This Friday Wisconsin will introduce their initial CI Day event at UWMilwaukee with remote viewing supported around the State.  It was great to hear WiscNet’s Shaun Abshere at this session today in Q&A regarding Friday’s coming session and supported remote technologies that will be used.

UW CI Day event program at UW-Milwaukee.

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

In this video CERN technologists discuss the network’s requirements which supplies the TeraScale switches that connect 6,000 processors and 2,000 storage devices. TeraScale supports 672 line-rate Gigabit and 56 line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports per system, allowing CERN to deploy fewer systems and simplify the architecture of its network.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tags: Large Hadron Collider, CERN, Network, Research, Internet2, BoreasNet, WiscNet, reading

Today begins Internet2′s Spring Member meeting.  The hot topic of conversation? Broadband stimulus funding.

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:

Click thumbnail to view image

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.

Click thumbnail to view image

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.

Click thumbnail to view image

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:

Click thumbnail to view image

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

Click thumbnail to view image

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

Click thumbnail to view image

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:

Click thumbnail to view image

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

This Regional Optical Network (RON) will be advancing the research opportunities in the upper midwest by enhancing the established optical network with new links installed by member institutions and the WiscNet NOC.

Tags: ANML, optical network, Midwest, Boreas, globalization, network, Milwaukee, economic development, 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

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

Starlight is really one of the true keys of internet research and development. At the high end he presented the incredible work utilizing bandwidth coming out of Chicago and how Starlight has repositioned the globe regarding fiber points spanning the globe.

Tags: Internet2, WiscNet, Joel Mambretti, Starlight, globalization, network, trends

Could you have predicted a 100GB backbone just 10 years ago crossing the US?

At the same time Internet2 has opened a plan to redesign Internet2. This project should result in a stronger organization with continued leadership in advanced networking for research and education.

Tags: Internet2, WiscNet, Doug Van Houweling, community, globalization, trends

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tags: WiscNet, Education, Learning, community, globalization, trends

But will this upgrade be the next great Y2K project? Probably. And consider all those IPv4 consumer gadgets that are connecting to the internet today… Yikes! But fear not: Many companies are already moving to IPv6 .Google is already set. And while Apple’s OS X Leopard is already IPv6 capable, oh how Windows XP is not….and I’m not upgrading to Vista based on IPv6 alone.

This session was moderated by Internet2 CEO Doug Van Houwling who is speaking in Madison at WiscNet’s Future Technologies Conference May 13th & 14 at Monona Terrace.

Another strong presentation was John Windhausen‘s “National Broadband Policy” presentation. The goal: an 8 billion dollar investment to provide 100MB broadband service to every school, home and business by 2012.

Its a globalized world and we better keep ahead of the curve. But the wisdom of the crowd will have to drive our congress to make this happen. This type of thinking will not develop by itself by our elected officials.

Tags: Internet2, WiscNet, Doug Van Houweling, John Curran, ARIN, John Windhausen, national broadband policy, trends

In higher education the opportunity to collaborative remains a big challenge due to the fact that working collaboratively now extends across the globe. In the end the fast changing globalized world will benefit from educational institutions empowered by advanced networks. By the way … Internet2′s CEO Doug Van Houweling will be speaking in Madison at WiscNet‘s Future Technologies Conference.

Tags: Internet2, WiscNet, Doug Van Houweling, community, globalization, trends

Tuesday May 13th Doug Van Houweling, President of Internet2 will keynote the first day of the conference. Joel Mambretti, Director of the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern will be addressing the FTC on Wednesday.

You can register here for the 2 day conference in Madison.

Tags: Internet2, WiscNet, Doug Van Houweling, Joel Mambretti, Madison, global education, trends

The knowledge economy is really the network economy and his book is a good read to understand how networks, both physical and human are connecting everything – everyday – everywhere….in just 15 links (his reference for chapters) and how business, education, government and society can benefit by taking a closer look at how our linked world is really connected.

Ever play the game six degrees of Kevin Bacon? On the internet, links to every document are just nineteen links as noted by Lasziò Barabàsi, a Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame.

You can view this book as a more technical, networked version of Malcolm Gladwell‘s outstanding book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Gladwell explains how small events can transform people, trends and events. Its a great read for anyone looking to expand their understanding of how our linked world is tied together in unique ways.

I was interested to learn how Laszio Barabasi’s approach to power grids (Miami power failure) and the scale approach to al Qaeda all focus on networks and power hubs as true, real-world approaches to solving global problems. This book will make you look at your organization, mission and networking opportunities (social) in a new more focused perspective.

Tags: Linked, Albert-Lasziò Barabàsi, Network, Power Hubs, reading, trends, Notre Dame, Physics

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

Michigan, Ohio and Indiana have established networks while Boreas covers schools including Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As defined by ANML advanced networks are a catalyst for high-tech economic development, especially in today’s globalized world. You can view the entire map in acrobat format.

Tags: ANML, optical network, Midwest, Boreas, globalization, network, Milwaukee, economic development, trends

This service continues to expand the number of private and public peering connections, now to over 70 000 commodity Internet routes by connecting to major ISPs and content hosting providers over a virtual private network (VPN)

For Internet2 Network Connectors with available traffic headroom within their Internet2 IP Network connection, the CP service is available at no additional cost and can offer a significant total cost reduction to their overall Internet expenses.

Tags: Internet2, peering, education, globalization, network, trends

This new network, ESnet4 now connects scientists and researchers at national laboratories and universities. ESnet4 is managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

This project was built to meet the emerging scientific needs of the DOE’s Office of Science which manages over 30 DOE laboratories and 100,000 scientists alone.Universities and other government agencies around the country include almost 20,000 researchers and research projects that extend across the globe to CERN the particle physics lab near Geneva.

Tags: Internet2, Department of Energy, optical network, ESnet4, research, collaboration, globalization, network, WiscNet, trends

Internet2′s corporate members are not just networking companies, but rather innovate firms seeking to enhance their business with advanced networks. Verizon will collaborate with the Internet2 community on advanced optical networking projects.

“One of the strongest values of the Internet2 community is its commitment to the exploration and development of leading-edge Internet technology.”

In addition today’s press release notes the development of next-generation content delivery and network security within the Internet2 community and Verizon. Will the delivery of HD video over the public internet be far behind?

CNN Money press release here

Tags: Internet2, Verizon, optical network, education, globalization, network, WiscNet, trends