Report Says Schools Need 100Mbps Per 1,000 Users 292
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samzenpus
from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-children dept.
from the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-children dept.
alphadogg writes "American schools need mega-broadband networks — and they need them soon, a new report says. Specifically, U.S. educational institutions will need networks that deliver broadband performance of 100Mbps for every 1,000 students and staff members in time for the 2014-15 school year. That's the conclusion reached by the State Educational Technology Directors Association. Why the need for speed? For one thing, more and more schools are using online textbooks and collaboration tools, said Christine Fox, director of educational leadership and research at SETDA. Broadband access must be 'ubiquitous' and 'robust,' she said, adding that schools should think of broadband as a 'necessary utility,' not as an add-on. The report, called 'The Broadband Imperative,' further suggests that schools should upgrade their networks to support speeds of 1Gbps per 1,000 users in five years."
Moar speed! (Score:3, Funny)
All the better to torrent with, my dear!
re: Moar (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
Trust me. They won't even consider that possibility. It's only a problem when it affects them.
And that is the core problem.
Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?
I'd be looking at huge caching servers first.
Re: Moar (Score:4, Informative)
Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?
When you get up to buying a gig, not as much /Mbps as the smaller allotments. But you are right, that would be a stretch for most institutions, mainly because their routers/firewalls/content-filtering/etc is not sized for the number of connections/pps that such a pipe would support. They'd be looking at a full re-buy and reprovisioning of their entire gateway path.
Re: Moar (Score:2, Insightful)
I would say caching servers is still doing it wrong. If thousands of students in a single building need access to "online textbooks and collaboration tools", why aren't those services hosted either on the premises or in some kind of colocation facility with a dedicated pipe?
Re: Moar (Score:5, Funny)
Because, The Cloud... It's always good!
Re: Moar (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, whoosh.
Re: Moar (Score:2)
Re: Moar (Score:3)
This requires organization. Good luck...
Re: Moar (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be looking at huge caching servers first.
Christine Fox: "What's that?"
Someone mod parent up. Their requirements clearly indicate the need to repeatedly access same content. Which means that you could cut your bandwidth usage by 999 times when that content, accessed by 1,000 students, is cached locally when the first student accesses it. Can you imagine the cost savings of such a responsible solution instead of knee-jerk response resulting in head-on capacity accommodation?
Re: Moar (Score:5, Interesting)
Today's content providers seem to jump through every possible hoop to defeat caching.
You would think that a video provider would use some indirect URL to first log the access attempt and then point to a static location where the actual video is provided, and that can be cached locally, but no...
In a new deployment, including a caching proxy probably is a waste.
E.g. our existing proxy now has a byte-% hit ratio of 11%, falling all the time.
Apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank HTML5 for the death of caching as much as the advertising.
It is all apps now. And in schools they KNOW they are all incompetent boobs so they want nothing that requires skilled labor to maintain. So outsourcing is the word. Everything. Gradebooks, attendance, cafeteria manegement, email of course, Courseware, scheduling and calendaring, yearbooks. If it isn't being delivered from the cloud now it is because they are still fighting over which vendor they want to write a check to. (read as the bidding is still fierce over who will kick back more.. ok, I'm a cynic) That pattern means they need LOTS of bandwidth now and will need an ever growing amount going forward into an HD Video for everything future.
And the vendors love it. It will of course drive lots of sales to schools themselves but when the kids can't do their homework without a constant high bandwidth connection it drives the 'Internet is a 'Right'' meme that leads to even more billions and billions of sweet sweet government money that will only be available to the politically connected.
Re:Apps (Score:5, Interesting)
Gradebooks, attendance, cafeteria manegement, email of course, Courseware, scheduling and calendaring, yearbooks. If it isn't being delivered from the cloud now it is because they are still fighting over which vendor they want to write a check to. (read as the bidding is still fierce over who will kick back more.. ok, I'm a cynic) That pattern means they need LOTS of bandwidth now and will need an ever growing amount going forward into an HD Video for everything future.
Having subbed in many local schools throughout the years and reading an article like this...BULLSH!T! You want to know what your tax dollars are being wasted on? Every class which had an assignment and needed computers...the kids weren't doing their work...they were playing games (web-based)...using You Tube...going to ESPN...racing web sites and going to Facebook/other social media sites. Reminding these "little angels" they had work to do and that if they were in an actual job doing these things...they would be reprimanded or fired...I was informed their teacher doesn't care. I let the teacher/the principal/IT department know this was going on...I was the bad guy and told to mind my own business.
This is what your tax money for education is going for. What a great use of our public resources.
Re: Moar (Score:2)
One of the points: try to talk to someone at a school about squid services. Watch the blank stare. The web is simply magic; our technology training of teachers is still in the dumpers.
Re: Moar (Score:2)
think if the ISP's who sponsored this study...
Re: Moar (Score:3)
hmmm.
SETDA is funded, in part, by the likes of Verizon, Comcast, Intel, HP, CDW, Microsoft and TI.. http://www.setda.org/web/guest/sponsors [setda.org]
Re: Moar (Score:2)
Trust me. They won't even consider that possibility. It's only a problem when it affects them.
That's because using metaphors that don't fit is stupid. Wondering whether there will be enough bandwidth is a real problem and it sucks to have to worry about it when you're trying to get something done. With as much bullshit as we've laden educators and students alike with, they shouldn't have to wait for lag when accessing educational resources.
Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?
Schools used to get a deal, don't they still?
Re: Moar (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry.. but this statement is just B.S. Apple IIs and TRaSh-80s were the gateway for hundreds of future computer users and programmers. Students learned TONS on them, though maybe not was initially intended.
I agree with the point made often around here is that there is magical thinking when it comes to educational computer use. Today you need good guides. Computers in the classroom also mean something totally different when most homes have smart phones and PCs. However, you have to be careful... Apple IIs in schools enable a new era... it's not fair to say that they didn't. However, today kids already have already had the exposure to computers that the AppleII gave my generation so you need to take it to the next step and get under the hood.
Re: Moar (Score:3)
Sorry.. but this statement is just B.S. Apple IIs and TRaSh-80s were the gateway for hundreds of future computer users and programmers. Students learned TONS on them, though maybe not was initially intended.
Sort of. I was a student, and I learned tons on an early computer. It wasn't the computer in my school that we were allowed to access for one hour a week to play games on though. It was my computer at home. The limited access to computers at school, the limited amount of things you were allowed to do with them, and the limited knowledge of anyone in the school about them meant they taught me absolutely nothing.
YMMV.
Re: Moar (Score:2)
I found a PDF about that 1Gb/s/user. It is actually 100Mb/s/user internet side and 1Gb/s/user WAN side. So a highly connected WAN and a decent internet connection.
Re: Moar (Score:2)
Re: Moar (Score:3)
>>> 'Can I watch my teacher's algebra video when I get home?'
Aren't they exaggerating a bit? I watch hulu and youtube video with only 0.3 Mbit/s. It's called "video compression". So yes the student at home does need broadband to watch his teacher's video, but he doesn't need a monster amount. Comcast's or Verizon's Economy Service (1 to 1.5 Mbit/s) will provide more than the minimum.
Re: Moar (Score:2)
why would the school ( assuming public school) not upload to you tube? HD content and let google manage it
How the schools work (Score:5, Informative)
> why would the school not upload to you tube?
You obviously know nothing about the way schools work. There is an entire industry devoted to reinventing every wheel for educational use. Some of it makes some sense, schools have a lot of mandates for privacy and so on, but most of it is simply because. YouTube would be right out, a contract with an edu specific video hosting site would be required, and it would of course require a hefty annual contract with each school system. Each school would have to get a customized portal with the school logo, colors and such or it is a no sale. Access controls are a must. You can't put a picture that includes a student on a school's public facing website without moving a lot of paper for clearances.... meanwhile the local paper's website has the same photo from the game up that day and the kids themselves post everything onto their facebook pages in realtime. And it simply must be this way, the idea that it could be different could never occur. If nothing else, schools simply wouldn't be able to handle the concept of a vendor that doesn't charge.
Re: Moar (Score:2)
Re: Moar (Score:5, Interesting)
My local school district has several Verizon FiOS 115 Mb/sec connections for the district of 4,000 K-12 students. It isn't that expensive, but it is essentially residential-grade service.
They pay about $200/connection per month, probably $1K/month - much cheaper than the subsidized business class service the district had before, and much faster.
Our in school wire network is Fast Ethernet to the desktop, Gigabit backbone.
It was non-trivial to get this service at a public school, due to rate regulations.
Re: Moar (Score:2)
Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?
I'm sure they do, it's not that hard to price out. Do you have any idea how much heat and AC cost a school with 1000+ students every year? In a 4 season climate it absolutely dwarfs any ISP costs. And gets more expensive every year, while Internet access gets cheaper.
Re: Moar (Score:2)
Depends where you're at. Some places offer gbps for ~$900/mo. I imagine a large, long-term connection like a university could negotiate a pretty good deal.
Caching? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose that local caching of something as relatively static as a textbook is out of the question? My dead-tree edition books were often cached for 5-20 years. Really, how frequently does arithmetic change from year to year? Literature? Science and "Social Studies" I buy as being a little more dynamic, but still within a year?
Re:Caching? (Score:4, Insightful)
That would be contrary to the whole "send it to the cloud" trending mentality, which is aimed at saving local-server tech support costs.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
I was never very good at adhering to fashion fads. I suppose that's why I wasn't very popular at school.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
Well, on a more serious note, most schools already squid heavily, because it's built into their content filtering suite as an add-on feature.
But then, how often do you actually download truly "static" webpage that wasn't dynamically generated these days?
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
I think its more for the "rent per year" charging for access..
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
The corporate overlords realy dont want you purchasing something that can be used for 5 - 20 years, when they can enforce a new version of licensed content every year. The big win is that they dont have to go through full publishing costs, but the student access must be fully renewed every year.
Re:Caching? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose that local caching of something as relatively static as a textbook is out of the question?
How do you ensure that the recurring fees are being paid? After all, the point of online textbooks is to bring in money for textbook publishers; making information available to students is just an unfortunate side effect.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
Most "material" that the broadband is used for is already saved on local servers.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
Kids need to learn how to find and investigate stuff online, not just access text books. Responsiveness is key to maintaining interest and attention too.
The focus in education has moved away from memorization towards being able to find the information you need. Obviously that has to be underpinned by strong basic skills in things like English and Maths, as well as good general knowledge of the particular subject being studied. Even when I was at school in the early 90s studying history there was as much emphasis put on being able to take a source and evaluate and interpret it as there was on being knowledgeable about the time period, which makes sense since I doubt many of us used out knowledge of WWI and the 1920s/30s much later in life.
Re:Caching? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Caching? (Score:2, Informative)
The ability to update textbooks on the fly presents an opportunity for too much bias to enter into them.
Last years updating crew really didn't like president X, and while they are professional enough to not write up a case study on libel, it's easy to see a bit of a slant one way or another.... only to be swung back the following year when a new editing crew comes on-board, and they really like president X, but hate president Y.
Not to mention things that haven't entirely come to light. Should American history books include info about Stuxnet/Flame and our alleged involvement? Would anything have to be redacted a few years down the road? Keep textbooks on a 5+ year schedule at LEAST, so that enough time and peer review can be undergone for everything to be fully vetted by professionals. And that's just for Social Studies or other subject that are prone to change. How often do we really need to update our math books? Unless Euclid of Alexandria plans to rise from his grave and revise his (in)famous proof... I think we can keep Algebra course books static year in and year out.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
yes but the advertisements that will be displayed with the book pages change every few seconds...
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
Just because you CAN buy a gold-plated car doesn't mean you should. Money is finite. We don't need to be spending ~40,000 a month (or ~$500,000 a year) on a high speed internet line when $10,000 worth of reusable textbooks can do the same task for an entire decade.
Re:Caching? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have two children two years apart, in the public school system in the northeast US. Our school district is rated fairly well for the state, better than most but not as good as some.
Now that the context is established, let me say that I have been shocked and somewhat dismayed to see the annual changes to curriculum and approach at the elementary school. While I do understand that gains have been made in understanding childhood development and education, I really struggle to understand this constant churn from year to year. The students struggle with it as well. This is particularly noticeable in basic approaches to reading, spelling, and math. As an example, one year the focus will be on memorizing a list of 10 words, spelling them, and using them in sentences. The next year, the spelling quizzes are gone completely. Maybe this is a response to the standardized testing regimen that all schools are focusing on, but I have a tough time not feeling like this is some kind of ill-considered trend-chasing experiment and our communities' children are the unwitting guinea pigs.
While I'm in rant mode let me also express my surprise to find that precious little time is being spent on learning basic math facts. These children are being exposed to grouping, estimating, while they still don't know their basic addition/subtraction/multiplication/division tables. Having these facts committed to memory up front will save them a lot of time and effort down the road when they are trying to digest weightier subject matter. (Before you jump all over me, yes as a parent I have worked with my offspring to get them to know their math facts) Rote memorization may be boring, but it too is a skill that must be learned and why not learn it early on in the same way that's worked for at least the past 200 years? It's *not* broken!
OK so now that the rant is over - yes, caching is good and should be encouraged. Even if the texts are changing daily or weekly and being served "from the cloud" - there are still major performance gains and efficiencies to be found on the network with a little simple cache engine.
Re:Caching? (Score:3)
Having spent five years as the IT head for a school district I can tell you that much of it is following the trends in their field. Real data is hard to find and does not in fact always go to plan when you try it on your district's children. So the administrators see a growing trend to teach in XYZ form and the given improvement can be 10-30%, so they opt to try XYZ at their school. A year is typical for any such thing, so even if it doesn't seem to be working for them they will continue it for that period and evaluate it during that time. At the end they may have seen a -10% change in their students which decries the trend and rather than continue with it to see if the change reverses (because the teacher(s) teaching to XYZ were new to it or any of a hundred things) they instead decide to try another trend, say KXT instead the next year to see what effect it has.
Most of the gains and trends are caused by people looking at schools doing 'well' and trying to emulate them. However each group of children are different and respond differently, so the results vary. Three years ago I had looked at One-laptop per child programs and the reported stats varied all over the place. Some had 60% improvements in certain areas, others had neutral or slightly negative results. So when I discussed the topic I said that the highest gains are as much as 60% and the average was more like 10% with some results even being slightly negative. My CAO (Chief Academic Officer, equal to a superintendent) said "When you go in front of the board don't give them all that crap just say it's 60% gains! We would never get it approved if they didn't think this was the best course of action at least for the next year. After that we already have the stuff, so it doesn't matter."
Btw on the whole caching issue, I can say I'd never have gotten funding for it. I couldn't even get them to replace a partial working (it would freeze once every 14 days and require a reboot). They don't see a reason for large expenses of cash. It however is much easier to say we need an 'X' increase a month for added bandwidth. My school district had a shared 3 MB connection and as they transitioned to more and more online based resources we could clearly all see the effects. I was advising we go above our basic needs to around a 20 MB connection (when what we needed was more like 10) for some future-proofing. However no one could offer us 20 or even 10 and so we went to 7 instead.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
The shift towards standardized testing, meanwhile, is meant to allow a variety of pedagogical methods, while putting them on an equal basis for evaluation. (Of course it has many issues of its own.)
As to your second rant, "back to basics" (including a shift back towards more rote memorization) is certainly among the fashionable movements now.
Re:Caching? (Score:3, Funny)
I suppose that local caching of something as relatively static as a textbook is out of the question? My dead-tree edition books were often cached for 5-20 years. Really, how frequently does arithmetic change from year to year? Literature? Science and "Social Studies" I buy as being a little more dynamic, but still within a year?
I'm not the person that would ever use the term "rofl", but if I ever did, it would be about this comment.
I find your rational thought and naivety amusing.
Caching a textbook locally would require a huge license and licensing system, or would certainly be illegal. Are you a pirate? Pirates would think that they can make local copies for their own use and the use of others in the name of education, but they would be doing harm to the industry. (Potentially millions or even billions of dollars in harm.)
Also, every textbook has to change every other year, or else the entire educational system dies. Everyone knows that. Being able to change every other week, while having an adjoining resources website, blog, and twitter feed will ensure that students are able to temporarily license access to this knowledge without any of the inherent evils that dead-tree format provided - such as copying, borrowing, reselling, or using once graduated.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
Bullshit.
A publisher could easily offer (as an example) a PKI based scheme to cache content for a specific period of time.
There are easy technical solutions to a variety of these kinds of issues.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
And you buy that equipment once and stop paying for it. Internet connectivity is an ongoing expense. Internet connectivity at the rate of 1gbps per 1000 students means an OC-24 for every 1200 students. So you're saying it doens't matter whether you need to spend $40k once or $40k monthly? Also, keep in mind that this is *per 1200 students* so a school with 5000 students would need 4 OC-24 connections to *ALMOST* neet that requirement, at a cost of $160,000 per month.
You need to spend the $40k initially in either case; but if everything is cached locally, an OC-3 should more than suffice for even the largest schools.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
Not if it was cached on the student's own hardware.
100Mbps for..... text...books (Score:2)
Re:100Mbps for..... text...books (Score:5, Funny)
100Mbps for textbooks
It's a new DRM system.
Re:100Mbps for..... text...books (Score:2)
9am. 5000 students accessing the same non-cached 25MB PDF on a 4mbps line.
Do I need to make the calculations, or can you see where I'm going with this?
Re:100Mbps for..... text...books (Score:2)
you broke it by saying "same non-cached"
Think, McFly... (Score:3)
Um. If your text requires 100Mbps you're doing it wrong. Um. If your text requires 100Mbps you're doing it wrong.
It's *not* a "text file". It's more likely a locked down PDF or a similarly "heavy" format.
Re:100Mbps for..... text...books (Score:3)
Re:100Mbps for..... text...books (Score:2)
I used to work at a small 2 year college. We had about 30 classrooms, a few thousand FTE students. (12 credits = 1 FTE).. We got complements when we went from 2 to 4 Mb/s. The compliments were all about how much faster it was than their cable modems. (in our area, 5MB cable was the norm). But we had much, much lower latency, and a squid proxy server. I think the most I ever saw online at one time was about 80 people. However, most are reading something, or just have the internet connection open in the background. I think myspace was about half our bandwidth, from all the streaming music video's. I'm sure things are busier now (they moved to 8MB recently) but even the heaviest Facebook page is pretty small when you consider that the kids are reading stuff at the same time. The streaming stuff that caused issues from time to time had nothing to do with education, and we would ask students nicely to stop.
Re:100Mbps for..... text...books (Score:2)
Textbooks are often well illustrated. And the old style of textbook is a dinosaur that could do better. The idea is interactive game like lesson plans with quizzes and work areas to help practice the skills or memorize the lessons.
I took a licensing course online this weekend to pass a certification course (which it also tested for online) and without broadband it would have been painfully slow waiting to advance to the next page. There were also video sections... and if a kid has to wait a minute to watch a minute long video--we're wasting a lot of school resources (teachers, librarians etc.) to have kids sitting around looking at waiting bars.
American schools ? Nay. ALL schools. (Score:2)
At first, I thought 100mbps seemed a bit low, after all it's only 100kbps per user, but pragmatically it's more like 3mbps per classroom. You don't need to be streaming individual content to each kid. As much as I despise the overt brainwashing that is most K-12 education, if those subservient lemmings can come out with a bit more content between the ears, maybe they'll be better equipped to think for themselves and add value to their surroundings, unlike the current sad state of affairs.
Re:American schools ? Nay. ALL schools. (Score:2)
For self-paced learning you do.
Depends on Controls (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a Network admin at a major university, the amount of bandwidth-per-user really depends on the levels of control the school is allowed (or willing) to apply to the user's Network usage.
For example, in our residences, students are told they have unfiltered access to the Internet, as in, they are allowed to use any software they wish. The only stated restrictions are overall bandwidth related on a per-day basis. Behind the scenes, a we use packet shaping hardware to limit the total amount of per-user bandwidth usable for such things as P2P or VoIP (to prevent super-nodes) but otherwise leave it alone. In this model, 100Mbps per 1000 students is inadequate, but only just barely. We currently have it at approximately 120Mbps per 1000 students.
Under tighter control circumstances, where P2P is disabled and/or other controls, caps, and so on are enacted, you can likely get away with less bandwidth. Other networks we distribute have such tighter controls, and allow us to dial the number down further to around 70Mbps per 1000 students (without any web censorship).
Re:Depends on Controls (Score:2)
This is pretty close to the situation in our network, and I suspect these are pretty typical numbers for a higher education residential campus.
Re:Depends on Controls (Score:2)
Future Student Excuses (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Future Student Excuses (Score:2)
Re:Future Student Excuses (Score:2)
Ted Stevens is still dead.
Requirements != Capability ~ Insanity (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife is a kindergarten teacher. In order for her students to access the content she is required to teach them they must first logon to the machines in the computer lab. (I'll avoid a diatribe on the woes of the poor password practices they are forced to teach these minions...) It can often take 1/3 of her classes computer lab time just to log on; granted much of this wasted time is due to the fact that kindergarteners can't remember their passwords but, an equal amount is also caused by the lag caused when the network is flooded with their logon requests (she has less than 20 students).
Once they've accomplished the herculean task of getting the little minions logged onto the lab computers the real fun begins. Most of the content is only available online from the publishers of the text books the school uses. Adding insult to injury the publishers sites are difficult to navigate often requiring the students to manually type in long cryptic URLs that would make torrent users eyes bleed. While much of the content is colorful, animated and has pleasing sound effects try and imagine what accessing this content is like on a network that can't handle a few dozen simultaneous logons.
While I'm a fan of using online resources, the schools (as directed by their boards of education, county governments etc.) seem to have truly put the digital cart before the horse in the mad dash to move toward education online. Also without competent, which of course often means properly paid, tech support (she was once told by a tech the printer wouldn't print because she was using a japanese USB cable) adding bandwidth is pointless.
Logins for kindergarden students?! (Score:2)
Re:Requirements != Capability ~ Insanity (Score:3)
Passwords for kindergarteners? Seriously? What ever happened to the guest account, virtualization, deepfreeze, anything?
Next up (Score:4, Funny)
Wrong - Re:Next up (Score:2)
No - wrong
Next up. "West Virginia supplies 1 Gbps Networking to all schools using $100,000 routers and money from ARRA funds after it discovers that the T1 line routers they bought last year were obsolete!"
Ridiculous government waste as usual (Score:3)
Rather than place what cannot be more than 10gb of textbooks for the whole school on a local server for students of the school, lets run $10,000/mo fiber to every classroom. The insanity of government waste obviously knows no bounds. The audacity of government "IT managers" is nauseating. What? Is everyone stupid now? We can't count? I know that textbooks don't require a 100 or 1000mbit connection! I don't care if you have 10,000 people per 100mbit! Get a fucking clue! Store commonly downloaded things localaly. Shit, you morons, put the fucking textbook on the local machine (DUH!). Since when is this moronic behavior acceptable?
While Rome burns the ubermench in the government fiddle away with these "solutions". Now we'll be told for every dollar that we spend on this internet connection we can expect to see 1 trillion dollars in returns in as few as 5 years! Of course, as with every single estimate the government makes, it will be off by orders of magnitude and end up costing 1 trillion dollars in 2 years. At the end of the day I predict that the schools in question will have <10mbit connection at the price of 1000mbit connection, it will somehow drive up the price of internet service for everyone and increase educational spending greatly. All of which will have a negative impact on grades.
And really, fellow geeks, who thinks that computers on a kids desk during class are anything but a huge distraction from learning? I know if I had a computer at my desk during school, I'd be all about hacking the shit outa that machine and 0% on the lesson. More than anyone, the government is bound by the law of unintended consequences.
Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual (Score:2)
So, for gigabit, that's between $2000 and $5000
If your class has to upload a few MB of data at the end of class, you're not a very good educator are you? Why, pray tell, are the students doing anything on a computer? Most likely, and this is an assumption, it's a complete waste of time. Computers are nothing but a distraction for classrooms. Individually, kids using computers can be educational, but in a classroom setting it's nothing but pure distraction.
Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual (Score:2)
$200? Where do you live? The year 2035?
Probably not where you live (Score:2)
He probably lives in an actual forward thinking country with a functioning economy. The AVERAGE broadband data rate in Japan is 61 Mbps; Korea 46 Mbps; Finland 22 Mbps, Sweden 18.2 Mbps; France 17.6 Mbps. The US? 15th place, 4.8 Mbps - well below Portugal and a little better than Hungary and Slovak Republic.
The price in Japan is 27 cents/Mbps; Korea 46 cents/Mbps. The US? Brace yourself. $3.33/Mbps.
These figures [dailyinfographic.com] are over a year old, but I bet the disparity has not closed.
Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium [wikipedia.org] Area Total: 30,528 km2 ( 11,787 sq mi )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA [wikipedia.org] Area Total 9,826,675 km2 ( 3,794,101 sq mi )
Get a clue.
Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual (Score:3)
This is why AT&T can claim it covers 90% of the USA while only covering 10% of the land.
Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual (Score:2)
Re:Ridiculous government waste as usual (Score:2)
And now you're talking about schools mantling their own fiber! I'm sorry, are they going to employ their own lien men and NOC operators? You also gota realize that the UK is like the size of California. No sorry, quite a bit smaller. And that's just 1 of 50 states that need to be interconnected. Ever hear of alaska? Ya, it's like the size of France, who thinks that'll be cheap to fiber up? I'll bet that it should cost the same to cross 20,000 miles of roads as it does to cross 2,000 miles. Maybe you can find me a single citation for the cost your talking about. I've looked up the prices, my estimate is quite conservative. Your price of "virtually nothing" is a laughable as it is fantastic. As in: it only exists in your fantasy.
I'm sure that makes it easy to download all those text books. But seriously, what the hell are you doing with 50mbps? Oh I'm sure you have a really good reason to need to double that bandwidth too. 20mbit backup? Give me a break! What are you Warren Buffet? You keep a fucking backup internet connection you pay a monthly fee for? Oh wait! You must work for the government!
As a visitor to the US... (Score:2, Informative)
As a visitor to the US (from Canada eh!) I think you are wasting your money.
Your kids can not spell, can not do basic math, can barely print their own names.
Your high school graduates are functionally illiterate: most can not spell well enough to use an online dictionary.
Your educational system is fundamentally broken, and nobody is addressing it.
If ignorance is bliss, you have the happiest students in the developed world.
Self preservation (Score:2)
So the State Educational Technology Directors Association says we need more ... State Educational Technology. What a stunning conclusion for this completely neutral and unaffiliated group to come up with!
What schools really need is more education and less "State".
Ridiculously low (Score:2)
That's funny; I need 100 Mbps for ONE user - and would actually like more than that. OK I only have 16 now but I NEED 100.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
Re:Caching? (Score:3)
Re:Caching? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Caching? (Score:5, Funny)
It appears that you've gone off your meds again, number 980855.
Please return to the reeducation cell immediately.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
Every time I mention a point like this it causes someone to do a knee-jerk "you commie, you think all profit is bad!!!11!!one" reaction, but this hits the nail on the head.
The general unspoken assumption by a large part of our society right now is profit can drive everything and the market can magically fix all problems. That's bunk because there isn't ONE human system that solves all problem, whether it be the free market system or Open Source software.
As a society we will have to get through this idiocy and eventually get back to the idea that there are some processes that we don't necessarily need or want to be for profit. I expect we will be a rough ride until then.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
Actually schools' needs for high quality video conferencing is pretty pressing. Nothing less than 384Kbps is even passable. 768 is workable for some lectures, but a higher bandwdith and lower latency telepresence is needed for anything that involves more than a lecturer at a chalkboard. The crummy youtube-level quality web users put up with just doesn't cut it in an interactive learning environment.
Figure a class size of 24, 1000 students would be 20 simultaneous classes, and assume 10 of them have distance learning inbound or outbound, you're then up to at least 14Mbps of low-latency demand, which means more raw bandwidth than 14Mbps. 100Mbps per 1000 student is not much of an overestimate.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
1000 students would be 20 simultaneous classes, and assume 10
change propagation fail... that's 40 classes assume 20.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
Generally they do this very thing, using a Polycom or BT set-top unit. That's what the above math represents -- the bandwidth cost of ONE classroom-quality bidirectional conferencing feed to a conference bridge.
Now if you are cheaping out and not using an outside conferencing service, which is common, any video-conference with more than two endpoints is going to require one of the particpants to run the multipoint bridge on their local codec. That means for that site they need to be able to support one session for each endpoint other than themselves. So a single 4-participant distance learning session can pretty much fill a T1 connection completely at the hosting codec's site, even when you are using crummy 384Kbps connections.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
The whole point of this kind of this is that students can work at their own pace. Kids with greater aptitude in, say, writing will finish those "courses" quicker, whereas kids with greater math aptitude might finish those courses quicker. Teachers are there as a kind of facilitator/tutor to help when a kid gets stuck or appears to be bottle necked. I can't comment one way or the other on the effectiveness of this a learning tool (at least for younger children, it's always worked for me at the adult level), but to make it one computer and projector pretty much misses the entire point.
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
so the students are not present at the schools... then you must take into account 80% (pulled it from thin air) of students surfing porn/playing games/whatever else these whipper snappers do these days... so BW needs really isn't that high ;)
Re:Caching? (Score:2)
A school's need for relevant content is unlimited, explicitly. You have no idea what a school needs, unless you have a bunch of horrible teachers who teach from the book. Not all content is static, nor is this correct. Nor does it define whether a proxy is needed or not. Simply not relevant. Sorry, I disagree with you.
Don't think youtube/khan academy isn't/is useful, do think about how much bandwidth it would require for 1000 users simultaneously.
Proxies should be in place anyway to make bandwidth more efficient, but that's not an answer, it's one step of a much larger solution: network compression would benefit just as much as a proxy would as well.
Other schools ask questions via facebook, g+, etc for example.
Re:Not that much (Score:2)
Most universities have more than 1000 students. Let's assume they have 10,000 students. Now we are at 1gbps or 10x100mbps. I'm having a hard time figuring out, even assuming that 50% were using it all at once (so 1mbps per 5 students), how they need that for educational purposes. Plus, assuming that 50% of the student body all suddenly download a *ahem* textbook at the same time? Hum. And, seriously... because of online courses or online books, that's why it needs that sort of broadband? That's kinda ridiculous.
I understand wanting it for certain sections of the school, perhaps - like the CS department (downloading Linux, or Microsoft stuff through MSDN, etc.) or multimedia department (video is pretty big. :) ). But that has little to do with online textbooks or online collaboration tools...
Re:OMG Need More Moneyz! (Score:5, Interesting)
and define the bottom 2%
in NYC a teacher that teaches in one of the most elite schools in the city was ranked one of the worst. reason her kids didn't improve from last year. they are already the best in the city but because they didn't improve she's a bad teacher
or what if all your kids never do homework and never study because their parents don't care?
Re:OMG Need More Moneyz! (Score:2)
the story you're referencing was a bit more nuanced than that. the students blew off a standardized test that didn't matter; that was part of it. also, she wasn't just ranked one of the worst. she was ranked the absolute worst teacher.
amazing.
Re:OMG Need More Moneyz! (Score:3)
So maybe cut/fire by district instead.
Re:OMG Need More Moneyz! (Score:2)
That usual expected outcomes versus actual outcomes.
Obviously first year in students have no history of prior outcomes in order to base the statistical expected outcome on,so you'll need to pre-test or something.
The statistics will end up telling you how to weight things, maybe an increase in outcomes of 5 points (on some arbitrary scale) at the top end is equivanent to an increase in outcomes of 20 points in the middle, etc. Maybe the expected outcome at the top end is negative, and hence no improvement is actually great.
Of course you also have things like student's parents both die in a car crash that year and that's really why his performance dropped, etc. You either need to make sure the sample size is big enough to cover that (which might mean you can't do it yearly) or special case things (which means empoying those administration workers everybody wants to get rid of).
Re:OMG Need More Moneyz! (Score:3)
In Texas, teachers get admonished for having more than a certain number of F's in their classes. It doesn't matter if all of your low grades are from kids who simply refuse to do any work, teachers will end up having to raise their grade averages to avoid being fired.
Re:OMG Need More Moneyz! (Score:3)
Every time the notion of judging the performance of teachers by their output, exactly like EVERYONE else with a job is judged, promoted and fired
Which industry do you work in? Because other than factory line workers and sales people, nobody I know is judged, promoted and fired like that. People I know are usually promoted/fired based on the opinion of their superiors on the quality of their work.
Or is it your position that there is no reliably measurable difference between a 'good' and a 'bad' teacher?
Pretty much. My position is that there is a difference between a good and bad teacher, but that it's not possible (or at least, simple) to reduce that difference to numbers in a way is both balanced across the different nature of classes, and impossible to game. It's a problem I find with most metrics other than the most simple of jobs.
In the same way, I believe that there are good books and bad books, but judging the quality of the book by using, say, average number of syllables in a word, is a really poor way of doing it. When we want to judge the quality of a book, we rely on human opinions (reviewers). In the case of people, we should rely on the opinions of supervisors, who have a greater grasp on context than does an algorithmic metric.
Which means it is useless. Mine is chosen almost entirely on the basis of being actually measurable and thus IS useful.
Just being measurable doesn't make it useful. Lines of Code is a perfectly measurable metric, but still sucks when it comes to determining the productivity of a software developer.
Come on over to the reality based community
The reality is, you need to base decisions on personal observation, not on some clunky algorithm that doesn't produce the correct result.
Really. How many other professions are there where the people in charge will openly assert that it is impossible to measure their output, immoral to even try.
How many other professions are there where your output is entirely determined by a third party, over whom you have no authority? The ability of teachers to effectively control their students has been diminishing year by year. Many of the students know it too, and know that there'll be nobody in a school willing to call them out on their actions, for fear of legal liability.
and oh, by the way we insist on being granted tenure even though the notion is utterly inapplicable to K-12 education
I'm in a different country. We have the same current trend towards metrics, but none of our K-12 teachers have tenure, although, as government employees, teachers are just as difficult to fire as any other bureaucrat. I agree with you that the solution to the problem is getting rid of the under-performing teachers; I disagree that a simple mathematical formula is able to determine that accurately.
Re:95th percentile billing (Score:2)
Oh yea, I'd love to download that 8mb PDF over THAT connection...
</sarcasm>
Re:Grumpy old man. (Score:2)
My take on it is the only classes that should have computers, are the classes that are teaching something about computers. You need a computer to learn how to type, or for writing and compiling code. You don't need a computer for your core stuff like history, math, english, etc. Computers and electronics in the classroom are just distractions.