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

Tags: Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Seadragon, Photosynth, design, TED, Virtual Reality, imaging, trends

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

The TechMate video automatically starts when the page loads — and their embed tag does not permit a video to begin when triggered by the user…..so here is the link

Tags: Michael Copeland, Fortune, Tablet, Apple, TechMate, Newton, 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

Kindle DX

Tags: Amazon, Kindle, eBook, Globalization, reading, community, 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.

Population
China: 1,330,044,544 (July 08) Source
US:         303,824,640 (July 08) Source

Internet Population
China:   298,000,000 (Jan 09)  22.4% of the population Source
US:        220,141,969 (June 08)  72.5% of the population  Source

China has almost as many people connected to the internet as America has people.  Think about that for a moment.  At Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society this week former Berkman fellow Rebecca MacKinnon addressed “The Tao of the Web: China and the future of the Internet” in a webcast about the role of censorship in China.

Over the past two years leading up to the summer Olympic games many publications (print and digital) wrote articles about “The Great Firewall of China” and China’s censorship efforts.  But MacKinnon shared the Chinese Communist party has lost control over their own young citizens.  The webcast alone is worth the view and here are two amazing facts regarding China’s youth culture:

Over 65% utilize the web as the primary source of video entertainment.
Over 60% found YouTube videos via social networks and IM.

MacKinnon’s webcast (view it here) proves China has not only embraced YouTube. China’s own premier conducted a two-hour webcast available on YouTube.  The Great Firewall of China still has oppressive control over their citizens but YouTube has shown a small crack in their armor.

Tags: China, YouTube, The Great Firewall of China, globalization, Population, Internet Users, Censorship, education, technology, trends

From a technical point-of-view CIPA solutions range in flexibility like Tylenol:  Extra Strength Tylenol, Regular Strength Tylenol, Tylenol 8 hour and Tylenol PM.
For a real-world overview of YouTube, K12 web filtering & CIPA: Click Here

Many CIPA related questions from teachers and administrators can be addressed by a single resource:  District Technology Policy.  If you do not have one — get one — following these easy steps:

1. Google “K12 district technology policy”
2. Read policies posted online by Districts around the country
2a. Find one that looks appealing for the needs of your District
2b. Don’t forget to acknowledge their efforts…send an email acknowledging their work
3. Copy/paste
4. Modify as needed WITH District-wide consensus
5. Publish your Policy under Creative Commons

In many respects the CIPA vendor you choose may limit your flexibility in unblocking webpages.  Most robust CIPA products DO permit teachers/district coordinators to permit custom URLs to be available on the fly.

Vendors permit “timed access” to specific pages allowing, for example a class meeting Monday afternoons from 1:00 to 2:00pm will have a block of pre-approved website URLs available for 60 minutes.

Vendors also provide the flexibility to permit access to certain categories like eBay, Amazon or CraigsList with options:

1.    Warn:  This CIPA option will display a dialog box reminding users that the destination URL has been identified as a non-academic site but still allows access to the page.
2.    Tracking:  Pages can be tracked by administrators if your Technology Policy is so inclined.
3.    Time Quota:   This CIPA option will track a set time per day (beginning at midnight) for users to access defined, specific or pages.  categories.  If your district policy calls for 2 hours/day users are simply blocked after the district-wide site times out.

C O N T R O L:
Teachers have commented they need “special permission” to get access to a page or entire website for class.  Management of IT organizations has taught me many schools (and organizations) have adverse relationships with their IT staffs.  I’m sorry this exists.

It is often difficult to break the assumption, or the “built-in notion” that IT holds C O N T R O L simply because they install and configure the hardware/software but ultimately do not use the product in the classroom.  Do you work in a District where IT is the tail that wags the dog?

Q and A:
Does IT tell you what textbooks to order?

Today more and more textbook publishers are embedding webpage URL resources inside textbooks or have established textbook companion webpages.  Think you still have the right CIPA solution running in your District?

The idea that textbook approval is equal to website approval is not real.  Textbooks are a single source of knowledge unchanged until the next physical edition is printed/shipped … in some cases years later.   The equivalent would be a series of fixed bookmarked websites pointing to  content. However in some cases pages move to different webservers, blogs or wikis by the time a textbook is shipped. The advantage to online resources includes the ability to see feedback from students outside his/her classroom on a potential global scale regarding subject matter.

BTW:  In some cases a remote firewall can block access to the destination website.  Sometimes the webserver crashes.
The internet … like life … is not perfect.
Q:  Should the teachers be in this same umbrella of protection?
A:  The CIPA law is for the protection of minors.

Q:  Should the teachers then be allowed to access the internet without restrictions?  If so, where does the boundary lies – shopping sites, personal email sites, etc.
A: Well … do you ALWAYS log off your classroom computer correctly?
I have personally watched teachers leave their restricted login account running after they have exited the classroom leaving the computer available to anyone with access to grading and assessment.  There are boundaries/rules/guidelines and dare I say … Policy for a reason — to protect students AND faculty.

Is a computer available in the teacher’s lounge?  That computer could be configured to bypass CIPA filtering based upon LDAP or Microsoft’s Active Directory.  Some have voiced an opinion that teachers and administrators are employees of the District and must obey rules when using equipment at school.  While teachers at home or on the road – different story/different post.

A Technology Policy crafted for your District based upon the realworld needs of your teachers can determine the best product and will serve your District well.

Tags: content filter, CIPA, K12, education, technology, web filter, 8e6, bandwidth, broadband, internet, teacher, school, youtube, K12 Technology Policy, District Technology, Technology Policy, web filter, trends

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:

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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:

Click thumbnail to view image

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:

Click thumbnail to view image

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

The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution proves that indeed access to music can be modified to be as simple as finding water.  If you are interested in education David and Gerd actually spell out something special in chapter one … maybe without even knowing it.

Without a doubt they have The Future of Music nailed down: Mobile and Digital.  The book is labeled a Manifesto for good reason.  If you want to understand the music industry from the inside, gain a better perspective on how the record industry stacks the deck against musicians and how mp3 + iPod + iTunes = Revolution then you will really enjoy The Future of Music.

Authors David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard have combined their knowledge and talent to truly place a wonderful series of ideas, thoughts and experiences from the music industry into a book that will show how radical changes to the digital distribution of music will actually make everyone happy, kill Digital Rights Management in the process yet make the music business profitable.

The book begins with David and Gerd sharing their ideas of what our lives would be like if music was like water.  “Music is starting to flow all around us. It is available on the internet, on mobile networks, wifi, 3G and your home.”   But I was really struck by the idea that they were really talking about the future of education. I’m really not sure how to tell you how this hit me while moving through the first chapter but I realized that in sharing their ideas about the future of music, they were actually describing how the future of education could be accessed just like water.  Try this: read the first chapter and substitute ‘education’ for ‘music industry’ and ‘teachers’ for ‘artists’ and even ’students’ for ‘music fans’ and it just comes together … and makes a very powerful statement about how changes to our educational system due to technology, the internet and digital downloads have just as much impact as how today we can access iTunes for music and iTunesU for learning.

Chapter 2 is a great overview about the top ten truths in the music business for those of us who do not have insider knowledge on how the industry is changing.

The Top 10 Ten Truths of The Music Business:
01.  Music matters more than ever: the music market is alive & vibrant.
02.  The record business ? the music business
03.  The artists are the brands, and entertainment is the main attraction.
04.  Artists and their managers will shape the future.
05.  Publishing income is a crucial income stream
06.  Radio is no longer the primary way that people discover new music
07.  Digital niche marketing outperforms mass marketing
08.  Customers demand and get increasing convenience and value
09.  The current pricing model goes out the window
10.  Music is mobile, and new models will embrace a more liquid view of music.

It was very interesting to learn how U2 even passed up financial compensation for their Apple/Vertigo TV commercials with Apple but arranged a cut of sales of the U2 iPod Special Edition introduced in 2004.  Simply a book you must read.  Get it here: The Future of Music.  And Gerd has written Music 2.0 which I’m going to place on my reading list.

PS – Best thing about writing this post?  I’m listening to Mozart on Pandora via the Internet.

Tags: The Future of Music, David Kusek, Gerd Leonhard, music, globalization, mp3, digital, music industry, manifesto, itunes, ipod, napster, drm, reading, trends

Session Overview:
October 15, 2008, 8:45 AM – 10:00 AM | UTC/GMT -5 hours (CDT)
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) represents a major milestone along the path towards a new understanding of the fundamental nature of the physical universe. This is a major milestone for physics, and also an important milestone for the Internet2 advanced networking community in supporting research in the U.S.

The LHC will generate many petabytes during each year of operation, and will accumulate an exabyte of real and simulated data within the first decade of its estimated 20 years of operation. Internet2 and its regional partner networks, ESnet and USLHCNet will provide the critical national and transatlantic infrastructure linking U.S. LHC scientists to the data, and to their partners in Europe and Asia.

To celebrate and highlight our community’s work, Internet2 will present a live peek behind the scenes at the LHC using advanced iHDTV technology developed by the ResearchChannel and University of Washington to provide our community a first hand view of the biggest science device on the planet and discuss the importance the community’s investment in cyberinfrastructure to this work and in future research and discovery.

This session The Importance of Cyberinfrastructure for Higher Education was truly a peek at new demands for massive data transfers over the internet.  LHC project research will be expected to generate over 5 petabytes of data.  Over today’s advanced 100Gbit networks this data will take one week to transfer from LHC to the large science research centers in America.

One week over the most advanced networks available today?  Time for an upgrade.

Tags: Internet2, bandwidth, network, fiber, globalization, petabyte, large hadron collider, LHC, CERN, gigabit, trends

Tags: Internet2, bandwidth, network, fiber, globalization, trends

Larry has documented how the music and movie industries are turning students into criminals because they use cheap software, the internet and their creativity.  His presentation at TED hilights the core principals of his upcoming book.

The power and impact of the digital economy has placed copyright and the old guard clearly on the defensive.  Those aging companies still want the market to be “published” (in analog format) are unwilling to change to the new information economy.
–Well okay what I’m really trying to say is they don’t want to give up their revenue streams.

Okay maybe they do understand how the game has changed, yet I’m not sure the impact of how young people are wired has fundamentally changed their business model.

Actually I’m hoping Remix may also hilight how the RIAA should be chasing down the millions of pirates in China rather than students in America.  Larry is proving what everyone under 30 already has accepted as a fact of life…They have never been forced to purchase a majority of their entertainment in analog format.  Should be a great read!

But if you purchased digital music from Yahoo and move that music to a new computer or external drive, you cannot take it with you.  Yahoo’s underperforming music store has announced they are closing their doors (and also taking down their DRM technology keys) stitched into your downloaded music.

This means the music you paid for will not play anymore.  If you purchased Yahoo music you are simply SOL. Actually Yahoo tells a better story:
After September 30, 2008, you will not be able to transfer songs to unauthorized computers or re-license these songs after changing operating systems. Please note that your purchased tracks will generally continue to play on your existing authorized computers unless there is a change to the computer’s operating system.

This should serve fair warning to all the music etailers to abandon DRM.  The customer is always right and today’s teenage market has a powerful voice and the tools (like Digg) to flex their collective financial muscles….so don’t piss them off.

So we can remix photos with Flickr and all the web2.0 photo sites but when it comes to music the RIAA is still holding the handcuffs with their lawyers in the next room?  Keep pissing them off and you’ll drive them further underground. With the internet begin global those music servers are increasing sitting outside the US mainland and are getting harder for RIAA’s lawyers to track down because they sit beyond the reach of US legal copyright.

Tags: Yahoo, music, DRM, copyright, globalization, trends

Tags: Internet2, bandwidth, network, astronomy, China, trends

Walter Bender, former President of OLPC has launched Sugar Labs to promote the use of Sugar on more devices. Sugar is open source and I’m running it on my Powerbook via VMware’s Fusion. Sugar Lab’s approach: children should not be forced to learning a legacy operating system designed for adult computer programmers.

Lets face facts. XP is not designed for the world’s children living in poverty. The design is simple and perfect for children:

Sugar was designed to be used by children with no previous access (or understanding) of computers, but rather a fresh, new focused approached designed to intelligently and easily bring advanced tools to their attention:

Sugar will have a difficult time but I believe in their work and I’m sure many agree that Sugar is an OS designed for children. Think about that.

Tags: OLPC, Sugar Labs, Walter Bender, XO, open source, globalization, trends

Playing catch-up
Today we find a majority of schools around the country in the educational slow lane. For some reason it does not matter if the school is remote or urban, many are connecting at just 5 Megabits/second. Its like teaching history with books that still recognize Russia as the old Soviet Union….oh how I miss Gorgachev.
Any college connecting at less than 10MB — shows a lack of understanding and vision for their students who enter higher education seeking not just a degree but an advantage to enter the global marketplace.

How can any teacher provide engaging content to today’s rich media students with the school’s 5Mb/s connection? My home cable modem runs at 6Mb/s while other providers around the country are pushing 8Mb/s for a service that is sparingly used after work.

My home computer sits idle during the school day. I’d support any solution to transfer my 6Mb/s to my local school during the day. Okay, I know this probably will not work. But do you see my desire?

Lets go a step further
With emerging (and engaging) content coming from Internet2 any school (K12 or HigherEd) needs 10Mb/s minimum…to be honest it should probably be 25Mb/s minimum because 10 will be flooded immediately by students accessing rich media content.

HD video on the internet needs 8Mb/s alone, so 10Mb/s will not permit email, web and VoIP to function on the academic side while the administrative access to ERP software like Oracle and MS Dynamics cannot be off-line during a HD video broadcast.

9/11 video history
How successful could a teacher convey history lessons with access to video footage surrounding 9/11? For my generation: think of the value a history lesson from the December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor. The resource Archive.org has raw video from ABC, CNN, NBC, CBS, and even the BBC from 9/11 available for free. Take a look for yourself here.

Why is this important? Because ultimately any historian whats to convey a real sense of the times. And what a resource this can be.

I would be interested to see the same access to raw video of Katrina. History teaches us compelling and emotional lessons but the impact on today’s students will only be powerful if you don’t have to deal with the “stop/start/stop/start” video jerkiness due to slow bandwidth.

Competition
Countries including Canada, South Korea and Japan deliver over 1GB/s to their schools and libraries empowering their students and citizens. Yes thats 1 Gigabit per second! Our students (I.E. our future) are learning in the slow lane. Lets use an automotive theme:

Bandwidth to the Home
Japan: 1 Gigabit/second or 1,000 miles per hour
USA : 5-8 Megabits/second or 5-8 miles per hour

Do you see the crisis looming?
Its only going to get worse. Is Bandwidth on the radar for our upcoming Presidential election — Maybe to no surprise? Just as those countries are supplying bandwidth to schools, we are losing our research edge as more and more talented Americans leave for greener pastures overseas. Please understand today’s fight for talent is not east coast vs. west coast…..its now global.

Its now East Asia vs. Western Europe with American somewhere in between and beginning to show its aging infrastructure. If you were unaware of this talent migration, may I suggest Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back I’m just half way through and have been further enlightened to the dangerous slide occurring in America.

Tags: Internet2, bandwidth, school, community, globalization, trends

I’ve been watching my usage. In two months I’ve only used Outlook out of the entire Office Suite. Everything else? Moved onto online services.”
- 09:06 AM April 30, 2008 from web

Reflecting upon my own use of applications online from various vendors including my beta testing of SlideRocket, I would have to agree that the time to move from Microsoft’s Office suite to Google Apps and SlideRocket appear to make more sense than ever before as I also type this on my laptop, suggestion I’m set for wireless access to data at the office, at home and on the road.

Scoble may be predicting cloud computing solutions has really arrived because the applications available today are more than powerful enough for a majority of citizens. For those who see their roles within organizations as advanced users of MS Word and Excel, then Microsoft’s Office suite is still a perfect fit for this small user base.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Robert Scoble, Naked Conversations, community, Google Apps, Microsoft Office, globalization, trends

Tags: Internet2, laptop, orchestra, community, globalization, trends

The HD video concert was projected in Discovery World’s Digital Theater which provides viewers with a spectacular 27foot wide high definition image with a 2048×1920 resolution picture.

Early arrival at Discovery World

The Philadelphia Orchestra is the first major orchestra to transmit live concerts to multiple large screen venues such as Discovery World. The live broadcast uses an MPEG 2 compressed stream running at bandwidths exceeding 50 times that of conventional internet video streams. For this concert performance only 20 venues around the world participated.

Performances in the Global Concert Series provide the audience with an up-close look at the musicians and conductor, in views not seen by live audiences. The live concert is transmitted using seven high definition cameras installed in Verizon Hall at The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia. The first performance was Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. I’ve blogged about Mozart before and was thrilled to watch (and listen) to his work.

This event and concert series provides proof that art performances and exhibitions belong on Internet2, extending the local reach globally to audiences in real-time who simply cannot travel, yet want the experience.

But this was not just a watch only event. Philadelphia’s concert series supports live questions to their host via email (of course) and supports questions via text messaging. Audience participation included a live interview with Orchestra musicians before the concert and included an extensive interview with particularly noted conductor Charles Dutiot during intermission.

This provides an excellent educational lesson to novices and series music students. The series provides Philadelphia an opportunity to connect with venues around the world in their supported “Continue the Discussion” forums with musicians, conductors, and guest artists on-line following the performance. Philadelphia’s Orchestra is leading and engaging a broader, global community from local school groups to retirement communities and extending their community to new patrons.

The Global Concert Series, begun in September 2007 is made possible through a partnership among the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Internet2 Consortium. Local support comes from WiscNet and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Discovery World is another WiscNet member connecting and delivering dynamic content via Interent2.

UPDATE: UDelaware is joining the broadcast for on-campus performance

Tags: Internet2, network, Philadelphia Orchestra, Concert Performance, Milwaukee, Discovery World, global education, digital theater, HD video, Mozart, trends