Tags: experimental network, Google, Network, internet access, Research, Internet2, Broadbandt, gigabit, high speed, trends,

Annual costs to support a legacy back-end email server, software licensing and required related services (anti-spam, anti-virus, filtering and backup) must also run 24/7 while “people” costs include training and technical support.

Some legacy email solutions actually require a dedicated server to cannibalize a CPU — not virtualization friendly.  Think OpenText’s WorstClass FirstClass email server.

The green financial picture.
What’s an overlooked annual cost by IT and financial managers?  Electricity.  The cost to power all your school servers 24/7 can be rather shocking….sorry.

The first time I collaborated on a college’s annual budget, I was surprised energy costs for just three buildings on a small campus ran above $260,000/year.  Same probably applies for K12 district buildings.

Server costs and email requirements
If your school is running real industrial servers (1U or even 3U units) there are significant annual costs, regardless of rack, blade or tower servers.  Many schools on tight budgets re-purpose Pentium desktops to be “servers” along with those old, energy sucking CRT monitors.  Not a good idea.  And don’t be so moved by the marketing and PR efforts for “green” servers, they run all day and still cost a surprising amount over a three to five year lease.
…you do lease your school’s servers?

How to fight the power
So how much does your school’s servers cost to power year-round?  Gather total watts for EVERY computer in your server room which includes KVM/SAN/DNS/RTSP/CIPA filter and spam/virus systems along with all attached monitors and run the numbers.

Don’t overlook HVAC costs too.  Even small server rooms required large HVAC.  Is there a large server room at your school?   You should be looking at a rather BIG number. Hopefully your school has negotiated an acceptable rate from your regional electrical conglomerate.  For many small schools this is reasonably accurate:

Monday – Friday:
7:00am to 7:00pm 5 cents / kilowatt hour
7:00pm to 7:00am 3.5 cents / kilowatt hour
Weekends:
7:00am to 7:00pm 3.5 cents / kilowatt hour
7:00pm to 7:00am 3.5 cents / kilowatt hour

Remember servers run weekends, holiday breaks AND all summer long — even though K12 districts mostly sit empty.  Yes empty….lights are on but nobody’s home and your still burning your energy budget.

Your CFO will think its outrageous believe me, followed by a call to auto-shut down idle office and lab computers.   By the way, run the numbers for ALL computers at your school campus-wide:  computing labs along with Library, business offices and dedicated computing studios.

Re-coop costs
It helps if your IT staff embed energy-saving measures in their system configurations.  This means computers are configured to power off, dictated by your school’s traffic patterns of actual use.  Configuring monitors to “dim” is NOT energy savings (guys, the monitor still requires power in “dim” mode) so just power it off.  Believe me the time it takes a student to push the power-on button is worth the green effort.  Present the modified numbers by your CFO….it will become mandatory in the default configuration.

Can you believe lab computers are configured to NEVER sleep?  Yep – power consumption is burning money 24/7/365.  Stranger than fiction to watch a school’s budget burn up right in-front of your eyes.  Irresponsible and outdated attitudes are simply passed-on in the way of increased tuition or higher taxes for a K12 school district.

Obsolete Certification
Ironic that email administrators have been known to use established certifications as an excuse to continue running an expensive, legacy system.  Remember your school (tuition or taxpayer) is paying for certifications, some approaching $1,000 to re-enforce legacy email solutions.

I have watched the use of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) while addressing alternative email solutions with a college email administrator…a true “deer in the headlights” moment.  And of course the issue of being certified was part of the reaction.  It scares the hell out of them. Discussions about changing email become a threat to some or political firestorm for others.   In the end you need to convey that shifts in the computer marketplace continue to accelerate, and email is now apart of that discussion.

Conduct an energy audit.
After partnering with a regional energy conglomerate to implement a college’s first-ever energy audit, I learned much about implementing efficient measures directly impacting the organization’s IT carbon footprint while reducing annual energy costs.

Today’s students are more aware of their need to reduce carbon footprints while junior faculty are embracing green energy savings at home and at school so there is real momentum despite an IT team’s outdated approach to let everything run all day and all night.

At one operations meeting with College executives I learned the school was going to partner with the energy conglomerate for a financial gift.  I simply asked to consider negotiating a $0.15 shaving off our kilowatt/hour costs….the school did not recognize that avenue of thinking.  Remember that $260,000 annual energy bill.  One would hope a-quarter-of-a-million-dollars would change the way people think.

Google Apps for Education
By migrating from an internal email server (and associated services mentioned above) to Google Apps for Education (GAE) schools eliminate ALL server related AND energy costs.  And maybe, just maybe if your school is forward thinking you can reduce expensive Microsoft site licensing with GAE’s bundled suite.
Yesterday Google announced two more states have adopted GAE for 3,000 schools across Colorado and Iowa.  I see lots of financial and energy savings as well.

Its all about change and I know change is hard.  May I recommend Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.  At the same time I believe sharing the spreadsheet energy cost saving should be enough for most decision makers.

Tags: Google, Google Apps for Education, email server, Postini, technology budget, increased tuition, taxpayer, tipping point, carbon footprint, K12, trends

As budgets have been cut across the country for education, this is a smart move for many financially strapped school districts.  Does it pay for a District to force taxpayers to pay for expensive, legacy email programs like FirstClass and Novell when cloud based solutions with robust feature sets are being embraced by K12 and Colleges around the country.

Source article

Tags: Google, Google Apps for Education, education, Postini, anti-virus, K12, trends

Google CloudCourse LMS

To no surprise CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar.  Google has also made CloudCourse customizable for schools by supporting service provider interfaces:

Sync services – Sync CloudCourse data with school’s internal systems
Room services – Schedule classes in school locations
User info services – Support for school profiles (employee title, picture, etc)

CloudCourse was built in Python and uses Django (web application framework) and the Closure Javascript library.
CloudCourse code site and wiki link

Tags: CloudCourse, open source, Learning Management System, LMS, education, python, django, trends

Tags: Google Wave, beta software, Collaboration, real-time, communication, test audience, limited preview, trends

As many have shared on twitter — a lot of people with Google Wave accounts simply “don’t get it” and the new channel on YouTube will provide a great single repository for Wave fans to learn about their real-time collaboration solution.  Wave is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.

As many have accomplished, Waves around the world have proved to be excellent communication opportunities for individuals.  If Google wants to reach out to small groups and large organizations, they must provide mass accounts to really kick the tires and integrate this promising tool into their infrastructure…..BTW it can help revolutionize a number of outdated ‘workflows’ that are in use today in non-profits, education and business.

Tags: Google Wave, beta software, Collaboration, real-time, communication, test audience, limited preview, trends

Google migration from Exchange:

The process to migrate looks relatively simple. Through Google Apps, a customer enters their Microsoft Exchange user name and what it calls “two-legged OAuth,” consisting of a consumer user key and a consumer “secret”. They then upload a .CSV file consisting of the email addresses, calendar and contact information. It is optional what to migrate. For example, an IT administrator may upload email addresses and contact data but not the calendar. Email service does not get interrupted during the migration.

Coupled with Google’s offer to provide free anti-spam and anti-virus filtering (Postini) for K12 schools until July 2010 — its getting more and more difficult for Districts to continue using expensive, power hungry ($$$$) and outdated email services like Novell and FirstClass.

Why?  Check out Google’s simple cost calculator to see how much your School District (Tax Payers) can save by switching.  The Oregon School District in Wisconsin left Novell for Google and saved over $11,000 annually.  In tight economic times this makes a lot of sense (and lots of cents)

From Google:

A better document editor
We’ve brought the responsive, real-time editing experience you’ve come to expect from our spreadsheets over to documents, which means you can now see character-by-character changes as other collaborators make edits. We also added another popular feature from spreadsheets: sidebar chat, so you can discuss documents as you work on them with colleagues.

The new technical foundation also helped us improve document formatting, which means better import/export fidelity, a revamped comment system, real margins and tab stops, and improved image layout within documents. These improvements have been highly requested, but previously impossible to create with the older documents editor on older browsers.

A faster spreadsheet editor
With the new spreadsheets editor, you’ll see significant speed and performance improvements — spreadsheets load faster, are more responsive and scroll more seamlessly. We’ve also added a host of often requested features, like a formula bar for cell editing, auto-complete, drag and drop columns, and simpler navigation between sheets. And as always, real-time collaboration in spreadsheets is easy with sidebar chat and the ability to see which cell each person is editing.

A new collaborative drawing editor
In the year since we launched the Insert drawing tool, we’ve received many requests for the ability to collaborate on drawings and make them accessible directly from the docs list. The new standalone drawings editor lets you collaborate in real time on flow charts, designs, diagrams and other fun or business graphics. Copy these drawings into documents, spreadsheets and presentations using the web clipboard, or share and publish drawings just like other Google Docs.

Tags: Google Docs, performance improvements, Network, trends,

Link to Google’s Official Blog post about the community fiber project:

Their only “failure” is the current lack of a wider test audience. Wave has a lot of promise but during it’s current limited preview its simply not as widely available to the average Google user.

Google Maps was a different type of beta release.  Anyone could login and test their mapping features.  Wave is an initial different product and audience.

I know PLENTY of people who want to kick the tires and engage Wave but they do not have an account.

If your not a Google user (Gmail, Docs, Analytics) then you may feel like you must extend your “Yahoo life” in order to test Wave. The same can be said for those who want to test Wave within an organization or company.

Google has been more relaxed about giving away invites.  In early 2009 it was extremely difficult to find an invite.  I noticed that this process turned into a “power struggle” for some who where begging for Wave invites on twitter.

This also makes me wonder if all those tweets about Wave’s failure belong to people who really do not understand the limitations of beta software.

A simple query at amazon.com reveals a number of Wave books are not even shipping yet.  Another Wave book that I’m interested in is also not shipping yet.

Are there any Wave Wave torrents?  So to all those on the cutting bleeding edge: how well do you actually know Wave?  If you need a book to read check out The Complete Guide to Google Wave.

Tags: Google Wave, beta software, Collaboration, email, IM, test audience, limited preview, trends

I have been following Larry Lessig’s work on copyright and our digital culture for some time, reading his positions online, previous books and keynote addresses at TED, Wired and last week to Italy’s Parliament among others.  His work on Creative Commons is a direct action from the creative limitations of copyright.

His latest book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is a very easy read for anyone who has also known his work.  He tells an important story about how new technology is clashing with old money.

Lessig illustrates how copyright’s old money (the big media empires) are clashing with today’s society and technology.  Old money is winning financial amounts here and there, but ultimately they are cutting their own throat as they can no longer control content.  Their motto: since we cannot have it our way anymore (due to the easy distribution of digital content) we are going to sue as many people as we can and take outrageous amounts of money along the way.

Lessig simply points out the two different camps: Read-only versus Read-Write.  Look at popular consumer phones and computers.  Today anyone can create a short video and post it to YouTube.  And by today’s “standard” in social networking — your somewhat expected to post multimedia content on Facebook and YouTube for example.

But post a 29 second video of a baby dancing to Prince’s Lets Go Crazy and Universal Music (they own Prince and his music) files a lawsuit claiming copyright violations.  Its old money trying to control society and Lessig points out it clearly no longer works.

He acknowledges great opportunities that permit art and commerce to thrive in our new hybrid economy.  Yet the RIAA continues to litigate, suing  individuals for monetary gain. YouTube is being forced to alter posted videos due to old-money ideas and their lawyers.

But with the unprecedented growth of the internet and YouTube which serves over 1 BILLION videos each day all the lawyers in the world will not be able to keep up to date.  In the US alone over 12 billion are watched everyday.  And after all the lawyers for the RIAA would rather sue wealthy people in America than say 1 BILLION poor people in China.  Its no wonder some internet media companies have their physical servers outside the US – since copyright is not equal under the law of every nation with a fast ISP.

Tags: Larry Lessig, Remix, art and commerce, copyright, creative commons, ReadWrite Culture, old money, Media Empires, YouTube, Change, control, trends

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tags: experimental network, Google, Network, internet access, Research, Internet2, Broadbandt, gigabit, high speed, trends,

Broughton is the former Paris bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph of London. His writing was easy, flowing and pleasant.  Broughton was also very human in his approach to writing about the elite training ground for the high stress world of finance, venture capital and banking.

Broughton was also able to describe those MBA alums who spoke of those demands and losing wives and children to the long hours of business.  It was a bit odd to read that more than a few alums went through the divorce process four times.

Worse yet was those few who admitted their own children did not know who they were due to those demanding hours.  Most wanted their MBA to provide for their family while in fact they were losing touch with them in the process…all for the glory of wealth and fame.

And yes it was interesting to hear how his class of 2006 could land $400,000 jobs, his thirteen interviews with Google were pretty demanding.

In the end he skipped his graduation on a rainy Saturday in to take his infant son to his favorite Boston spot for cannoli.  At one point in my life I would have ridiculed this man for skipping his Harvard commencement.  For $175,000 (minus his new BMW — see below) you better be sure I would show up come rain or snow for that moment.  Today with two small children and a backdrop of a soggy event on Harvard Square I kinda understood his decision.

I was impressed with his review of their first year known as RC: required cirriculum.  The demands of Harvard’s case studies was rather impressive as their main tool for teaching.  And from the looks of it those case studies required round the clock research and planning.  The feel of his fellow students all aiming for post Harvard success was an interesting read, especially from the foreign students.  Most of his fellow students agreed they did not want to be called upon to review a case study.  The demands were extremely high and Broughton described a couple of painful episodes of his participation and those by his fellow students.

From his book the only real technology requirement was being an Microsoft Excel Jedi Knight, and that also meant writing your own macros.  Clearly Broughton was no computer wizard…somewhat surprised if he left off anything offered by the school to teach computing to these future business managers…beyond Excel.  But then again as he wrote about the case studies — when would he have had the time?

The personalities of the faculty and even some of his fellow students kept the story going but his experiences in the recruiting process and the hyped ‘treasure trove’ of MBA grads coming back to speak to his class was rather interesting.  From Enron’s Jeff Skilling to W. Bush Broughton was not a surprise W. Bush was never was asked back to Harvard Square.

The break before the beginning of 2nd year or EC elective curriculum was no less stressful.  The summer was all about landing a job.  And today Broughton acknowledges the competition is not within his section or other candidates at Harvard but Kellogg, Wharton and Tuck.  US News and World Report: Best Business Schools in America.  More important are the top university rankings in the world.

It was even refreshing to recognize that some of the textbooks from his classes just happen to also be sitting on my bookshelf.  My favorite (review here) is still probably Competing in a Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World.  I failed to recall that Dr. Victor Fung taught at HBS before returning back to Hong Kong to run his family business….I’m not sure many Americans would consider doing this — because as Broughton pointed out the foreign students really did not want to relocate to America following graduation.  That is a big change in the last decade.  India and China are hot locations.  Surprised?

You will even learn how to acquire a BMW before asking for financial aid 

Tags: Philip Delves Broughton, Ahead of the Curve, Reading, Research, MBA, Harvard business school, Case Studies, globalization, Elite education, MBA Candidate, venture capital, trends

Its easy to think this book is a political sequel to An Inconvenient Truth. That would be a mistake. The book has set off all the political rhetoric one would expect.

I found Chapter 11: Population rather interesting and worth the read alone.  Clearly we live in a world that is experiencing a sustained population boom in China and India.

This brings ultra-large scale social responsibility as well.  The impact of population on energy and food is obviously critical but the underlying issue on this still taboo subject must be moved to the forefront.

How will China and India care, feed and shelter their children?  More importantly how can green fuels be utilized in favor of coal and other cheap, outdated solutions?  There are options.

Gore has tapped into so many new technologies in Our Choice, its a bit overwhelming.  I was a bit taken back by the level of technical and engineering details and although this is a good new resource for the non-technical crowd, its a bit heavy on the engineering side.  From the the SuperGrid (Chapter 13) to Google’s real-time energy tool PowerMeter, new technology tapping the internet and mobile devices is clearly in play in our futures.

But the dramatic changes that are currently underway will surprise most readers.  If you think nuclear power is still a real option you need to consider Thorium.  It’s even hilighted in the January issue of Wired as the successor to nuclear power plants in America.

Gore has tapped the crowd to share and educate how we can help conserve our plant’s resources, help the environment and cut our carbon footprint.  All in all a good read.

Tags: Al Gore, Our Choice, Reading, Research, energy, change, education, population, India, China, green fuels, trends

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tags: Web Toolkit, Google, Developers, datasets, innovation, technology, trends

Tags: Google, Google Apps, City of Los Angeles, Novell, gmail, City Government, trends

Google has been helping K12 Schools and Colleges save money by giving free access to their powerful tools in an enterprise setting.  Google began offering Gmail and have continued to add more tools to their suite specifically tuned for schools.  Known as Google Apps for Education (GAE) this collection provides an excellent solution for schools just as most technology budgets are shrinking…or should I say…being slashed to the bone.

To no surprise Gmail has been a hit with schools.  In 2006 Arizona State University was one of the first colleges to migrate to Gmail.  They moved 65,000 student email accounts saving over $400,000 in ANNUAL related email costs.  Since then more higher education institutions including Northwestern University (case study) and Notre Dame (moved 15,000 students and 150,000 alumni and saved $1.5 Million) have migrated to Gmail.

For Students, Faculty and Administrative staff, GAE has grown to include 7GB of individual email storage, integration with GoogleCalendar, GoogleDocs (word processing, spreadsheets and presentations) and GoogleSites (websites and wikis) for web publishing.  Google has even added 10GB of storage to their Google Video offering.  These tools provide a tremendous savings for schools who can retire in-house or expensive outsourced systems.

From Good To Great:
A necessary email-related tool schools need is anti-spam and anti-virus protection.  And Google has recently responded with an AWESOME offer for K12 Schools that’s too good to pass up:

Until July 2010 K12 Districts can migrate to Google Apps for Education AND receive FREE anti-spam/anti virus-protection via Postini

Postini is a popular (Google owned) industrial strength anti-spam & anti-virus solution.  And Google is even offering deep discounts on email archiving, malware protection and web filtering for K12 Districts as part of Postini.

In today’s economy hundreds of under-funded K12 school districts are moving to Gmail as a permanent replacement for those expensive, legacy solutions from companies like Novell and WorstClass FirstClass.  Google provides free GAE infrastructure tools for School IT Administrators and Google’s Sync is available to K12 IT Administrators to links contacts and calendars for popular mobile devices including Blackberry, iPhone and Android smartphones.

Still not convinced?  Take a moment and learn about ASU’s Gmail conversion:

Click here to view the embedded video.

How much does email cost your school?  Its expensive and ultimately costs are passed to taxpayers or student tuition.  By the way, what sliding scale fee does your school annually pay for a campus-wide Microsoft Office license?  GAE kills two birds with one stone as Google Docs is a free replacement for Office.

Act Now – Deploy later. Google’s offer ends July 2010

Related: Top Ten Reasons Schools should move to Google Apps.

Tags: Google, Google Apps for Education, education, Postini, anti-virus, K12, trends

Click here to view the embedded video.

From the Google Author Series:

He makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company’s survival.

The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10; now Intel’s latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor–effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don’t apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage.

Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you’re trying to sell.

I found Chris’ idea really is not so radical given today’s economy.  It will benefit those companies smart enough to recognize the innovative opportunity to grow their customer base.

Tags: Chris Anderson, Free: The future of a Radical Price, marketing, Google Author, copyright, internet, economy, innovation, ideas, business, radical, reading, trends

And YES you can read his book for free online at Scribd and at Google Books.  You can also download a full unabridged 6 hour audiobook for free — or purchase a 3 hour abridged copy.  Get it?

If you have not been paying close attention to the Free Economy, there is a lot you can learn from this book.  Anderson traces the history of “free” products (Gillette razor blades in 1895 and even Jello) and services and intelligently outlines how “free” is driving sales in our culture today.  Even in our current economic recession.

He introduces the idea by recalling the announcement from Monty Python, who’s pirated movies were already on YouTube.  They decided to establish their own YouTube channel, place higher quality clips online with links to their DVD products….and placed a hilarious insult letter to all their fans.

Even though they were placing movies online for free, fans purchased their DVDs at Amazon, driving them to the #2 sales rank with an increased sales volume of 23,000%.  That’s no typo: a 23,000% sales jump!  Clearly free works.

Anderson has done great research to help explain (he calls them “sidebars” in the book) to help you see where you have already run across “free” in your daily life including radical ideas including air travel, cars, silverware, textbooks and even a university education.

If you have a child gifted in school or passionate about learning a specific subject you can tap the world’s best professors online via MIT’s OpenCourseWare or download audio and video lectures online via iTunesU or at a school’s website like Stanford.

I think this book can even “wake you up” to really see how innovative marketing is changing the world.  Would you ever think a child’s online game (Club Penguin) that is free to play can generate associated revenue equal to the largest worldwide subscription revenue of the Wall Street Journal?  Think again.

Want to learn how?  Read his book….its free!

Tags: Chris Anderson, Free: The future of a Radical Price, marketing, copyright, internet, economy, innovation, ideas, business, radical, reading, trends

who controls the internet

On the surface you may believe — even in 2009 that you can still say anything, do anything or hack any computer around the globe without impunity because you can hide inside the internet.

Goldsmith and Wu challenge Tom Friedman’s (The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century) position that globalization is opening up communication in countries that have long suppressed their citizen’s ability to speak freely.

China for example. Or think about the European Union.  Is the EU able to dictate how Microsoft releases software?  Think again.  When Microsoft published it’s passport technology it was rejected by the EU.  Rather than pay a fine Microsoft added the tougher security standards dictated by the EU for all customers worldwide.  Those standards are even tougher than those used in America.

Can France tell Yahoo or eBay what products to sell?  They can and they already do.  This book is written from a legal standpoint since both teach at the Law Schools of Harvard and Columbia respectively. Is it strange to see government control over the internet?  Would this be different if today was September 10 2001?  Goldsmith and Wu share their insight to the way Law helps and hinders the internet.  From simply selling memorabilia to cybercrime you learn gaping holes exist even today to prosecute offenders and criminals.

The “I Love You” virus that cost US companies millions of dollars originated in The Philippines, but since there is no law against this type of crime in the The Philippines the US was unable to arrest the known hacker.  Similar rules apply in Russia. When the FBI arrested a hacker who extorted millions from US companies, Russia did not acknowledge this type of crime and did not agree to extradite, so the FBI was forced to release the criminal.

Goldsmith and Wu share the legal case between Yahoo and the country of France that forced Yahoo’s online store to pull Nazi related memorabilia even though Yahoo is an American based company.  But Yahoo’s remote offices in France proved to the key error Jerry Yang overlooked.  Yahoo has stumbled a lot lately.

Control over the internet extends to US K12 School Districts who filter web content to protect minors from material that is deemed to be offensive, sexual or drug related.  But many in America may find that the country of Australia has been trying to impose the same type of filtering for the whole country.

As the internet has grown in popularity and extending access to schools, banks, companies and financial firms the need to protect assets against cybercrime has also grown.  To no surprise the US and foreign countries have begun to establish laws to protect citizens and business.

Finally Goldsmith and Wu show how companies eager to enter China’s vast market have been answering to the communist party vs. individual freedoms.  Yahoo provided the strongest example when they give Chinese authorities the identity of a blogger who wrote “controversial” posts about the Chinese government and leadership.

Who Controls the Internet is a valuable read to understand that governments can control access and at the same time acknowledge some laws are not enough when hunting cyber crime.

who controls the internet

I have been impressed with the book, including a new preface to the paperback release.  But guys, seriously….why did you ditch the original hardcover visual? The typography on the updated paperback is terrible in comparison. Looks like someone forgot to ftp the master cover art to the book publisher.

Goldsmith and Wu also trace the history of DNS and ICANN regarding the recent discussions about moving control of the internet to the UN or to other countries, both friend and foe.  There is a lot to be considered if giving up control of a democratic tool to the Chinese or any non-democratic country including Russia.

There are plenty of examples of how the net began as a US defense department project and has revolutionized the world.  But they also do not acknowledge any issue with ICANN and the role of spam.  Since many spam servers sit outside the US there is little the government can do to stop this threat.  Ditto for identity theft.

Tags: internet, Legal, China, Cisco, Tom Friedman, filtering, European Union, Microsoft, trends,

Wolfram|Alpha search engine

The launch does not mean Alpha is a Google killer as many have written, but rather a step forward in our ability to tap vast amounts of data in new ways.  I’m looking forward to utilizing the power of Alpha.

Tags: Search Engine, Wolfram, Alpha, advanced technologies, trends

Tags: smartphone, IPv6, network, advanced technologies, trends

The most surprising session was “HD video over IP for Distance Learning” because the original presenter did not show up….so I decided to try an Unconference session that ran two hours long.  Lots of great learning about how K12 Districts around the Midwest want to bring distance learning and HD video into the classroom.

Apologies up front for this long post.  Sincerely hope by sharing my experiences more teachers, administrators, curriculum developers, technology coordinators and even parents will have a better understanding how filtering ultimately affects students.

Disclaimer
1. This post will not address content found on YouTube.  This post will speak to the technologies behind filtering and how solutions from 3rd party vendors permit access to rich media content websites including YouTube. School Districts, based upon an established technology policy have options when choosing their web filtering solution.
2. Michael Wesch was a keynote speaker at WiscNet’s 2007 Future Technologies Conference …and just off the enormous success of his own video on YouTube.  His presentation “Human Futures for Technology and Education” resulted in many attendees sharing his video at their schools helping fellow teachers and administrators better understand how students use the internet.
3. This post does not endorse any specific vendor.
4. This post draws upon my work with K12 technology coordinators, teachers and administrators along with vendor technical support and the excellent network support group at WiscNet.
5. This post addresses in a roundabout way the need for every district to have an established technology policy regarding filtering. Finally this post will address the critical issue of bandwidth necessary to deliver rich media content into the school.

Wish this was an easy, short post.  The filtering process can become complex and frustrating. I have learned this isolates teachers who want to share compelling content with their students.  This started as an answer to questions regarding filtering in K12 outside the 140 limit of Twitter and then kinda steamrolled…

Overview
K12 school districts are required by law to implement filtering to block adult, illegal or offensive content from minors.  The law is known as the Children’s Internet Protection Act:

The 2001 Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is a federal law enacted by Congress to address concerns about access to offensive content over the internet on school and library computers. CIPA imposes certain types of requirements on any school or library that receives funding for Internet access or internal connections from the E-rate program – a program that makes certain communications technology more affordable for eligible schools and libraries.

Computing vendors sell dedicated hardware, software and appliances (devices that combine filtering along with firewall, anti-spam and even anti-virus protection) that address CIPA requirements for a K12 school district or Library. Their solutions integrate CIPA guidelines into filtering categories for technology coordinators:

Click thumbnail to view image

Solutions will vary from district to district due to any vendor’s installed filtering solution.  However a technology coordinator can edit filtering settings.  Combined with Mudcrawlers (see below) the district or library can stay up-to-date with the newest sites and pages that conflict with CIPA guidelines.

Powerful video that moves/educates students
There are very compelling education-related videos on YouTube including Michael Wesch’s Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing us.  Michael has also shared some rather powerful statistics regarding YouTube here. The page was last updated in March of this year so consider those numbers higher today.  And if you think those are powerful, consider the staggering numbers for FaceBook here.  Again parents, teachers and administrators need to understand how students already use the internet.

Just like other Web2.0 media sites that popped up on the internet, YouTube gained traction and became a powerful location to upload videos for free. No thought was put into establishing an educational access point when YouTube was launched…the founders were burning through credit cards just to keep the site live.  So from the beginning YouTube was not built to become a video warehouse for education. However with their overwhelming exposure and free access for everyone it has become a popular resource nevertheless.

Test Michael’s video and test your school’s filter at the same time:

1. The URL for his video is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
2. Copy/Paste this link into your browser.
3. Does your school district block access to this video?
4. Does the video play immediately?  Does it take a long time to play?

Filtering options
School districts have implemented filtering solutions from 8e6, Barracuda, Fortinet and others.  WiscNet, the educational and research StateNet in Wisconsin partnered with 8e6 Technologies to provide Wisconsin school districts and libraries with two options addressing filtering:

1. Offsite filtering: Central
Central hosting permits schools and libraries to connect via proxy servers to WiscNet’s centralized filtering server.  Each district’s technology coordinator(s) work with WiscNet to configure DNS and also configure all web browsers used by students, teachers and staff to redirect every requested URL to the central filter for analysis.  The district’s technology coordinator is authorized to log into their district profile and add or block additional pages on demand.

2. Onsite filtering: Local
The second option places a filtering server onsite inside a district’s server room.  There are advantages to installing a local content filtering box.  In addition to the features in the central server, a local filter has the ability (if it matches the district’s technology policy) to block IM traffic and even streaming media.  Local filtering can also leverage a district’s LDAP server and link filtering rules to the district’s network directories (students, faculty, staff and administrators) thereby syncing the filtering solutions to user groups at elementary, middle and high school facilities including any administrative buildings connected to the districts’ network.  This has also been extended to laptops used at schools and libraries.

Reporting Tools
8e6’s servers have reporting tools that permit logging URLs requested by a single laptop or an entire classroom of computers. If a teacher feels a student may be veering away from online class assignments, a realtime probe tool can be configured to log all requested URLs from a student’s computer for specific periods of time.  The results can be analyzed to determine the stated course of action outlined in the district’s technology policy:

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4. Warning and Timed Quotas
8e6 provides options to place a customized URL warnings regarding access by groups: students, teachers, staff/admin and guests.  For example a district may recommend teachers, staff and administrators not visit eBay during the school day.  The software permits a technology coordinator to attach a custom message to any web browser used by teachers, staff and administrators that requests any eBay URL. The message will remind the user that eBay is not approved under district policy, but does permit the browser to access eBay.
–Consider this a gentle hint hint – wink wink – nudge nudge reminder.

A recent feature added by 8e6 is “Timed Quotas” which permits a district to implement time limits for a website.  District policy (again eBay for example) can dictate access to eBay not to exceed three hours a day.

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After eBay’s time quota has been reached the site becomes blocked for the rest of the day, with the site’s quota reset at midnight.

Tech Support’s cool factor:
Filter vendors and StateNet support teams who work in partnership with districts can log directly into a district’s filter (central or local) to address questions.  The software even permits tech support teams to configure their own browser (via proxy) to point to the school’s IP filtering address, permitting them to “drop” their browser inside a district LAN. This allows tech support to access any URL in question (deny or pass) just as any computer connected to the district’s network.  Reporting tools can generate Excel spreadsheets or email providing excellent data to troubleshoot URLs not playing well with filtering.

A word about big video websites
Heavily trafficked websites including YouTube have multiple servers to handle large numbers of visitors.  When you need to block a popular site today you must use a filter’s ability to search for all addresses that answer to “www.youtube.com” because Google has established additional servers to handle heavy requests.  If those are not included the videos will continue to be accessible:

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Mudcrawler
How does a school district keep up-to-date with all the new content uploaded to the internet outlined by CIPA?  Vendors work with Mudcrawlers. What a job title eh? Mudcrawlers identify, locate and verify new content and proxy hacks in conflict with CIPA guidelines and upload those new URLs daily to vendors who then push updates to their installed machines at schools and libraries.  This takes place on a daily basis.

Achilles Heel:  Bandwidth
There are very important bandwidth considerations for accessing rich media content resources on the internet including YouTube from a classroom, teacher’s laptop or even “high tech” teaching labs.  This all revolves around bandwidth.

The video’s file size does not matter since a teacher’s goal is to play the video online not download it. The video’s data rate (data transferred over the internet/per second) is very important for consistent playback. Depending upon the amount of bandwidth the school district has available smooth playback may occur due to bandwidth constraints.

Please remember a district’s total bandwidth is divided between the elementary, middle school, high school and district administrative offices.  If a district has a 5 megabit bandwidth connection between the buildings listed above that means each building basically receives a single (1) megabit connection if configured by the technology coordinator or network consultant.  Here is the data rate of Michael’s video: 466.9 Kbits/second – just under 470K of bandwidth per second.

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If a school district has a total bandwidth of just 3 Megabits/second it means SIX students (on six different computers at the same time) begin watching Micheal’s video — the entire bandwidth for the school reaches saturation.  In other words the network crawls.

Test Michael’s video and test your technology coordinator’s nerves:
1. Learn how much bandwidth your school has established across the entire district: how much for each building linked to the school’s LAN.
2. The URL for his video is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
3. Copy/Paste this link into your browser.
4. If the video plays, does the rest of the district’s network slow to a crawl?
5. What happens in a classroom with 20 computers?  10MB/second requirement.

Ironic that my roadrunner cable modem at home provides a 6.5megabit download speed to a single computer. $44/month minus taxes.

Attention Technology Coordinators: Get your geek on
Wesch’s video is not a RTSP stream but rather a static clip that gets pushed over TCP/IP. In a low bandwidth situation TCP will automatically rebroadcast dropped packets. YouTube is going to be flooding your pipe rebroadcasting those dropped packets and causing your network to slow down.

Low Bandwidth = High Shapers
Clearly school districts have insufficient bandwidth to view YouTube like content.  Bandwidth can be saturated quickly by the demands of rich media.  Example: Grab NASA’s video stream of a live shuttle launch.  The raw feed could require 8Mb/second connection, which would kill a district’s entire bandwidth to the internet.

Short term solution
Install a packetshaper.  Packetshapers permit a district technology coordinator to limit the amount of bandwidth specific protocols can access.  A science teacher wants to permit students to watch the shuttle launch and listen to commentary by NASA.  A Tech Coodinator can limit RTSP (the protocol passing the live video) to just 100K/second for every computer on the network – district wide.  However this packetshaping configuration will kill the video in two ways: first the limit on bandwidth would result in a stop-start-stop-wait-start-stop effect, second it would take a very long time to download the video to a students computer to watch the launch.

Long term solution
Get more bandwidth.  If you live in Wisconsin you need to get in touch with WiscNet, Wisconsin’s StateNetwork.  Check out this article: WiscNet helped a K12 District increase their bandwidth from 3MB/sec to 100MB/sec for just $75.00 more a year via GrowSmart.

Educators please recognize HD video lectures from Museums and Colleges have been available to K12s on the Research Channel and Internet2 via your StateNet.
Love the fact Missouri K12s have been video conferencing with Museums in London for four years!
Powerful content awaits both teachers and students.

Real World challenges: We don’t plan to fail, we fail to plan
Regardless of filtering solution, frequent “fire drills” revolve around allowing blocked sites to be unblocked for a teacher’s request, class assignment or guest speaker.  Yet due to the workloads of almost every high school technology coordinator, requests arrive less than 10 minutes before the class or speaker is scheduled.  Fire drills that often frustrates everyone in the process.

Q & A:
Q: I’m frustrated when YouTube’s webpage is still not showing the video.
You and me both.  Multiple answers here:

Answer #1: Google pushes many URL resources into a single YouTube page.
Those embedded URLs may be blocked by CIPA categories. If just one of those pushed URLs from Google is blocked, the entire page AND the video will not play:

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The interesting and troublesome issue is that most YouTube pages do not carry the same embedded links and URLs, so trying to write a generic allow (or bypass) rule will be very difficult.

Answer #2: Copyright infringement.
The video is pulled by YouTube due to legal action. No technology workaround is going to show it.  Google statement regarding copyright killing video here

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Answer #3: Bandwidth
Spinning cursor loading selected video never stops.  See Achilles Heel (above)

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Answer #4: The user deleted the file.
There is no magic like having someone delete a video from their account after its been talked about.  Bummer.

Q: Is YouTube automatically blocked by CIPA ?
A: Yes and No.  YouTube has videos that definitely fall outside CIPA guidelines forcing filters to block access to YouTube.  Districts can permit access to areas of YouTube by adjusting the settings in their filters or allowing custom bypass rules:

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Q: What does a blocked page look like ?
A: For a filter than BLOCKS videos from YouTube based upon a CIPA category of R Rated, the filter pulls this report which spells out the category and URL upfront:

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Q: Can YouTube flag videos for K12?
A: Today citizens around the world upload over 150,000 videos every day to YouTube.  Trying to hire someone to flag videos for K12 would be an overwhelming task.  Consider this: ABC Television has been broadcasting for 60 years. The first television broadcast was in April 1948 and if you added all the video ever broadcast since 1948 it would total over 500,000 hours.
YouTube has produced more hours of content in just the past 5 months.

Q: Does all YouTube video playback at the same rate ?
A: No.  Depends upon how much the person who uploaded the video knows about video codecs (compression/decompression) the data rate can be small or really big.

Ideas:
1. Google: set up K12.youtube.com so filters can automatically pass educational videos to schools and libraries. This would take some work on the backend, but boy it sure would help out K12s around the globe.

2. Apple: strengthen iTunesU’s existing K12 category by opening compelling video content clips for K12s.
See K12s own category within iTunesU here

Although I have read a number of tweets regarding educational YouTube-like websites all of them fail to scale to the demands of having industrial strength servers and network bandwidth capacity compared to YouTube or iTunesU.

Read More About It
Library.org: content filtering review here
PC Magzaine: content filtering review here
TopTen: home filtering review here
CIPA information via the FCC here

So why did it take so long to register that a blog post could benefit others by stepping outside the 140 character limit of Twitter?  If you think this is a good knowledge sharing post, then please follow me here on Twitter.

Will be more than happy to answer additional questions.  Let me know your thoughts.

Tags: content filter, CIPA, K12, education, technology, web filter, 8e6, bandwidth, broadband, internet, teacher, school, youtube, Michael Wesch, Twitter, WiscNet, web filter,trends