'Bandwidth Divide' Could Bar Some From Free Online Courses 222
An anonymous reader writes "The Bandwidth Divide is a form of what economists call the Red Queen effect referring to a scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass when Alice races the Red Queen. As the Red Queen tells Alice: 'It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!' Keeping up with digital technology is like that race — it takes a continual investment of money and time just to keep up with the latest, and an exceptional amount of work to get ahead of the pack. 'The question is, What is the new basic?' said one researcher. 'There will always be inequality. But 100 years after the introduction of the car, not everybody has a Ferrari, but everyone has access to some form of motorized transportation through buses.' Well, not everyone, but even fewer people have the online equivalent. Colleges considering MOOCs should remember that."
Internet = Utility (Score:4, Insightful)
Simple as that.
Re: (Score:2)
It's called augmenting your infrastructure so that you can encourage growth and development. One could also call it "watering the garden of capitalism", if you encourage people to be prosperous, you can apply taxes, generate revenue for other augmentations to your society, that in turn generate more prosperity. You just have to have the balls to throw the right things under the bus for the betterment of all.
The greed of a few shall not out weigh the needs of the many. It doesn't matter if it's grandma's bak
Re:Internet = Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea cause heavily regulated utilities are such a great example of efficient operation as well as champions of innovation.
I don't want innovation from my ISP. All I want from them is an unfiltered, public IP Address, at the bandwidth they advertised.
Re:Internet = Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Internet = Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think about that for a second, you'll realize it's kind of dumb. If a behemoth like AT&T was capable of innovation, they wouldn't have been caught flat-footed by the new technology of the Internet. Hell it took them years to bully their way into the ISP market before they just decided to destroy all competition.
If they're going to benefit from running wires on public land, or using public spectrum, then they need to become a public utility.
Or, break them into tiny pieces so we can have actual competition in the ISP space again. Funny how people who would claim to worship the "free market" aren't really concerned about anti-competitive activity of these anti-free market corporations.
Re:Internet = Utility (Score:5, Interesting)
If they're going to benefit from running wires on public land, or using public spectrum, then they need to become a public utility.
The joke is that the regulated parts of the telco industry are now pushing as aggressively as possible to switch their entire infrastrucute over to internet protocols so that they aren't regulated anymore.
AT&T recently made a FCC submission requesting that they not have to continue supporting their switched telephone network (TDM).
Here's all the responses for and against [fcc.gov]
They'll still be using wires on public land and providing phone service over *copper wires, just not under the auspices of "legacy" FCC regulations.
I.E. if AT&T gets their way, they'd no longer have a legal obligation to continue wired phone service to the middle of Montana or even the poor part of town.
*only a fraction of U-Verse customers have fiber to the home
Re: (Score:2)
Deregulation worked great for the airline industry. Prices have dropped to something like 1/5 of what they were a few decades ago. You cannot innovate by increased regulation. A healthy, competitive free market almost always brings lower prices and increased consumer choice.
Re:Internet = Utility (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think about that for a second, you'll realize it's kind of dumb. If a behemoth like AT&T was capable of innovation, they wouldn't have been caught flat-footed by the new technology of the Internet.
Does the geek have any notion of the extraordinary debt --- the full debt --- he owes to the "old" AT&T and Bell Labs? The monopoly which among other things did pioneering research in long distance communications and mobile. The first papers on cellular radio.
At its peak, Bell Laboratories was the premier facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language and the C++ programming language. Seven Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
1937: Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.
1956: John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the first transistors.
1977: Philip W. Anderson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing an improved understanding of the electronic structure of glass and magnetic materials.
1978: Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias and Wilson were cited for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, a nearly uniform glow that fills the Universe in the microwave band of the radio spectrum.
1997: Steven Chu shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.
1998: Horst Stormer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect/
2009: Willard S. Boyle, George E. Smith shared the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Charles K. Kao. Boyle and Smith were cited for the invention of charge-coupled device (CCD) semiconductor imaging sensors.
The Turing Award has twice been won by Bell Labs researchers:
1968: Richard Hamming for his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes.
1983: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for their work on operating systems theory, and their development of Unix.
During the 1920s, the one-time pad cipher was invented by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne at the laboratories. Bell Labs' Claude Shannon later proved that it is unbreakable....
Bell Labs [wikipedia.org]
This list is endless, really. You could fill pages with this stuff and only scratch the surface.
Re:Internet = Utility (Score:5, Interesting)
Wait, you think it was ISPs that pioneered faster connection speeds? They fought it every step of the way because they didn't understand it.
Without the regulations, the big broadband providers would turn the Internet into cable television. They had their chance to create a real worldwide network, and gave us "bundles" of channels where we have to pay for stuff we don't want to protect their revenues. Do you forget how they had to scramble to catch up with the Internet? What the hell do you think they "innovated"?
The big ISPs are a threat to anything like a free market. The last thing they want is competition.
Re: (Score:3)
I always find this comment somewhat amusing from Slashdot posters.
Bundling is a pain in the rear, but pretty much everyone on this site with cable television benefits from it. Do you really think that most of the channels we watch would exist without bundling? I'd hazard a guess that with the possible exception of the food channel, any channel remotely educational or special interest would be gone without bundling, because almost no one would sign up for them.
Re:Internet = Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
I always find this comment somewhat amusing from Slashdot posters.
Bundling is a pain in the rear, but pretty much everyone on this site with cable television benefits from it. Do you really think that most of the channels we watch would exist without bundling? I'd hazard a guess that with the possible exception of the food channel, any channel remotely educational or special interest would be gone without bundling, because almost no one would sign up for them.
I call bullshit on losing Discovery and History channel. As for the others; why do you find it necessary to artificially prop up specialty channels?!
If the user base isn't there to support it, it should go, plain and simple. Either pass on the true cost to the customer or axe it.
Furthermore, what percentage of channels show their own in-house content and how much comes from shows that were shopped around? AMC's flagship series Breaking Bad -- made by Sony. If AMC the channel didn't exist, the show could still be shopped around to another channel. Maybe eliminating channels would clean up the ratio of quality shows on the channels that do exist?
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly...
If some niche channel can't support itself why should I have to pay out to support them when I don't use them?
Re: (Score:2)
Because the alternative is having cable television become exactly like network television but with more sex and violence. Don't get me wrong I like sex and violence as much as the next guy, but if I wanted naked women and no plot I have the internet for that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And on the internet, channel bundles don't exist, on cable television however where none of those things are true, they do.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If these 'innovative' ISPs would get off of their asses and implement multicast on their IP networks, it wouldn't be a problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Multicast is problematic to say the least, it's a lot more mature than IPv6 but still it's not easy getting right.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
YEa, back in the Clinton years they got tax money from users and tax breaks from the Government with the expectation that they would beef up the infrastructure to keep us as #1... Now we've fallen way behind and they pocketed the money.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't want innovation from my ISP. All I want from them is an unfiltered, public modem access at the baud rate they advertised.
Re: (Score:2)
I understand what you mean. A promise of superior service in the future is no better than a pig in a poke. c
Re:Internet = Utility (Score:5, Insightful)
Let the phone, tablet and computer industries innovate.
All we need from the ISPs is bandwidth, which is delivered via wires on public land or via public airwaves.
They shouldn't be delivering content, selling ads or partnering with handset manufacturers.
Since the big telcos have proved they are incapable of functioning in a free market, then they need to become public utilities. The last thing we need is any of them getting any bigger.
Re: (Score:2)
Yea cause heavily regulated utilities are such a great example of efficient operation as well as champions of innovation.
While not wanting to see internet become a utility per se, it is difficult to see how doing so would be any worse then what we have now. This country invented the internet andled for a long long time in access. In the 2000s we ceded control of the Internet to the modern ISP ( as opposed to the initial ISPs, for a long time I used Interaccess and for the most part had reliable inexpensive service ). Now the US has become a third world country.
Let me also point out that one of these companies basically co
Re: (Score:2)
Is one way Satellite still available these days? I have only heard of the two-way stuff.
Universal Service for Broadband (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it Intereresting and disturbing that in the US we provide "Universal Service" for many old technologies - US Mail, Analog Telephones, and T1s, but we don't even have a discussion about universal broadband.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
I find it Intereresting and disturbing that in the US we provide "Universal Service" for many old technologies - US Mail, Analog Telephones, and T1s, but we don't even have a discussion about universal broadband.
I'm sorry, don't you understand Free Market? There's money to be made here... What are you? Some kind of leach?
Re: (Score:2)
If you want universal access, even in rural places where infrastructure costs will push profitability decades away, the you should not rely on free market to do it. Would you refute that?
But as I understand, the US telecom market is neither a free market, not a government-controlled public service. It is a mix of the bad sides of both approach: profit-seeking private operators that do not have to compete with each others.
Re: (Score:2)
We don't have a discussion about universal cell phone access or universal groceries access either. That's because private companies are providing it just fine. Just about everyone in the US has access to at least basic level of broadband service if they want it.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
We don't have a discussion about universal cell phone access...
Check your cell phone bill next time. You'll see a line on there for something like "Universal Service Fee" which is a tax the phone companies pass on to you, so somebody can get their "Obamaphone".
Re:Universal Service for Broadband (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting, the fund was created by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 [wikipedia.org] which was passed by the 104th United States Congress [wikipedia.org].
January 3, 1995: Republicans gained control of both houses for the first time since the 1950s.
Fucking communists. :)
Re: (Score:3)
They don't call 'em RED states for nothing!
Re: (Score:2)
so somebody can get their "Obamaphone".
I'm gonna need to see some more Obamatowers before those Obamaphones will do much good (in a universal service fashion). Not that he could do anything about the permitting processes at the FCC...
Re: (Score:2)
Not really, around here it was only in the last year or two that some of the neighborhoods received upgrades from 1.5mpbs maximum download rates. And Seattle was one of the most connected cities in the country. 1.5mbps is insufficient to stream with decent quality these days without spending a ton of time waiting for the video to buffer.
Every other option has a cap that would prevent access to this sort of service.
So, no, not everybody has access to basic broadband service if they want it, 1.5mbps was barel
Re:Universal Service for Broadband (Score:5, Insightful)
So, no, not everybody has access to basic broadband service if they want it, 1.5mbps was barely acceptable 10 years ago.
Thats almost twice the bandwidth needed for 480p youtube as tested just moments ago using the free educational video made by sixtysymbols on transistors (link to video [youtube.com])
Note that the MAXIMUM quality of these videos is 480p, and the final raw badwidth count (includes packet overhead and so on) was 98.1KB/sec which is about 785kbps.
It seems to me and I think I have shown it to be true that people are actually crying about the availability of highest quality media, and not so much access. That these two distinct things get equated is the consequence of people so easily stooping into the realm of intellectual dishonesty in the name of wants instead of needs.
Re: (Score:3)
Perhaps theoretically, in practice, even with my 5mbps connection, I rarely see speeds that fast.
And considering how much the taxpayers have paid to greedy ISPs, I think it's perfectly understandable to demand something for it.
Re:Universal Service for Broadband (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, so how about my home connection. 56K is what we pay for, but we get 41K when the weather is good. It's 1/10th the speed of my 3G phone (When I'm in range of a tower). That is no where near enough to stream even the smallest YouTube video. And that's the best we can get at any price. I'm a couple miles outside a small midwestern town. Wireless is our only option and the only wireless data that gets any rections here is a 2G tower 12 miles away. With a directional antena we can duplex that. The phone lines here are crap so no DSL, even satellite is out because we don't have an upload signal path. We're not that unusual.
With that meager bit of data we can email. (And /.). But using the web is incredibly painful. Video is straight out. Skype doesn't happen. System updates are flaky and take all day to download. Web pages aren't made for connections this slow any more, they're hundreds of K, and can take minutes to load, and some connection will often get lost, which will bork the whole page.
No one uses the internet here. They don't know what it's for. They don't know they can find out anything with it, that they can learn the skills to take them further, or talk to people all over the planet. Or get movies on demand! You won't hear much from them around here because they don't know about Slashdot. Or online discussion forums in general. The Internet is a thing that they talk about on (broadcast) TV.
So while some people might bitch about only getting 1.5mbs, there are no shortage of people in the United States who essentially can't use the modern internet.
Re: (Score:2)
Move or build an ISP in your town, running the fiber cable yourself.
Yay for the internet! It lets you work from anywhere, and lets you buy stuff even when there are no shops around.
Well, as long as you live in a big city with lots of offices and shops.
I've been saving up, so I went with cheap internet -- I'm on 56k, and I'd forgotten what it's like. It's also a congested, poorly managed network. It's a real eye-opener, and it's a valuable lesson for someone who's developing a web app that he wants to be widely accessible....
Re: (Score:2)
> 1.5mbps is insufficient to stream with decent quality these days without spending a ton of time waiting for the video to buffer.
Where there is a will, there is a way. Most of you are just spoilt with high speeds and forgot how resourceful you can be (I learned my tricks in dial-up days) :-). I am in India now with a 1 mbps connection ($10/month). I can get faster Internet and can afford way more. But I chose not to for reasons I won't go into now.
I just use browser plugins, downloaders or my own Python
Re: (Score:2)
That makes the previous poster what we now refer to as a 'low information voter'
Bus example (Score:3)
Would the equivalent not be a public library? Bandwidth isn't an issue (at least at my tiny local branch) since I see people there stream videos on their Facebook and Youtube all the time. Which makes me think access isn't as much of an issue as converting people who consume to people who invest in themselves. Now, global access disparity is another issue, and it'll take more than the US alone to deal with it.
Closed on weekends (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I have always wondered why places like Libraries and many stores are open during the time when most people are at school or work?
My bank keeps such short hours that I have to take off work early just to visit.
Re: (Score:2)
Your local library is closed on the weekend? All our regional libraries of any size are closed Sunday Monday and are open on Saturday. Some of the tiny ones are only open 2-4 days a week. I think they mostly run as book drops for the larger branches.
Re:Universal Service for Broadband (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it Intereresting and disturbing that in the US we provide "Universal Service" for many old technologies - US Mail, Analog Telephones, and T1s, but we don't even have a discussion about universal broadband.
That's all well and good, and I agree that access to internet should be taken as a basic service, but did nobody else notice the real evil in this story:
The e-textbooks used in the project, run by the Fairfax County Public Schools, worked only when students were online—and some features required fast connections.
Why the fuck was there not an offline version of this textbook? I don't want to go all Stallmannite, but the problem right here is not lack of bandwidth. The problem here is a fucking textbook that can't be downloaded and used offline.
Where are these people? (Score:2, Informative)
The difference between those who have access to fast connections and those who have only dial-up speeds or access via a cellphone is "bigger than people think," he said.
Quick. Name three people you know (not just people you've heard of) who fall into the above category because "fast connections" are not physically available to them.
Re:Where are these people? (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on what you mean by "available". If you mean "geographically available", then I can think of a few dozen people I know who are limited to slow dial-up or spotty satellite that doesn't work half the time due to weather. If you mean "financially available" then I can think of a few dozen people that might be able to scrape it together each month, but it would be a really poor financial choice.
Re: (Score:3)
What makes you think this is a first world issue? "We" only make up about 1/7th of the world's population.
I realize that this may come as a shock to you, but the world is bigger than you seem to think.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Once they have broadband Internet they can order food, water, and clothes from Amazon - problem solved! /sarc
Balassa-Samuelson (Score:2)
Once they have broadband Internet they can order food, water, and clothes from Amazon
That's not so easy if the area they live in doesn't have regular mail service due to lack of reliable roads. Nor is it easy if their country has an undervalued currency [wikipedia.org] due to not having much of an export sector [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
My manager, his boss, and at least 3 of the operations department plus myself.
Well, that wasn't hard.
Re: (Score:2)
The difference between those who have access to fast connections and those who have only dial-up speeds or access via a cellphone is "bigger than people think," he said.
Quick. Name three people you know (not just people you've heard of) who fall into the above category because "fast connections" are not physically available to them.
My Uncle Frank, my friend Diedre's parents (I've met them), and my friend Darrun. You probably don't know them.
Re: (Score:3)
My brother, his wife, my aunt and her 2 kids.
My brother and his wife live within the city limits of one of the 10 largest cities (by population) in the US. Yet his options are dial-up, or cellular data. And no-one is offering unlimited cellular data plans in the region anymore.
Yet a facility half a mile further out of town than him can get fiber. Rural broadband coverage in the US is shit because only a limited number of properties immediately adjacent to switching points can actually get any connectivity.
Re: (Score:3)
Thats exactly my point. Within city limits of one of the 10 largest cities in America (well over 1.5 million residents), yet is considered rural enough that the local baby-bell monopoly (oops, now AT&T once again) won't offer him broadband. AT&T at least is required to run wires to his property for phone service. Cable companies ignore is area altogether.
And he's only 3-4 miles outside of a suburb city which has a population of almost 200,000. So even though he's "rural" he's by no means living in t
Re: (Score:2)
Quick. Name three people you know (not just people you've heard of) who fall into the above category because "fast connections" are not physically available to them.
What is the purpose of this exercise?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah but you all have *access* to broadband, it doesn't take much to cache content. If I could handle broadband access in the middle of South America back in 2001 I'm sure you can do that yourself. What I find harder is the need of constant online access, I don't want that by choice when I study, and some people really don't have that, so some interactive parts of these courses are hard to participate in.
So Broadband libraries can help a lot, and will probably be cheaper than building 1Gbps fiber to all rur
Libraries with inconvenient hours (Score:2)
So Broadband libraries can help a lot
Provided that states can find the money to keep them open on evenings and weekends.
Re: (Score:2)
Well considering that wifi enabled things are getting cheaper every day I don't see why they have to be staffed all the time.
they need a service (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Video is bandwidth intensive. There's no way around that (though H.265 will help compared to the current generation). Whether video is strictly necessary for online education is another question, but very little of Coursera's network requirement is "scripts and redirects and google metrics."
They do (at least for the classes I took) let you just download the videos. No overhead there and even if you live in a rural location without access to high speed internet, if you can make it to a library or place with
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Video is bandwidth intensive.
Yes, but not as much as people seem to think.
480P youtube H.264 uses about 100KB/second. This is more than enough quality for baseline educational resources..... its been good enough for PBS for 40+ years.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you mean kb/sec or kB/sec? Capitalization matter. If it's the former, you're wrong (480p YouTube is about 768kb/sec), if it's the latter, that's true but it's still way beyond the capacity of dial-up and some cell connections.
Re: (Score:2)
very little of Coursera's network requirement is "scripts and redirects and google metrics."
Yes, it is. Look at the source of their home page. They load stuff from "ogp.me", lots of stuff from "cloudfront.net", jQuery, then they "boot up Coursera", as a comment in the code says. The home page even has a GIF animation of a loading icon for when this is taking some time. The loader creates a new document which is forced in with "document.write()". The new document loads still more Javascript, chosen by the loader.
Amusingly, there are special cases not only for Opera but for the Playstation 3 br
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but Coursera's a revolution that there's no going back from.
Translation: all those scripts, refreshes and document.writes()s mean that the browser back button doesn't work....
Re: (Score:2)
.
The other way to speed browse is to disable im
Re: (Score:2)
OT: 'What is the new basic?' (Score:4, Funny)
'The question is, What is the new basic?'
Answer: VB.NET - even if it isn't that new, there's none newer that that. (question is: will it still rot your brain?)
fairfax county schools (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA refers to a pilot project by fairfax county schools. their project would not have failed miserably if they implemented it properly: with offline-capable ereaders preloaded with the proper texts and materials.. but instead, they opted for content and a system that required internet access (presumably due to drm at the publisher's insistance) to use, which limited access to those with sufficient internet access at home AND limited _where_ students could read and study their texts. a preloaded offline ereader would have eliminated those major issues with a conversion to digital texts. if fairfax county school board had listened to complaints and concerns expressed prior to them choosing this defective system, and not gotten memorized by slick salesmen, their system _could have been_ a model for public schools nationwide - instead they just fucked up big time.
I've encountered this (Score:5, Interesting)
I've taught courses online for a regional university in Appalachia and had to design the courses specifically with bandwidth limitations in mind. Of the students who had home internet access, some were limited to dial-up or very slow DSL. Many students rely on internet access at public libraries and thus I had to create materials they could bring home for study. I could never assume constant access on the student's part. I made heavy use of public-domain sources as primary texts (I'm a historian), knowing these could be readily transferred to any machine, even a cell phone if necessary (of course, cell phone access can kind of suck out here too).
Courses can still be taught under these conditions, but a teacher cannot use multimedia as a crutch and must focus instead on course structure, careful selection of readings, and heavy use of lower bandwidth tools like message boards. I made any multimedia material optional and supplementary.
The question of technology, however, is not the chief problem with online courses in these circumstances. The chief problem is that the courses themselves are being used to advance the notion that education is a series of hoops, the easier to jump through the better. They're an administrator's dream. More degrees generated at lower cost.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless your video format is really broken, you don't have to do anything special for video: tools like Miro will download video for offline playing. It's trivial to set up and use.
Defective by design (Score:2)
Unless your video format is really broken, you don't have to do anything special for video
Publishers of videos distributed under proprietary commercial licenses tend to prefer intentionally broken formats [defectivebydesign.org]. These publishers use digital restrictions management to deter casual copyright infringement or charge the advertisers per impression.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Heaven forbid that we should actually lower the cost of education! Do you prefer the cost of education to keep going through the roof and then raise taxes on everybody to pay for it? Or what?
Re: (Score:3)
I'm all for education. It is, after all, my vocation. However, nota bene: degrees!=education. What I'm not for is continually raising costs for students while lowering costs for universities. That is what happens with these courses. They often cost quite as much as regular courses and the students most likely to take them (in my experience) are largely non-traditional students: i.e. students who have kids, a full time job, several classes and are trying to better their lot. If they're lucky enough to gradua
I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
So unless all the MOOCs suddenly change their model to highly interactive 3D environments I suspect that most learners with the most moderate internet access will be just fine.
Only the caveat of some kind of skype type live learning would demand goodish bandwidth but I don't see much education heading that way except for those services that are determined to maintain their tutoring per hour business models which really wouldn't apply to the same people who are supposedly on the wrong side of the digital divide.
And on top of all that my experience in poorer countries is that internet access is really cheap by our standards and their infrastructure is leapfrogging ours. In Jamaica for instance for $40 a month you get unlimited 3G data access nearly everywhere along the coast and as for tethering they sell cool d-link wi-fi routers that you put a SIM card into to have home internet.
If you are a kid in a poor place a bit of industriousness in obtaining a crap old pentium(or raspberry pi), a CRT, a USB stick, and occasional internet access and you will be able to fill your brain with all you ever wanted. Add in an NGO with the goal of making this easier and whole communities will be just fine.
More people have access to a Ferrari... (Score:2)
... than high speed internet? Dude, where the hell do you live? It sure as hell ain't anywhere I've ever heard about. I do also have to point out, it hasn't been one hundred years since the creation of the internet, yet you expect the same level of infrastructure to be in place after, what, some forty years?
Speaking a bit more on the article, as a resident in Maryland and 20 miles from DC, it's bullshit. The DC metro area has access to very high-speed broadband - some people just choose not to purchase it,
hogwash (Score:2)
my wife is taking mostly online classes, and though a 4 year degree progressing to a bachelors the only class that was bandwidth intensive was Spanish cause they had some shitty videos to watch
really people, its some forums, email, upload a word doc or a pdf and email
not ground breaking stuff here, its education ... your lucky if they surpassed 1998
Re: (Score:2)
Cause for "divide" (Score:4, Interesting)
This is so far down the page that likely no one will see it but I am posting for the record.
From Pew ...
In April of 2009, 7% of American adults age 18+ used dial-up internet at home. (As of April 2012, this number is 3%) These are the reasons they gave for not switching to broadband.
Price must fall -- 35%
Nothing would get me to switch -- 20%
Don't know -- 16%
It would have to become available where I live -- 17%
Other -- 13%
http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/May/Pew-Internet-Broadband.aspx [pewinternet.org]
So, in this survey, only 17% of 3% said that high speed internet was unavailable.
Re: (Score:2)
Not everyone has access to MIT's online classes. Not everyone has access to MIT's in-person classes either.
Let me rephrase in an attempt to also touch the
Colleges considering MOOCs should remember that.
As long as college education is seen as a business, colleges will not have any interest to remember that: after all, people that don't have access to broadband may have little money to pay their "online tuition" (and yes, it's a vicious cycle... the less educated one is, the less chances one has to make a decent living).
The perspective changes at the moment college education is defined as a basic right. Now... is it defined as such?
Re: (Score:2)
People used to go to the (FREE) library and read actual books and learn things independently - why don't more 'students' avail themselves of this free education?
Is it because knowledge isn't the goal, a piece of paper is?
Re: (Score:2)
Well for one, those public libraries are getting less and less funding so their collections are even more limited than they used to be and even that wasn't really all that fantastic. Unless you were really lucky, finding anything particularly recent, specialized or rare at your local library, even with getting it sent in from another branch wasn't all that common(ever tried finding a Comp Sci book at your local that was written in the last 10 years?).
For another, for better or worse, a university education
Re: (Score:2)
YEa I read an article recently about how the college degree is the new HS diploma.
Lot's of places that would not and did not previously need them, now do. THe job is the same, it's just degrees are so common why not get someone with a degree over someone without for the same pay?
Re: (Score:2)
I should have been more clear. If you're currently 18 and you decide not to get a university education, in the US, unless you are really exceptional and lucky or have seriously connected parents, your shot at any kind of middle class lifestyle is a long one, not impossible, but it's going to be hard. If you're in your 30's with a decade of experience you'll probably be Ok without a degree, if you're in your 40's a lot of successful folks won't have a degree, becoming less important as you get older and fewe
Yes. I run state U online ed., don't have HS diplo (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Higher education (college, university, whatever you want to call it) has never that I know of been considered a "right" to be enjoyed by all. It has always been reserved for the financially well-off (those who can afford it), the financially stupid (those willing to take on loads of debt for something not guaranteed to provide a return on investment), and the financially gifted (those given scholarships for any number of reasons).
... which is something that MOOCs are supposed to be changing. The author's point is that if MOOCs are supposed to democratise and open education, why are they such godawful bandwidth hogs? I'm on 56k at home (I went cheapskate as I work in a university and can download anything I need for lessons at work) and I need to pause my Coursera videos and do something for a few minutes while they load, or I get a retro 2003-style juddering, stalling, buffering, stopping experience.
The international openness of C
Re: (Score:2)
Here is the source of the 98.2% figure, Obama's very own boondoggle:
http://www.broadbandmap.gov/summarize/nationwide [broadbandmap.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
Note that that $50/month also lets people replace many other subscriptions and services, like phone service. So there is really very little cost associated with using it for education.
Voice over satellite Internet (Score:2)
Note that that $50/month also lets people replace many other subscriptions and services, like phone service.
In areas unserved by cable or DSL, I don't see how voice over satellite Internet can replace POTS given the time for light to travel to geostationary orbit and back. Or were you referring to cellular Internet, with its even stricter monthly data cap?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The latency [of voice over IP over satellite] is not bad enough to write off the idea of doing slightly delayed voice comms.
Please see Netssansfrontieres's comment about perceived hesitation [slashdot.org]. "In human interaction, that silent pause is extra information."
Re: (Score:2)
you dont need broadband for 99% of it though
its a flat forum written in frontpage, email, pdf's and 1 language class might need some quicktime once every week
Exede's 10 GB cap (Score:2)
reasonable broadband service (estimated at $50/mo)
Would you find a 10 GB per month cap reasonable? Because that's what Exede includes in its $50 package [exede.com].
Good luck compressing video to 40 kbps (Score:2)
Do you really care that your video stream is more compressed than the next guy as long as it's viewable? How much bandwidth you need to be able to watch a presentation is something you can measure. [...] Content should generally be aimed at the low end of your expected users
The low end is dial-up. With packet overhead and nominal loss, you can't count on V.90 to deliver more than 40 kbps. Traditional video codecs don't go that low, which is the whole reason that formats like SWF were created. Sure, so many people love to hate SWF, but vector animation and stills (think seconds per frame, not frames per second) are the only way to get any sort of audiovisual presentation in that sort of data rate.
Re: (Score:2)
if you were die hard you would have learned how to get around that bull a decade ago
go cry a river noob