to do it either. I had wanted to do business class DSL or cable as backup to our lowly 3 mbps fiber (yes that slow connection was a fiber one). My area rather sucks for data connections, and this was 3 years ago now.

While I don't live there anymore this wikipedia page discusses the city the school was in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie

Caching?

[vinod4linux]

Schools needs for relevant content from the internet is fairly limited. Moreover, most of the content in question is static. This is the perfect place to deploy a forward proxy cache like squid.. this can reduce the need for expensive fat pipes to the internet.

100Mbps for..... text...books

[iamhassi]

100Mbps for textbooks? Text. Um. If your text requires 100Mbps you're doing it wrong. And stop throwing around 1,000 users as if all 1,000 are going to download a gigabyte file all at the same time. Maybe a few dozen out of 1,000 would be using the network at the same time, and if they're actually reading books online and not streaming lolz cat videos in HD there is no way 100Mbps is required.

Re:100Mbps for..... text...books

[betterunixthanunix]

100Mbps for textbooks

It's a new DRM system.

Re:100Mbps for..... text...books

[Jane Q. Public]

What he said. "Textbooks" is really a misnomer these days. "Schoolbooks" should be used instead. Today's schoolbooks are typically full of color graphics. Have you looked at a math or physics book lately?

Re:100Mbps for..... text...books

[QuantumRiff]

I used to work at a small 2 year college. We had about 30 classrooms, a few thousand FTE students. (12 credits = 1 FTE).. We got complements when we went from 2 to 4 Mb/s. The compliments were all about how much faster it was than their cable modems. (in our area, 5MB cable was the norm). But we had much, much lower latency, and a squid proxy server. I think the most I ever saw online at one time was about 80 people. However, most are reading something, or just have the internet connection open in the background. I think myspace was about half our bandwidth, from all the streaming music video's. I'm sure things are busier now (they moved to 8MB recently) but even the heaviest Facebook page is pretty small when you consider that the kids are reading stuff at the same time. The streaming stuff that caused issues from time to time had nothing to do with education, and we would ask students nicely to stop.

Re:100Mbps for..... text...books

[skovnymfe]

9am. 5000 students accessing the same non-cached 25MB PDF on a 4mbps line.

Do I need to make the calculations, or can you see where I'm going with this?

Re:100Mbps for..... text...books

[im_thatoneguy]

Textbooks are often well illustrated. And the old style of textbook is a dinosaur that could do better. The idea is interactive game like lesson plans with quizzes and work areas to help practice the skills or memorize the lessons.

I took a licensing course online this weekend to pass a certification course (which it also tested for online) and without broadband it would have been painfully slow waiting to advance to the next page. There were also video sections... and if a kid has to wait a minute to watch a minute long video--we're wasting a lot of school resources (teachers, librarians etc.) to have kids sitting around looking at waiting bars.

Re:100Mbps for..... text...books

[zlives]

you broke it by saying "same non-cached"

Re:100Mbps for..... text...books

[MickyTheIdiot]

"in my day we had TEXT in our books.. and WE LIKED IT THAT WAY!"

Now get off my lawn.

Report link

[Anonymous Coward]

After digging through two links at NetworkWorld, here's the original report.

American schools ? Nay. ALL schools.

[billcopc]

At first, I thought 100mbps seemed a bit low, after all it's only 100kbps per user, but pragmatically it's more like 3mbps per classroom. You don't need to be streaming individual content to each kid. As much as I despise the overt brainwashing that is most K-12 education, if those subservient lemmings can come out with a bit more content between the ears, maybe they'll be better equipped to think for themselves and add value to their surroundings, unlike the current sad state of affairs.

re: Moar

[khasim]

From TFA:

"Students shouldn't go to school and wonder if they turn on the light, is it going to dim the light in another room?" she said.

Trust me. They won't even consider that possibility. It's only a problem when it affects them.

Students also need to have access to broadband outside school, Fox said. "Students need to be able to leave school without wondering, 'Can I watch my teacher's algebra video when I get home?'" she said.

And that is the core problem.

The report, called " The Broadband Imperative," further suggests that schools should upgrade their networks to support speeds of 1Gbps per 1,000 users in five years.

Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?

I'd be looking at huge caching servers first.

Think, McFly...

[Frosty Piss]

Um. If your text requires 100Mbps you're doing it wrong. Um. If your text requires 100Mbps you're doing it wrong.

It's *not* a "text file". It's more likely a locked down PDF or a similarly "heavy" format.

Reduce those fractions!

[pedrop357]

10 mb for every 100 users
1 mb for every 10 users

OR expand them
1 gb for every 10,000 users

Depends on Controls

[Dakiraun]

Speaking as a Network admin at a major university, the amount of bandwidth-per-user really depends on the levels of control the school is allowed (or willing) to apply to the user's Network usage.

For example, in our residences, students are told they have unfiltered access to the Internet, as in, they are allowed to use any software they wish. The only stated restrictions are overall bandwidth related on a per-day basis. Behind the scenes, a we use packet shaping hardware to limit the total amount of per-user bandwidth usable for such things as P2P or VoIP (to prevent super-nodes) but otherwise leave it alone. In this model, 100Mbps per 1000 students is inadequate, but only just barely. We currently have it at approximately 120Mbps per 1000 students.

Under tighter control circumstances, where P2P is disabled and/or other controls, caps, and so on are enacted, you can likely get away with less bandwidth. Other networks we distribute have such tighter controls, and allow us to dial the number down further to around 70Mbps per 1000 students (without any web censorship).

Re:Depends on Controls

[skids]

This is pretty close to the situation in our network, and I suspect these are pretty typical numbers for a higher education residential campus.

Re:Depends on Controls

[ganjadude]

I havent been in a college in a while, but while I was there in 2003 as a freshman, we had 2 separate networks, the academic network and the dorm network, with VPN connection between the 2. Using that method, based on your work, What would you say the needs of simply the academic side of the network is?

Re:Depends on Controls

[Dakiraun]

We have similar - a residence network and the main campus network. On the main campus network we have a bit more control in that we are not acting as an ISP that provides completely unrestricted access. We do not allow much P2P, and are quick to lock a host that abuses bandwidth. I would estimate the bandwidth requirements for the main network sit around 60M per student. The only reason it is that much is because of the recent spike in the use of educational video streaming by the professors, which is more of a misuse issue (IE, professors should pre-download the video they want people to see and show it on a single display unit rather than telling people to go look at it on-line all at once).

It is inevitable though that the bandwidth-per-student counters will continue to increase, even though the majority of that usage is likely non-academic (as is the case now).

Future Student Excuses

[pkinetics]

I submitted my homework, but the intertubes are full and until they are cleared you won't receive my homework.

Re:Future Student Excuses

[ocdude]

This excuse already exists. I run a help desk for a LMS at a university, and I hear this pretty much non-stop from students. It's the new "the dog ate my homework".

Re:Future Student Excuses

[Virtucon]

Ted Stevens is still dead.

Requirements != Capability ~ Insanity

[tiberus]

My wife is a kindergarten teacher. In order for her students to access the content she is required to teach them they must first logon to the machines in the computer lab. (I'll avoid a diatribe on the woes of the poor password practices they are forced to teach these minions...) It can often take 1/3 of her classes computer lab time just to log on; granted much of this wasted time is due to the fact that kindergarteners can't remember their passwords but, an equal amount is also caused by the lag caused when the network is flooded with their logon requests (she has less than 20 students).

Once they've accomplished the herculean task of getting the little minions logged onto the lab computers the real fun begins. Most of the content is only available online from the publishers of the text books the school uses. Adding insult to injury the publishers sites are difficult to navigate often requiring the students to manually type in long cryptic URLs that would make torrent users eyes bleed. While much of the content is colorful, animated and has pleasing sound effects try and imagine what accessing this content is like on a network that can't handle a few dozen simultaneous logons.

While I'm a fan of using online resources, the schools (as directed by their boards of education, county governments etc.) seem to have truly put the digital cart before the horse in the mad dash to move toward education online. Also without competent, which of course often means properly paid, tech support (she was once told by a tech the printer wouldn't print because she was using a japanese USB cable) adding bandwidth is pointless.

Re:Requirements != Capability ~ Insanity

[drinkypoo]

Passwords for kindergarteners? Seriously? What ever happened to the guest account, virtualization, deepfreeze, anything?

Re:Requirements != Capability ~ Insanity

[tiberus]

Also without competent, which of course often means properly paid, tech support (she was once told by a tech the printer wouldn't print because she was using a japanese USB cable) adding bandwidth is pointless.

Most of you seem to have missed the above... I know that with a small amount of vision and planning great leaps forward could be made in the usability of these systems. The problem is that the persons to implement and support that infrastructure simply don't exist. The number of botched upgrades, system outages and the overall quality of the network are testament to that. It's doubtful that anyone with vision would be willing to work for the pay most county school systems are able and willing to pay.

Great ideas but, these folks ain't ever gonna be runnin' anything but, Windows.

Re:Requirements != Capability ~ Insanity

[kenh]

In our school district, computer usage in kindergarten is minimal (three or four computers per kindergarten class, some have none at the teacher's request).

We have NO password requirement for K-2 students, it can be anything they want (123), but they also have no email access and typically don't access internet (running local "edutainment" programs on Macs.

What state requires computer usage in Kindergarten?

Re:Requirements != Capability ~ Insanity

[jmorris42]

> It's doubtful that anyone with vision would be willing to work for the pay most
> county school systems are able and willing to pay.

That isn't the problem. I'm way out in flyover country and even our school system pays enough I'd take it considering it is almost as secure as being a teacher. And remember, it is the benefits and job security that make working for the government attractive, until quite recently it wasn't the actual money and things are in the process of correcting back to that historical norm. But I have dealt with them enough to know better, it isn't the money that makes me conclude I'd rather do handjobs for cash if things were ever that bad. It is the knowledge that I'd be dealing with weapons grade stupid on an hourly basis even if I were running their IT shop.

Re: Moar

[skids]

Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?

When you get up to buying a gig, not as much /Mbps as the smaller allotments. But you are right, that would be a stretch for most institutions, mainly because their routers/firewalls/content-filtering/etc is not sized for the number of connections/pps that such a pipe would support. They'd be looking at a full re-buy and reprovisioning of their entire gateway path.

Next up

[jones_supa]

Coming soon in Ask Slashdot: "I was assigned to set up a school network (about 100Mbps for 1000 users)..."

Re: Moar

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say caching servers is still doing it wrong. If thousands of students in a single building need access to "online textbooks and collaboration tools", why aren't those services hosted either on the premises or in some kind of colocation facility with a dedicated pipe?

Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

Rather than place what cannot be more than 10gb of textbooks for the whole school on a local server for students of the school, lets run $10,000/mo fiber to every classroom. The insanity of government waste obviously knows no bounds. The audacity of government "IT managers" is nauseating. What? Is everyone stupid now? We can't count? I know that textbooks don't require a 100 or 1000mbit connection! I don't care if you have 10,000 people per 100mbit! Get a fucking clue! Store commonly downloaded things localaly. Shit, you morons, put the fucking textbook on the local machine (DUH!). Since when is this moronic behavior acceptable?

While Rome burns the ubermench in the government fiddle away with these "solutions". Now we'll be told for every dollar that we spend on this internet connection we can expect to see 1 trillion dollars in returns in as few as 5 years! Of course, as with every single estimate the government makes, it will be off by orders of magnitude and end up costing 1 trillion dollars in 2 years. At the end of the day I predict that the schools in question will have <10mbit connection at the price of 1000mbit connection, it will somehow drive up the price of internet service for everyone and increase educational spending greatly. All of which will have a negative impact on grades.

And really, fellow geeks, who thinks that computers on a kids desk during class are anything but a huge distraction from learning? I know if I had a computer at my desk during school, I'd be all about hacking the shit outa that machine and 0% on the lesson. More than anyone, the government is bound by the law of unintended consequences.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

10,000 dollars per month for 100mb fiber? Where the fuck do you live? And people don't need only textbooks, half the works for class will be send in using an online platform. These things can include small things but also bigger projects that may be a few MB, if your whole class has to upload a few MB at the end of class, but it takes 10 minutes for it to be uploaded, you got a problem. Never mind the number of times we had to install some extra program somewhere during class. The wireless can already be slow, but if you need a 10MB file with a whole class of 20, thats not something you want to wait very long on. Given a 1000 students, there are destined to be a bunch of people needing access to something at every moment.

My school has a 1gbps for about a 1000 students. And it sure as hell doesn't cost them 10000 per month. Maybe a 200 dollars.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

They're talking per 1000 students. So before you start calling me out on bad calculations, maybe you should so some calculations of your own.

So, for gigabit, that's between $2000 and $5000 /mo. So if you have a school with 10,000 kids. You do the math smart guy. Let me just say, I was being conservative in my cost estimate.

if your whole class has to upload a few MB at the end of class

If your class has to upload a few MB of data at the end of class, you're not a very good educator are you? Why, pray tell, are the students doing anything on a computer? Most likely, and this is an assumption, it's a complete waste of time. Computers are nothing but a distraction for classrooms. Individually, kids using computers can be educational, but in a classroom setting it's nothing but pure distraction.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[jonnythan]

$200? Where do you live? The year 2035?

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

Here's a better idea. How about we don't spend so god damn much? How about we don't tax as much? And why not address my specific valid criticisms instead of turning all lib-tard?

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[mSparks43]

The UK has JANET for educational use, SuperJanet4 is currently 10Gbps. Costs virtually nothing to run fibre between schools (let alone $10,000 per month per school) and upgrade the routers. No reason they can't OWN THEIR OWN FIBRE.
I already have 50Mbps at home, going to 100Mbps sometime soon, with probably a 20Mbps backup - all for me.
Tech is moving quickly, keep up or fall behind.
You seem to think falling behind is the best option.
More fool you.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

Is there some cost/benefit analysis you have that I'm not privy to? I declare computers in a classroom are a distraction, and you just ignore that part. I'm saying, unless it's a computer class you shouldn't be using a computer. You don't need a computer to learn math, English etc., they are not helping anything. They are nothing but a huge distraction. Just read some of the anticdotal data in the comments to this story. Kindergarteners logging into a CMS to view textbooks? You seriously think that's educational? I guess they'll learn crappy CRM authentication systems.

And now you're talking about schools mantling their own fiber! I'm sorry, are they going to employ their own lien men and NOC operators? You also gota realize that the UK is like the size of California. No sorry, quite a bit smaller. And that's just 1 of 50 states that need to be interconnected. Ever hear of alaska? Ya, it's like the size of France, who thinks that'll be cheap to fiber up? I'll bet that it should cost the same to cross 20,000 miles of roads as it does to cross 2,000 miles. Maybe you can find me a single citation for the cost your talking about. I've looked up the prices, my estimate is quite conservative. Your price of "virtually nothing" is a laughable as it is fantastic. As in: it only exists in your fantasy.

"I already have 50Mbps at home, going to 100Mbps sometime soon, with probably a 20Mbps backup - all for me."

I'm sure that makes it easy to download all those text books. But seriously, what the hell are you doing with 50mbps? Oh I'm sure you have a really good reason to need to double that bandwidth too. 20mbit backup? Give me a break! What are you Warren Buffet? You keep a fucking backup internet connection you pay a monthly fee for? Oh wait! You must work for the government!

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

One reason:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium Area Total: 30,528 km2 ( 11,787 sq mi )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA Area Total 9,826,675 km2 ( 3,794,101 sq mi )

Get a clue.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[fnj]

You mean it's not true that 640 Kbps is enough for anyone? :-)

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[timeOday]

Look, there are plenty of people like yourself who assume it's all easy, if it were just turned over to good old fashioned common sense. Who can't, for the life of them, see why things are as they are. (Must be corruption).

Where is your proof of concept? Why isn't there a city in Montana where they still meet in single-room schoolhouses (taught by an old maid on a meager salary) that churns out salt-of-the-earth folks who can best whatever the foreigners have to offer?

It's because that glorified past never really existed, and certainly doesn't exist now.

As for this specific issue, it's not just about downloading digital copies of textbooks. Not by a long shot.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

Computers in computer classes are fine with me. It's a requirement. You still don't need gbps to use them. I don't care what it is you're programming. I'm a professional computer programmer. You don't need that kind of bandwidth to write computer programs. Actually, I can't think of any reason you would need a lot of bandwidth while teaching programming, let alone teaching hardware. This is what I'm talking about. Does everyone think everyone else is just stupid? I know perfectly well that 1-5mbps is plenty for anyone unless you start talking about specific applications: video chat, bittorent, watching videos. All of which have no place on a students desktop. And what about the potential for abuse? Aren't you concerned that students will become distracted by the computers and not pay any attention to the lesson ( he asks knowing the answer yes ).

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Nethead]

Clue: This is in Bumfuck Eastern Washington State.

http://localtel.net/dev/oecgi3.exe/O4W_PAGE?page_id=DouglasCountyInternet

Yep, $42 fro 100Mb/s, up and down. It is actually the only option.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Nethead]

Schools have been doing networks for decades; http://www.esd105.org/technology-and-records

Alaska has metro fiber in all major cities (in AK a major city is one with more that 10,000 people) and they are all connected on an MPLS backbone. I remember setting up circuits on it back in 2002.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Bengie]

And 90% of the USA lives within a densely populated city. Get a clue.

This is why AT&T can claim it covers 90% of the USA while only covering 10% of the land.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

You're comparing apples and oranges. Right now for most people 100mbit service residential is about $100/mo if you live in an urban area, much higher if you live in a rural area. But that's why, it's a lot more line to maintain. So rural schools can expect to pay a lot more than the $42 you're parading around. Your argument is disingenuous, but it illustrates my point perfectly. Because the U.S.A. is so much larger it costs orders of magnitude more to create infrastructure for. In tiny countries even the rural areas aren't too far from the capitol city.

How far is Leggett, California from the nearest urban center? My sister lives there now, it's a real city! Middle of nowhere. I think you would need to travel the width of Japan to even get to a major urban area. People living in Leggett don't expect to get cheap internet service anytime soon, and that's their choice, they want to be out in the middle of nowhere. But now they're being used as pawns in this weird statistics game. Ya, they don't have 100mbit service, and why the hell would they, it's of no use to them, when it becomes needed it will show up in the form of Verizon or Cox peddling flyers "FIOS is coming to your area!" or what not. That's pretty much how capitalism naturally works. Supply and demand. It's a indefatigable law of nature. There is plenty of high speed service in the urban areas, and very little in the rural areas.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

I don't understand your comment. Are you saying if you live in a rural part of the U.S.A. then go to hell? I'm not sure about the 90% figure, but the other 10% are going to pay more for internet service and infrastructure in rural areas is going to cost a lot more. Is there something I'm saying that is contradictory? Rural areas in tiny countries are never far away from the capitol and benefit from that.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

What is this link you've provided? Where does it say they install fiber cables across cities?

Alaska has metro fiber in all major cities (in AK a major city is one with more that 10,000 people) and they are all connected on an MPLS backbone. I remember setting up circuits on it back in 2002.

And how far along are they in getting their fiber setup to rural schools? Or are they not going to be getting the cheap fiber? Even cheap fiber isn't that cheap. It's cheap in relation to the same connection on traditional lines.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Bengie]

I'm saying your argument only applies to the minority and does not explain why the majority, whom are in cities, may not get access to decent internet. I guess I'm saying your argument is only wrong most of the time. Don't use corner cases and talk like it's common.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

Show me the numbers. I'm going to remain skeptical until I see a need for this. So far they say "textbooks" and I'm not buying it in a really big way. I think the library and computer labs need computers, every teacher should have a computer. If students MUST have computers they should get a CHEAP DURABLE tablet with all the text books the school provides flashed on the device. The device should be so locked down that they can't do anything but open text books. The internet is nothing but a waste of time for students ( and me apparently ). They should get an offline copy of wikipedia and a few other sites. If space on the device is an issue the content can be installed on the schools server and wifid into the device on demand. As far as video conferencing goes, that shouldn't be a daily thing for every classroom, so when it does happen, just make sure there isn't more than 2 or 3 happening at once. If cost was no object, we should just build auditoriums for every classroom. But cost matters and there are such things as boondoggles. Just schedule video conferences so faculty can share the bandwidth amicably. I don't think it's a great idea to blow millions of dollars on highly questionable solutions while we're laying off teachers to avoid budget shortfalls and have classrooms with 60+ students per teacher.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[rb12345]

And now you're talking about schools mantling their own fiber! I'm sorry, are they going to employ their own lien men and NOC operators?

That'd be done either by whatever organisation runs the local school system or some group set up specifically as an ISP for the schools. (Assuming we're using JANET as an example...)

You also gota realize that the UK is like the size of California. No sorry, quite a bit smaller. And that's just 1 of 50 states that need to be interconnected. Ever hear of alaska? Ya, it's like the size of France, who thinks that'll be cheap to fiber up? I'll bet that it should cost the same to cross 20,000 miles of roads as it does to cross 2,000 miles. Maybe you can find me a single citation for the cost your talking about. I've looked up the prices, my estimate is quite conservative. Your price of "virtually nothing" is a laughable as it is fantastic. As in: it only exists in your fantasy.

This excuse comes up way too often. I imagine it's perfectly easy to wire up New York and its surrounding areas for not much more than Sweden. Meanwhile, there seems to be nowhere that has 100Mb/s Internet in the US that isn't sat on a university WAN. There is nothing at all stopping an ultrafast ISP being set up specifically in San Francisco, New York or other cities and ignoring anywhere remotely rural.

"I already have 50Mbps at home, going to 100Mbps sometime soon, with probably a 20Mbps backup - all for me."

I'm sure that makes it easy to download all those text books. But seriously, what the hell are you doing with 50mbps? Oh I'm sure you have a really good reason to need to double that bandwidth too.

I imagine he's using Virgin at home, in which case the speed doubling is their doing, not the poster's choice...

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Bengie]

Cheap relative to under-educated children caused by a lack of decent network connections. The modern school-room will allow for real-time video conferencing and video-streaming. you lack of vision astounds me. Humanity doesn't progress out of need, but out of want. Eventually the want turns into a need, but we're all the better for it. 200 year ago, people didn't need the internet/phones/etc. If you suddenly removed the internet and all phones/etc, how would society cope? Not very well I predict.

Heck, by your logic, we don't even need society either. What is the bare essentials for life anyway? Probably none of the luxuries society provides.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

Hold on. He says that in Belgum he pays less than $100 for 100/100 connection. That's about on par with what I pay in California LA area. I have FIOS and pay $75/mo for 80/80. So our urban areas, at least my urban area, pays about the same rate. As you go away from major urban areas the cost increases. In Belgium one can only get so far away from the capitol before entering into France or whatever.

Schools, just like business pay more for internet service, I'm sure you know that. And I looked up the price for 1000mbit connections and it's about $2000-$5000/mo depending on the provider. 100mbit is about 1/5th the price. But it's quite a lot all the same. And it doesn't cost anywhere near what I pay.

You gota realize that the government doesn't seem to care to much about individual situation so I'm sure any mandate will disproportionately harm rural and poor schools and provide them with a service that is of questionable cost/benefit return. At the same time we're laying off teachers due to budget shortfalls and already have classes with more than 50 kids per classroom. Tell me, if you just found out you're getting a pay cut, would that be the time to upgrade your internet service?

If I was "king for the day" I would declare that all schools stop teaching all this extraneous bull shit and double down on math and hard sciences. Nobody needs to know about the first gay native american activist. As fascinating as that is it really has no place in the classroom. Learning about math and sicence at its earlyest stages (thru highschool) need not involve a single computer. I'm fine with tablets-in-place-of-textbooks. So long as that's ALL they can do, no facebook, web access etc..

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Nethead]

The price I showed you was for very rural central Washington. The county put the fiber in and a local ISP rents it. One town, Grand Coulee, doesn't even have T-Mobile service but the tire store has 100Mb service. The county put in the fiber to attract high-tech companies. I guess it worked since Microsoft just built a huge ass data center in Quincy, WA. I've seen 100Mb fiber drops to single-wides in orchards.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

Meanwhile, there seems to be nowhere that has 100Mb/s Internet in the US that isn't sat on a university WAN.

Have you been living under a rock? In the U.S. every major city has 100mbit+ net service offered by many providers to residents and business alike. It would more difficult to not find 100mbit in a major urban area than it would be to find it. Even one of my several detractors on this thread offered a link to <$50/mo 100/100. I got FIOS as do many people. Cox and Charter offer 100mbit.. So.... There's that for ya.

Oh, and in Belgum or Japan or Sweeden or wherever, what's it cost to get a colocated machine on the backbone of every major network in the world? Becuase, ahh, here in Los Angeles we sort of have THIS.

Beat that Belgium.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[rb12345]

Have you been living under a rock? In the U.S. every major city has 100mbit+ net service offered by many providers to residents and business alike. It would more difficult to not find 100mbit in a major urban area than it would be to find it.

Not living in the US, I wouldn't know. All I have to go on are the reports on /. and other such sites, which give the impression that those speeds are far from the norm. (If they are, this whole thread is rather pointless, apart from the issue of rural schools.) Not that 100mbit+ internet for end-users is that common yet outside the US either...

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

I assure you if children are under educated it will have very little to do with the lack of an internet connection. The more you shove all this technology down the throats of students the more you shove out the actual lesson. We're going from "turn to page 25" to "1) Power on computer, 2) logon to system, 3) logon to school WAN, 4) logon to CMS providing school with textbooks 3a) visit http asdfasdfadsfadsfasdf$$%%!!@@ 4) scroll down to the middle of the page 4a) if you have a lower resolution screen you may need to sroll further. And oh, you can watch this video. Which by the way we were perfectly capable of watching prior to having computers on every desk! And what when there are more than 1 videos running? Head phones? More than 1 video conference? What then? Are you seeing this insanity? Who the fuck are they even talking to!?!?

Heck, by your logic, we don't even need society either. What is the bare essentials for life anyway? Probably none of the luxuries society provides.

Nothing like having an honest broker to make my thoughts for me. Yes, yes, don't blow money on a technology until it is proven to be useful is the same as blow away all society. You have yet to prove to me that laptops on every kids desk is anything but a gigantic distraction from actual learning. I'm telling you it's harmful and you seem to think I'm some sort of Luddite. I'm a professional computer programmers so I assure you I am anything but anti technology, I'm just anti-bullshit boondoggles. As a child, if someone put a computer on my desk during class, I would spend 100% of my time playing/hacking the computer and 0% of the time learning whatever it is the teacher was teaching. Give me a break! How much education do you think would get done if you put a gyroscope on a kids desk? And you wana stick a computer there? Think about it.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Bengie]

I just looked up the price the state non-profit co-op offers to schools and it's ~$850/m for 1Gb.

I don't think the issue is lots of students using a bit of bandwidth all of the time, but a teacher in a class room consuming a large amount of real-time bi-directional streaming data during a class. Think of a guest speaker doing a remote Q&A with several classrooms from around the country, all HD streams so the kids don't get distracted from the bad quality.

Or even think of remote teaching where a school doesn't offer a class, but another school in the region does. If kids/teacher can't make out faces or a teacher can't read something, the quality of the experience will be reduced to worthlessness.

There is a lot of exciting tech coming out to help connect teachers and classrooms in real-time across the nation, but we need the bandwidth to handle it.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[timeOday]

I agree that Internet bandwidth is not and should not be the top concern, nor do I expect it to become so due to this government report. But beyond delivering textbooks, I would like to see some schools, perhaps charter schools, experiment with self-paced video instruction, supported by a teacher to monitor and answer questions. I have seen how quickly my kids master arcane interests by watching videos online. Admittedly this might be successful only in cases where the student is self-motivated. Then again, online social networking can be motivating. If you're the only kid in your class who is really interested in chemistry, and your chemistry teacher is there mainly to coach football, then it's not hard to imagine you would be better off in a self-paced virtual course, interacting with other similarly-minded students, while the football coach (who is physically present) ensures the students stay on task and handle the lab chemicals safely.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

Sounds like a lot of words for "government boondoggle" and then you continue to provide proof.

Grand Coulee, doesn't even have T-Mobile service but the tire store has 100Mb service

And what, pray tell, does a tire store need with 100mbit service? Are you so happy to see taxpayer money wasted? Just imagine what could have been done with that money if it were to stay in the pockets of people who actually earned it. It may finance new businesses, jobs, growth, more tax revenue, inventions, individual happiness, chari- NO it will be spent running 100mbit fiber to a fucking tire shop.

And then you call it desirable. Wasting so much money, money that came from actually people, shit money that came from you! Ever calculate what your cost on that line was? I'm sure you pay thousands in taxes, 100mbit internet service to a tire shop is useless, does it make you feel good you're subsidizing a useless service? Great plan guys, great plan.

I guess it worked since Microsoft just built a huge ass data center in Quincy, WA.

I'm not sure I buy your cause and effect there. It may have more to do with WA having such a lenient tax code. Just a guess.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Bengie]

In 2001-2006 we spent enough on war to cover they person in the USA with college education and health-insurance for 10 years. Don't quote budget info, because war-costs aren't in the budget, only general military spending is.

"Here's a better idea. How about we don't spend so god damn much?" - There is a reason anon said to reduce war spending.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

That's fine, but what does it have to do with the price of tea in China? If I see the government burning money I'm going to point it out in every instance, not just when it agrees with my politics. Profligate war spending is evil. When and where it is proven heads should roll, until then, realize that it costs money to wage war. No matter your political opinion on the war(s) we are in them and I for one think that given a choice it would be better that we win the war(s) than lose the war(s). And I'm speaking of actual wars, not proverbial wars like "the war on drugs" or whatever. We should totally give up on the war on drugs, another government boondoggle with no metric for success. How domestic spending impacts the fact that we're at war seems rather irrelevant to me.

In my opinion the federal government has proven to be very poor stewards of our education system. The DoE contains not a single teacher. The education system at the federal level should be done away with. Their illogical and onerous mandates put undo pressure on local school systems that are struggling to get by. School K-12 ought not be compulsory, that would trim the ever increasing educational expenditures and give room for students who are actually interested in going to school to use the facilities their tax paying parents payed for. And not to learn some left wing drivel about the first gay native american activist, but to learn math and hard sciences. So much of school is full of diversity training and political indoctrination in order to get the almighty federal dollar, any real education is left out.

I'm just curious, do you have any citation on the stat you gave? Seems fishy.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Nethead]

You know so little of what you speak. Washington State having a lenient tax code!
The infrastructure for the fiber project was paid for via a voter approved public bond for the public utility district. The taxpayers discussed the project and decided, with their wallets, that it had merit.

Microsoft liked the Quincy location for the access to power (note it is close to Grand Coulee Dam), available fiber to Seattle, and reasonable driving time (3ish hours) to Redmond.

The tire store got 100Mb service because that is all that is available unless you want to pay about 15 times as much for a T1. The rest of the stores in the chain run on business class DSL. They don't need 100Mb, the got 100Mb because it was cheaper.

What could they have done with the money? Dunno, grow more potatoes? That's about all that is going on there. They'll be happy to grow more potatoes when you want to buy more potatoes. They just wanted to diversify the local economy a bit. It looks like it's working for them.

One of the schools in the area was a finalist in the 2011 Race to the Top Commencement Challenge. Maybe cheap broadband helped?

Go back to your TEA rally.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[Coolhand2120]

Than how do you explain this:http://microsofttaxdodge.com/

It was pretty widely reported recently, I'm surprised you didn't see it here on Slashdot. So ya, MS is in Washington as a way to not pay as much in tax. Were they to be in another state their tax receipts would look a bit different.

Maybe cheap broadband helped?

Like most other government boondoggles, there is no metric for success. There is only "I'll bet that helped!". All for emotion, and nothing for measured success. Maybe it did. That's a big ass maybe for so much money spent. And maybe they would do better without it. Computers in a non-computer related class are nothing but a distraction. I can tell you what kids do with computers, I was once a kid with a computer: they goof off. So I'm not at all sold that it was helpful. I think it's just the opposite. A big waste of time and money.

What could they have done with the money? Dunno, grow more potatoes?

So flippant about other people's money. So many individuals who are going broke, out of a job, barely making ends meets. SORRY WE NEED FIBER BITCHEZ!

What will they do with the money: They can pay their mortgage and avoid being kicked out of their house? Avoid closing their business and putting people out of work. Put food on their table. And here's the super just part: it's their money that they earned and should be able to do whatever the hell they want with it without the government coming in and confiscating half or more it.

And I'm not sure why I'm from a tea rally. I've never seen/heard any tea anything. It's called libertarianism and it's been around a lot longer than the tea party. Read this and let me know which part you disagree with: http://www.constitution.org/cmt/bastiat/the_law.html. That's libertarianism in a nutshell. If you're a logical person, I'l bet you cannot bring yourself to honestly disagree with a single thing. Go ahead and read it, it's very short.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[cboslin]

Have you been living under a rock? In the U.S. every major city has 100mbit+ net service offered by many providers to residents and business alike. It would more difficult to not find 100mbit in a major urban area than it would be to find it. Even one of my several detractors on this thread offered a link to $50/mo 100/100 [localtel.net]. I got FIOS as do many people. Cox and Charter offer 100mbit.. So.... There's that for ya.

There are less than 30 communities that offer both Fiber To The Home (FTTH) and the same bandwidth upstream as downstream.

With FTTH, No bandwidth caps are necessary as your plan becomes the cap. A 10Mb/10Mb connection provides 10Mb X 24 hours X 365 Days both upstream and downstream without caps, without restrictions. With Fiber done right, FTTH, there is no need to screw over your customers. American consumers have been getting abused since the 1990s.

Your link did not work. The one for $50/mo 100/100

Enough FRAUD. FCC says Broadband = 768Kbps, yet 100% of cable Internet users are throttled to below 768Kbps, in fact 100% are restricted to much, much lower bandwidths than the FCC definition both upstream and downstream. Why is this not FRAUD?

100% of Cable companies throttle bandwidth to below the FCC definition of BROADBAND (768 Kbps), except during the Speed Test. Speed Tests lie. On my DD-WRT firewall/router I see bandwidth throttled immediately after the Speed test finishes to as low as 100Kbs/30Kbs. My guess is if the cable providers allowed for the FCC definition of BROADBAND upstream, most streaming problems would cease to exist. Of course they need the scarcity myth to drive up a customers monthly rates paid to them. Pathetic.

While FIOS offers the same bandwidth upstream in some locations as downstream, it does NOT offer the same bandwidth upstream as downstream on all its plans.

Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual

[mSparks43]

And when the class is to make the video?

Logins for kindergarden students?!

[betterunixthanunix]

What is the point of asking kindergarden students to log in? Just set up computers without a log in, and reimage the hard drives nightly.

Re:Not that much

[CannonballHead]

Most universities have more than 1000 students. Let's assume they have 10,000 students. Now we are at 1gbps or 10x100mbps. I'm having a hard time figuring out, even assuming that 50% were using it all at once (so 1mbps per 5 students), how they need that for educational purposes. Plus, assuming that 50% of the student body all suddenly download a *ahem* textbook at the same time? Hum. And, seriously... because of online courses or online books, that's why it needs that sort of broadband? That's kinda ridiculous.

I understand wanting it for certain sections of the school, perhaps - like the CS department (downloading Linux, or Microsoft stuff through MSDN, etc.) or multimedia department (video is pretty big. :) ). But that has little to do with online textbooks or online collaboration tools...

Re: Moar

[wiedzmin]

I'd be looking at huge caching servers first.

Christine Fox: "What's that?"

Someone mod parent up. Their requirements clearly indicate the need to repeatedly access same content. Which means that you could cut your bandwidth usage by 999 times when that content, accessed by 1,000 students, is cached locally when the first student accesses it. Can you imagine the cost savings of such a responsible solution instead of knee-jerk response resulting in head-on capacity accommodation?

Re: Moar

[drinkypoo]

Trust me. They won't even consider that possibility. It's only a problem when it affects them.

That's because using metaphors that don't fit is stupid. Wondering whether there will be enough bandwidth is a real problem and it sucks to have to worry about it when you're trying to get something done. With as much bullshit as we've laden educators and students alike with, they shouldn't have to wait for lag when accessing educational resources.

Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?

Schools used to get a deal, don't they still?

As a visitor to the US...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a visitor to the US (from Canada eh!) I think you are wasting your money.

Your kids can not spell, can not do basic math, can barely print their own names.

Your high school graduates are functionally illiterate: most can not spell well enough to use an online dictionary.

Your educational system is fundamentally broken, and nobody is addressing it.

If ignorance is bliss, you have the happiest students in the developed world.

Re:As a visitor to the US...

[P-niiice]

Why post that as AC? It's true, and a significant portion of Americans refuse to hear that anything American sucks. Well, guess what? American Education SUCKS and it needs fixing.

Re: Moar

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, The Cloud... It's always good!

Grumpy old man.

[thisisfutile]

Back in my day, we didn't have no fancy schmancy com-poo-tours with interwebs. We had a hammer! And a CHISEL! AND WE LIKED IT!!

Re:Grumpy old man.

[xgr3gx]

My take on it is the only classes that should have computers, are the classes that are teaching something about computers. You need a computer to learn how to type, or for writing and compiling code. You don't need a computer for your core stuff like history, math, english, etc. Computers and electronics in the classroom are just distractions.

Re: Moar

[pe1chl]

Today's content providers seem to jump through every possible hoop to defeat caching.
You would think that a video provider would use some indirect URL to first log the access attempt and then point to a static location where the actual video is provided, and that can be cached locally, but no...
In a new deployment, including a caching proxy probably is a waste.
E.g. our existing proxy now has a byte-% hit ratio of 11%, falling all the time.

Wrong - Re:Next up

[Virtucon]

No - wrong

Next up. "West Virginia supplies 1 Gbps Networking to all schools using $100,000 routers and money from ARRA funds after it discovers that the T1 line routers they bought last year were obsolete!"

Re:Wrong - Re:Next up

[jimicus]

"How am I going to get the best out of this when all the switches are 10/100 models, without so much as a single gigabit uplink?"

Re:Wrong - Re:Next up

[Virtucon]

"And where is the 10-Base-2 connection for our LANS?"

Re: Moar

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering we have two more wars to fight in the coming year, can't even imagine where the money is going to come from.

Self preservation

[Curunir_wolf]

So the State Educational Technology Directors Association says we need more ... State Educational Technology. What a stunning conclusion for this completely neutral and unaffiliated group to come up with!

What schools really need is more education and less "State".

Re: Moar

[Anonymous Coward]

reason is:
1) advertising
2) hits counting etc
3) copyright/control issues

Re: Moar

[Bengie]

Over here, $250/month gets your a dedicated 45Mb/s circuit if you're a school/library/hospital. Most of the cost is in the circuit. Once fiber starts going live state wide over the next 5-10 years, I expect 1Gb being dirt cheap.

I found a PDF about that 1Gb/s/user. It is actually 100Mb/s/user internet side and 1Gb/s/user WAN side. So a highly connected WAN and a decent internet connection.

Re: Moar

[Bengie]

I found a quote "1,000Mbps service for about $10,000 annually". Sounds like a good price to me. MMmmmm.. whole sales costs.

Re: Moar

[cpu6502]

>>> 'Can I watch my teacher's algebra video when I get home?'

Aren't they exaggerating a bit? I watch hulu and youtube video with only 0.3 Mbit/s. It's called "video compression". So yes the student at home does need broadband to watch his teacher's video, but he doesn't need a monster amount. Comcast's or Verizon's Economy Service (1 to 1.5 Mbit/s) will provide more than the minimum.

Re:95th percentile billing

[X0563511]

Oh yea, I'd love to download that 8mb PDF over THAT connection...

</sarcasm>

Ridiculously low

[fnj]

That's funny; I need 100 Mbps for ONE user - and would actually like more than that. OK I only have 16 now but I NEED 100.

Re: Moar

[kenh]

My local school district has several Verizon FiOS 115 Mb/sec connections for the district of 4,000 K-12 students. It isn't that expensive, but it is essentially residential-grade service.

They pay about $200/connection per month, probably $1K/month - much cheaper than the subsidized business class service the district had before, and much faster.

Our in school wire network is Fast Ethernet to the desktop, Gigabit backbone.

It was non-trivial to get this service at a public school, due to rate regulations.

Re: Moar

[zlives]

why would the school ( assuming public school) not upload to you tube? HD content and let google manage it

Re: Moar

[MickyTheIdiot]

One of the points: try to talk to someone at a school about squid services. Watch the blank stare. The web is simply magic; our technology training of teachers is still in the dumpers.

Re: Moar

[jellomizer]

Yes state your argument about a solution by using absolutes.
Lets ban all hammers, because hammers don't work well trying to put in screws.

Cloud Solutions, fill a gap, and it is good that it fills the gap, are there solutions that isn't fit for the Cloud, yes you bet, but don't blame the technology, blame the poor implementation.

Re: Moar

[Dahamma]

Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?

I'm sure they do, it's not that hard to price out. Do you have any idea how much heat and AC cost a school with 1000+ students every year? In a 4 season climate it absolutely dwarfs any ISP costs. And gets more expensive every year, while Internet access gets cheaper.

Re: Moar

[MickyTheIdiot]

Sorry.. but this statement is just B.S. Apple IIs and TRaSh-80s were the gateway for hundreds of future computer users and programmers. Students learned TONS on them, though maybe not was initially intended.

I agree with the point made often around here is that there is magical thinking when it comes to educational computer use. Today you need good guides. Computers in the classroom also mean something totally different when most homes have smart phones and PCs. However, you have to be careful... Apple IIs in schools enable a new era... it's not fair to say that they didn't. However, today kids already have already had the exposure to computers that the AppleII gave my generation so you need to take it to the next step and get under the hood.

Re: Moar

[pnutjam]

WHOA...!
think if the ISP's who sponsored this study...

Re: Moar

[PenquinCoder]

A dedicated county/city wide server farm would probably be easier to manage and update than a per-school server rack.

Re:American schools ? Nay. ALL schools.

[timeOday]

You don't need to be streaming individual content to each kid.

For self-paced learning you do.

Apps

[jmorris42]

Thank HTML5 for the death of caching as much as the advertising.

It is all apps now. And in schools they KNOW they are all incompetent boobs so they want nothing that requires skilled labor to maintain. So outsourcing is the word. Everything. Gradebooks, attendance, cafeteria manegement, email of course, Courseware, scheduling and calendaring, yearbooks. If it isn't being delivered from the cloud now it is because they are still fighting over which vendor they want to write a check to. (read as the bidding is still fierce over who will kick back more.. ok, I'm a cynic) That pattern means they need LOTS of bandwidth now and will need an ever growing amount going forward into an HD Video for everything future.

And the vendors love it. It will of course drive lots of sales to schools themselves but when the kids can't do their homework without a constant high bandwidth connection it drives the 'Internet is a 'Right'' meme that leads to even more billions and billions of sweet sweet government money that will only be available to the politically connected.

Re:Apps

[Phoobarnvaz]

Gradebooks, attendance, cafeteria manegement, email of course, Courseware, scheduling and calendaring, yearbooks. If it isn't being delivered from the cloud now it is because they are still fighting over which vendor they want to write a check to. (read as the bidding is still fierce over who will kick back more.. ok, I'm a cynic) That pattern means they need LOTS of bandwidth now and will need an ever growing amount going forward into an HD Video for everything future.

Having subbed in many local schools throughout the years and reading an article like this...BULLSH!T! You want to know what your tax dollars are being wasted on? Every class which had an assignment and needed computers...the kids weren't doing their work...they were playing games (web-based)...using You Tube...going to ESPN...racing web sites and going to Facebook/other social media sites. Reminding these "little angels" they had work to do and that if they were in an actual job doing these things...they would be reprimanded or fired...I was informed their teacher doesn't care. I let the teacher/the principal/IT department know this was going on...I was the bad guy and told to mind my own business.

This is what your tax money for education is going for. What a great use of our public resources.

Re:Apps

[TheReaperD]

Thank HTML5 for the death of caching as much as the advertising.It is all apps now. And in schools they KNOW they are all incompetent boobs so they want nothing that requires skilled labor to maintain.

Not all school districts have incompetent boobs for their IT staff (though many do). My school has a highly skilled, very professional team that puts many mid to large businesses to shame. You just look ignorant when you make blanket statements like this.

If it isn't being delivered from the cloud now it is because they are still fighting over which vendor they want to write a check to. (read as the bidding is still fierce over who will kick back more.. ok, I'm a cynic)

Sadly, in my case, your cynicism is well founded. My administration is being investigated by the California grand jury specifically for this reason. With the knowledge I know, unless they covered their evidence trail extremely well, which is possible as the superintendent never went anywhere without his $300/hour (no, this is not an exaggeration) district paid lawyer, they will be convicted on multiple counts.

That pattern means they need LOTS of bandwidth now and will need an ever growing amount going forward into an HD Video for everything future. And the vendors love it. It will of course drive lots of sales to schools themselves but when the kids can't do their homework without a constant high bandwidth connection it drives the 'Internet is a 'Right'' meme that leads to even more billions and billions of sweet sweet government money that will only be available to the politically connected.

I fear you may be correct here. We have a 10Gbps fiber uplink to the internet and were going to offer wireless internet to all of the student households in our area as we serve a poor neighborhood. We had most of the infrastructure in place and suddenly the FCC revoked the permit without explanation. I suspect they got a call from AT&T, our uplink provider, and "recommended" that our project be killed because it was "anti-competitive" but, we can't prove it.

Re:Apps

[gnapster]

We have a 10Gbps fiber uplink to the internet and were going to offer wireless internet to all of the student households in our area as we serve a poor neighborhood. We had most of the infrastructure in place and suddenly the FCC revoked the permit without explanation. I suspect they got a call from AT&T, our uplink provider, and "recommended" that our project be killed because it was "anti-competitive" but, we can't prove it.

Was this ever an issue when universities routinely provided dial-up access to members of the academic community? This was before my time, so I don't know, but I see a parallel.

Re:Apps

[jjbenz]

Agreed, some teachers use computers as electronic babysitters, but the good teachers keep the kids on task and don't let them wander onto game sites, youtube, etc....

Re:Apps

[phrackthat]

This. Oh, and don't forget the fun things they'll do. Like steal the mouse balls so that the next class won't be able to use the computers. Or gluing keys or other miscreant shit. Never mind that if you write referrals for such activity that the administration knocks you because referrals are used as a metric and the more they accumulate as a school, the worse the school looks so they don't actually try to control the kids. I had high school kids try to bum-rush me at the door before the bell, slash tires on my ride, throw fruit when my back was turned to them because I had to write on the board, etc. And the school acts like you are unable to "control the students" when you send them up on a referral but then the school won't give you any other tools to bring about order. The schools in my area are a bad joke.

Re:Apps

[phrackthat]

And when you went to rat them out/the teacher out/ whatever what did you expect? It wasn't your place to do that.

Um, yeah it was. He was a teacher in their class and it was his job to teach them. He went to the admin to explain that his class wasn't doing its work and they told him they don't care. So basically, they wanted him to babysit and not teach. That is a waste of his time and theirs. The administration should have backed him up.

Re: Moar

[LordLimecat]

Depends where you're at. Some places offer gbps for ~$900/mo. I imagine a large, long-term connection like a university could negotiate a pretty good deal.

Re: Moar

[Bengie]

"I watch hulu and youtube video with only 0.3 Mbit/s" - My bandwidth meter shows about 1MB(8Mb)/s sustained for HD YouTube. You must watch the blurry crap.

Probably not where you live

[fnj]

He probably lives in an actual forward thinking country with a functioning economy. The AVERAGE broadband data rate in Japan is 61 Mbps; Korea 46 Mbps; Finland 22 Mbps, Sweden 18.2 Mbps; France 17.6 Mbps. The US? 15th place, 4.8 Mbps - well below Portugal and a little better than Hungary and Slovak Republic.

The price in Japan is 27 cents/Mbps; Korea 46 cents/Mbps. The US? Brace yourself. $3.33/Mbps.

These figures are over a year old, but I bet the disparity has not closed.

Re:Probably not where you live

[Coolhand2120]

Tiny island nation spends less on infrastructure than the worlds 3rd largest nation. Movie at 11.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA Area Total 9,826,675 km2 ( 3,794,101 sq mi )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan 377,944 km2 (145,925 sq mi )

forward thinking country with a functioning economy

Upon what metric do you declare the U.S.A. not a functioning economy compared to Japan? (or anywhere?)

What we earn?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan $5.869 trillion ( $45,920 per capita )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA $15.094 trillion ( $48,386 per capita )

Currency? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_yen 4% inflation rate (dollar is 2%). Exchanging at ¥78 to the dollar.

No, go ahead, I'll give you some time. I'm sure you'll find some metric upon which you will tie all your lofty Marxist augments too. Oh wait. You did. You have declared that internet service is the metric by which all countries should be judged "forward thinking" or not. I know that it doesn't matter that the U.S.A. invented the internet and paved virtually all of the technical roads before these other countries had their very first dial up modem so creating their infrastructure was far easier and less expensive. I'm sure it doesn't matter to you that the U.S.A. continues to lead in developing the internet and provides internet service to more people in just a fraction of its huge territory than the entire population of Japan or Belgium or Sweden etc.. No, none of that can be taken into account. Only the per capita number. All other metrics are disallowed.

BTW how's that Euro zone thing going?

Re: Moar

[MickyTheIdiot]

This requires organization. Good luck...

From the front lines...

[frontburnerissue]

I work in K12 technology. I have yet to see how full Internet accessibility enhances the classroom. If administrators would define a subset of sites necessary for education then their bandwidth "requirements" would plummet.

Re: Moar

[compro01]

I'd be looking at huge caching servers first.

Unlikely to happen because the copyright holders of the online textbooks, etc. will pitch a fit over the loss of control that would mean.

Re: Moar

[PCM2]

Yeah, whoosh.

Re: Moar

[sdnoob]

hmmm.

SETDA is funded, in part, by the likes of Verizon, Comcast, Intel, HP, CDW, Microsoft and TI.. http://www.setda.org/web/guest/sponsors

They want the kids to browse.., I mean research...

[segfault_0]

Moderately efficient textbook formats and basic LRM caching is all the technology you would need to serve textbooks to PCs.

What they are really saying is that they are replacing textbooks with stuff like Khan Academy and Wikipedia (which are fine sites btw), and the kids need the bandwidth to browse the web all day.

How the schools work

[jmorris42]

> why would the school not upload to you tube?

You obviously know nothing about the way schools work. There is an entire industry devoted to reinventing every wheel for educational use. Some of it makes some sense, schools have a lot of mandates for privacy and so on, but most of it is simply because. YouTube would be right out, a contract with an edu specific video hosting site would be required, and it would of course require a hefty annual contract with each school system. Each school would have to get a customized portal with the school logo, colors and such or it is a no sale. Access controls are a must. You can't put a picture that includes a student on a school's public facing website without moving a lot of paper for clearances.... meanwhile the local paper's website has the same photo from the game up that day and the kids themselves post everything onto their facebook pages in realtime. And it simply must be this way, the idea that it could be different could never occur. If nothing else, schools simply wouldn't be able to handle the concept of a vendor that doesn't charge.

Re:How the schools work

[AthanasiusKircher]

Access controls are a must. You can't put a picture that includes a student on a school's public facing website without moving a lot of paper for clearances.... meanwhile the local paper's website has the same photo from the game up that day and the kids themselves post everything onto their facebook pages in realtime. And it simply must be this way, the idea that it could be different could never occur.

Well, a lot of this has to do with federal laws regarding student privacy. Just about anything that happens in school can be considered an "educational record," which the school is required to protect or face potential legal consequences.

So, not just grades or tests, but any assignment, any commentary by a student (online or not) that might be counted as part of a student's grade, any communication with a student regarding anything possibly related to anything academic, any information collected about a student (usually including ID pictures), etc., etc., etc., etc. must in theory be kept secure and private.

That's why schools often have to reinvent the wheel. In the era when students voluntarily give up their privacy everywhere all the time, schools are still required to police it. And that idea, in general, I think is good -- though admittedly the choices schools make to solve such problems are far from efficient or reasonable.

Re:How the schools work

[zlives]

hmm i guess i didn't realize students would be the ones teaching the "algebra video" that they need to access from home?

but all of this is moot, it seems the idea is a brain child of a child's brain.

Re:How the schools work

[jwhitener]

What are you talking about? I work in IT for .edu and we host tons of stuff on Youtube. Lots of courses. And we aren't the only one.

https://www.youtube.com/user/PCCvideos

The only time we need something hosted inside or streamed from a vendor with a login is when it is copyrighted for limited class room use. That has nothing to do with schools and everything to do with draconian copyright from publishers.

If we didn't have to deal with craptastic licensing from course material created external to us (like some random documentary a teacher wants to show), we'd have everything on Youtube or likewise free to the public.

Re: Moar

[MickyTheIdiot]

I love the hulu and the youtube!

This will mean US schools 10 years behind Asia

[WillAffleckUW]

If this is true, and you only move to 100 Gbps by 2020, you'll be 10 years behind Asia.

Not just Japan and South Korea, but Vietnam and China.

Sorry.

Too slow.

Research universities in North America are running 40 times faster than that.

Oh, and the students cell phones will literally suck about 99 percent of that bandwidth capacity up, so even that won't work.

e-readers

[thisisfutile]

Actually, I tend to agree. I just threw that out there because it was the first thing that popped into my head and made me chuckle. I could see distributing e-reader devices but that really only sounds and looks good on, well, paper (pun unintended) as they're less of a distraction than a full computer but I can't see students taking care of them any better than they take care of text books...which, of course, is very poorly.

Re: Moar

[acoustix]

Today's content providers seem to jump through every possible hoop to defeat caching.
You would think that a video provider would use some indirect URL to first log the access attempt and then point to a static location where the actual video is provided, and that can be cached locally, but no...
In a new deployment, including a caching proxy probably is a waste.
E.g. our existing proxy now has a byte-% hit ratio of 11%, falling all the time.

You would be correct if your first sentence said "for-profit content providers". Content providers geared towards education and other non-profits should be making their content as cheap as possible to access. Notice I said *should*. Caching web content is absolutely the smart and responsible thing to do when the same content is going to be viewed over and over - especially with content that is static.

There's an AC that responded to this post citing advertising and hit counts as reasons why caching won't work. I would certainly hope that educational content providers are not making their content difficult to cache.

Re: Moar

[Bengie]

The point is he is perfectly happy with low quality video streams. If you take a 320p video stream, stretch it to a projector/etc, you're going to have a hard time engaging kids with a blurry mess. If the kids can't make out faces or read text, you might as well have an audio stream.

Re: Moar

[Dcnjoe60]

Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?

I'd be looking at huge caching servers first.

Kind of kills the idea of textbooks being too expensive.

Technology is just a tool, not a solution

[Dcnjoe60]

I can't imagine how we ever go by prior to all of this technology in the classroom? I received my master's using a slide rule and my doctorate with a calculator that cost as much as today's entry level PCs and yet, somehow, we and all of my fellow classmates managed to learn.

I'm all for technology, but throwing technology at a broken education system isn't going to fix it. Teaching kids to do powerpoint isn't very useful if they can't deal with real math and science (let alone read). Distance learning sounds good on paper, but with 1000 students watching passively, who answers their questions? Not the instructor 1000 miles away.

If you want to improve education in the US so that the country can be competitive with other countries, you need to adopt strategies these other countries use, like having teachers who are actually educated in the fields they are teaching instead of having a generic teaching certificate; like having actual homework, longer school days/years and yes, pushing the brightest students into programs where they can excel instead of teaching to the lowest common denominator.

None of those things require high tech solutions. They just require determination by educators, parents and students to turn a failing system around. Somehow, we educated generations of individuals who put men on the moon, built space shuttles and spliced genes and all of that was without high tech classrooms.

Technology is just a tool, one of many. It's not a solution.

Re:Technology is just a tool, not a solution

[skids]

Distance learning sounds good on paper, but with 1000 students watching passively, who answers their questions?

Given that I am clearly talking of 2-way interactive videoconferencing, the instructor answers their questions.

If you want to improve education in the US so that the country can be competitive with other countries, you need to adopt strategies these other countries use, like having teachers who are actually educated in the fields they are teaching instead of having a generic teaching certificate; like having actual homework, longer school days/years and yes, pushing the brightest students into programs where they can excel instead of teaching to the lowest common denominator.

I agree that the fundamentals need to come first. The reason why you see technology pushed, is because there is not enough money made available to do the things you mention above, and technology is actually cheaper than the above. So they are looking towards technology to help cut costs by being more financially efficient than paying a person who can make money equally as well actually using their skills as they can teaching. Sometimes they get their hopes too high, sure.

None of those things require high tech solutions.

Neither does amputating a frostbitten finger, but you can be damn sure if I ever need that done I'll opt for the well equipped OR over the guy with a pack of ice and a cleaver.

Re:Technology is just a tool, not a solution

[Dcnjoe60]

Given that I am clearly talking of 2-way interactive videoconferencing, the instructor answers their questions.

Do you really think, even with two way interactive videoconferencing, that an instructor with 1000 students participating is going to be able to effectively answer questions? Even if you cut the size down to 100 students a 1 to 100 teacher student ratio is anything but good, particularly in grade and high schools.

I agree that the fundamentals need to come first. The reason why you see technology pushed, is because there is not enough money made available to do the things you mention above, and technology is actually cheaper than the above. So they are looking towards technology to help cut costs by being more financially efficient than paying a person who can make money equally as well actually using their skills as they can teaching. Sometimes they get their hopes too high, sure.

Technology may be cheaper, but if it doesn't help with learning the fundamentals it is like saving money by purchasing cat food when it is on sale, even if one does not own a cat. It is a false economy. I think the real reason that technology is pushed is because it is something tangible and concrete. It is easy to say to the public that we need $1M to upgrade computers so that students can compete in the 21st century (even though there is no evidence that the computers will allow that) versus we need $1M to provide remedial math and reading services so that students can have even a remote possibility of getting a job once out of school.

Neither does amputating a frostbitten finger, but you can be damn sure if I ever need that done I'll opt for the well equipped OR over the guy with a pack of ice and a cleaver.

That is only assuming the resources you are wanting are available. If you are on the north face of some mountain, you probably will take what you can get. The same with education. Resources are not unlimited and when they are re-allocated for high tech programs that can't really deliver on what they promise at the expense of basic education which does, the overall education system loses.

In the 50s and 60s and 70s the filmstrip and movie projector were the high tech of the day and yet, it was not acceptable to have kids sit in classrooms all day just watching them. They were used as tools to supplement the teaching/learning (except in PE where they were usually used in lieu of teaching). Back then, technology was a means to an end. Today, however, it is the end itself.

Back in the 90s, my wife taught computers in the junior high (it was a separate lab back then). She would work with the teachers on what they were teaching and adapt her class to supplement theirs. For instance, if in science they were studying Boyles law (pv=nrRT), in her class they used spreadsheets, as a tool, to calculate how long a scuba tank would last at various depths. Today, however, the science class has an "app" for that, where you just type in the air supply and the depth and it spits out the answer. So, if your goal is just to have an answer, today's method is much more efficient. On the other hand, if your goal is to understand the relationship in a gas to volume, temperature and pressure, the old way seems a much better way to use technology. Now, if I was going to go scuba diving, on the otherhand, I'd use the app.

My point being, technology in the classroom should be used to supplement the teaching, not replace it. If we aren't careful, we will have a new generation of adults who are very good at pushing buttons to get an answer with no grasp of the knowledge required to come up with that answer. I think there was an old Star Trek episode about that.

Why not a big regional fiber network?

[detritus.]

How about instead of building and maintaing huge buildings, school busses, etc. why not build a municipal fiber network for your school district to each student as well as the public, and promote home-based learning? Companies already know that telecommuting is serious cost savings for many jobs. I think that with videoconferencing and many other tools, this could transform learning for middle and high school students for many courses.

Re:Why not a big regional fiber network?

[zlives]

yes and several households with two working parents can hire a nanny, who can watch over the kids in a single room, to make sure a group of 20-30 kids do actually study with their high speed internets. He/she can even grade the students work.
I see in the future where a lot of these home based learning "groups" can render the idea of public schools obsolete.

Re:Why not a big regional fiber network?

[detritus.]

Simple - You're on camera and expected to be at your computer. If you fail, you get a visit from a roaming school official. If you don't want to behave, you get put into a classroom. You don't have to be physically present to watch a live lecture or to corroborate with peers.

Re:Why not a big regional fiber network?

[zlives]

hmm, not sure whats going on my camera stopped working ;)

Re: Moar

[Cramer]

They are a business just like everyone else. They are most certainly not going to do anything to make their content cheaper -- produce content cheaper, yes... but reducing the sold price? Absolutely not. They want the same (lame) metrics everyone else wants, so they do everything possible to inflact them -- esp. if the schools are charged based on "usage" (i.e. hit counts, not necessarily the amount of content actually moved.) If the content has been locally cached, accesses will be completely "hidden" from the supplier.

Re: Moar

[guruevi]

For schools, 1Gbps is about $1500/month in most urban areas and can be done over Cable. Fiber and upwards may cost more. 100Mbps should be available from most ISP's (if they are willing to sell) and most business packets already have 100Mbps options ($250-300/month).

I mean obviously...

[stevenfuzz]

What is more important to education then the internet? I mean, since the internet has taken over like a virus, look how well our US schools are doing. Clearly the only way to get the kids on to the right track is to give them MORE internet.

Re: Moar

[C_amiga_fan]

If you take a 320p video stream, stretch it to a projector/etc

The topic was watching teacher videos AT HOME on a student's laptop or PC. The economy line at 1 or 1.5 Mbit/s is more than sufficient to carry a 240p or higher video.

Oh, hell

[bryan1945]

We had to jack our computers into the damn phone lines to dial up (on campus!) into the network. Damn, I'm old.

Re:Oh, hell

[Greyfox]

We didn't even HAVE computers until high school! And even then, they were in no way networked! Kids these days!

Re:Oh, hell

[bryan1945]

Yeah, they don't even know the problems with RFC 1149. Damn laundry detergent was 1/3 of my school budget.

Re: Moar

[Jeremy Erwin]

Let me guess: you force it into 288p mode, and spend a lot of time waiting for the buffers to fill.

An educational film can be a lot more informative if it's in HD with minimal compression errors. You don't want the name of a town o a map to be a meaningless blob or an image of fine anatomical structure to be pixelated as if it was a clip of Japanese porn. Yes, in the age of filmstrips, vcrs, and fuzzy television, the directors were able to convey their messages with some degree of clarity.

But things are different now. Narrative techniques have changed to take advantage of the new media, It's no longer necessary to zoom quite so closely on something that the audience can be expected to see..

Re: Moar

[LordLucless]

Sorry.. but this statement is just B.S. Apple IIs and TRaSh-80s were the gateway for hundreds of future computer users and programmers. Students learned TONS on them, though maybe not was initially intended.

Sort of. I was a student, and I learned tons on an early computer. It wasn't the computer in my school that we were allowed to access for one hour a week to play games on though. It was my computer at home. The limited access to computers at school, the limited amount of things you were allowed to do with them, and the limited knowledge of anyone in the school about them meant they taught me absolutely nothing.

YMMV.

Re: Moar

[Anonymous Coward]

The report writers? Maybe, maybe not. But the original report's sponsors, Verizon and Comcast, certainly do.

Re: Moar

[funwithBSD]

Yes, but you have a lesson plan, why are you streaming it?

Should be loaded locally before hand, not JIT.

Re:95th percentile billing

[jmorris42]

> Oh yea, I'd love to download that 8mb PDF over THAT connection...

Each student could download an 8MB PDF every hour, even constrained to 25Kbps, which is slow by modem standards. And that assumes the average student could READ an 8MB document in an hour, which few could unless it is a comic book. And assumes each student needs to download a different one and can't retrieve the one copy cached locally before class by the instructor, and therefore directly available over the gigabit ethernet.

What drives the bandwidth needs are video and the rush to shut down the entire backend operation in the local school plus the school board and outsource all traffic except printing and perhaps the most basic of file serving. This scheme only appears to make sense because of the artificial economy created by the SLC funding mechanism that leaves the school system only paying a small portion of the bandwidth bill. In a more typical network a lot of the traffic is local and a smaller Internet feed will suffice. The Cloud is bringing this same idea into the Enterprise setting and the same hillarity is going to ensue as all the supposed savings are likely to be eaten by vastly scaled up Internet conection expenses.

Re: Moar

[mikkelm]

Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?

In a larger metro area? Initial infrastructure costs would probably be in the tens of thousands, but network infrastructure isn't really an optional expense for larger educational institutions these days. Going with the 1Gbps per 1,000 users, about $10k USD for two devices to handle routing for a handful of 1Gbps uplinks with the necessary failover, roughly $1,000 per 1Gbps commitment, and about another $1k yearly for support contracts. At an institution with 10,000 students, that's $120k/year for the transport, plus $1k/year for support. Or about $6 per student per semester. Not exactly prohibitively expensive considering the "technology fees" charged these days, much less so considering the general cost of tuition.

At those prices, fuck caching.

Re: Moar

[rtb61]

Ideally that is only part of the step. What you can do is interconnect all schools globally (upon mutually acceptable terms) allowing for more specialisation within particular schools but other schools having access to that specialisation. Create a school specific internet, one that is safe for children to connect to from home not only for homework but also for safe browsing, safe social network, and safe entertainment.

Lots of bandwidth enables the sharing of resources, reduces the replication of administration and service costs, enables are greater spread of global understanding between the young in a supervised educational environment and enables the create of a children safe network 24/7. Connect universities to primary and secondary schools and student teachers can gain supervised access to students in order to evaluate the student teachers and provide students falling behind with free tutor services.

Prospective employers can add to the school network providing free training packages, that of course promote working for the company but also ensure extra education courses target the employers needs. With lots of bandwidth and every student with a computer you start to create a lot more flexibility within the system and can more effectively tailor the education experience to try to being the best out of what is available from each student, no miracles of course.

Re: Moar

[splutty]

Price for 100Mb connection?

Where I live, about 60 euros per month..

Price for 1Gb? Depends on what you want your uplink to be, but with a decent Docsis3 implementation, this is quite easy to get, and if it costs 600 euros per month, I'm sure that's not too terrible for 1000 students.

Splut.

Re: Moar

[Bengie]

The topic was about watching videos at home? Silly me, and here I thought the topic was about schools.

1.5 Mbit/s is more than sufficient to carry a 240p

Let me know when you mention 720p

Re: Moar

[parlancex]

Here in Alberta the government started a project about 10 years ago to create a world class fiber network that spans the entire province, including rural areas. This network would be designed to allow public institutions such as schools, universities and hospitals access to broadband that would not otherwise be afforded to them. While the network is built and maintained by private companies, the government imposes service and pricing contracts and regulates and provides corresponding subsidies for public institutions, however private users (such as smaller ISPs to provide public Internet access) can also buy service.

What this foresight has meant for us in a K-12 school division in rural Alberta is we can provide even our small schools (less than 500 users) with over 100Mbps of bandwidth and we have direct access to peering exchanges for major networks such as Akamai et al.

I guess my only point is that I'm thankful someone had the vision and foresight to actually put this in place back when "broadband" was still a new concept to many urban Albertans.

Re: Moar

[C_amiga_fan]

You wrote, "The topic was about watching videos at home? Silly me, and here I thought the topic was about schools." My response: It helps if you follow the thread you are replying to, so you don't get lost:

ARTICLE: "Can I watch my teacher's algebra video when I get HOME?" (emphasis added)

CPU6502: "I watch hulu and youtube video with only 0.3 Mbit/s..... The student at home doesn't need a monster amount. Comcast's or Verizon's Economy Service (1 to 1.5 Mbit/s) will provide more than the minimum."

BENGIE: "If you take a 320p video stream, stretch it to a projector/etc....."

ME: "The topic was watching teacher videos AT HOME on a student's laptop or PC." Not on a projector.

Re: Moar

[C_amiga_fan]

If you look at hulu or youtube's stream rate, 240p video is only 248 kbit/s. Sometimes a little higher at 320k with a quality just slightly below DVD.

Point is that 1-1.5 Mbit/s via the $20 economy broadband is more than enough to watch the teacher's videolecture from the kid's bedroom, so you don't need a huge gigabit line.

Re: Moar

[mikkelm]

If this kind of bandwidth is necessary for the operation of the institution, then it doesn't really matter what the hardware upgrade costs are, because they're the costs of doing business. You can't operate without paying them. That being said, if you need 1Gbps/1,000 users by 2015, and it's purely for academical purposes, then you're likely dealing with a bunch of streaming video and audio, or large applications. That kind of traffic doesn't need content filtering, and any router you'd sensibly put in front of servers hosting that kind of content will be able to handle the traffic at trivial cost. Firewalling also shouldn't be a large cost-issue in an environment with relatively few, long-lived flows, even at those speeds.

Re: Moar

[cpu6502]

>>>Sorry.. but this statement is just B.S. Apple IIs and TRaSh-80s were the gateway for hundreds of future computer users and programmers.

Yes.
At HOME.
I too learned programming via my Atari 800 and Commodore 64, but it was at home. Not in the schools where the teachers didn't know what to do with them, and the 8 bit computers just collected dust. A gigantic waste of money.
Even now you won't find too many computers in college classrooms. The professors understand that learning happens *in the brain* through exercising it. Anything that slows/interferes with that process is a hindrance, not a help.

Re: Moar

[wiedzmin]

Damn. Must be nice to have all that tar sands oil money to throw at your infrastructure.

Re: Moar

[lsatenstein]

Price is what the market will bear.

My son lived in Riga Latvia, and since the war and the Exodos of the Russians from latvia, metal was so expensive, that citizens stole copper from wiring, elevators, etc. The local communication companies found it cheaper to install fibre to all residences. Yes, his apartment had 8 megabit access. He could download a movie in three to four minutes. I downloaded a 3.5gbyte Linux distribution at the limiting speed of the host. (about 5-6 minutes). If I recall, the state owned the communications company.

So, back to the school needs. Yes, it is possible, the constraint is that it is a question of monetizing bandwidth. It may mean that all residents go from dsl to fibre, except in very far off regions of the state.

If the desire is there, it can be done, and the bank will not be broken.