The second edition of the Edudemic Magazine has been published this weekend. To read the magazine you will have to download the app and then either subscribe to the magazine for 6 months or purchase individual articles.

I am delighted to announce that the article I submitted a couple of weeks ago is the subject of the front cover. What is more I have been asked to submit another article for the March edition, although at the moment I have no idea what the focus for this next article is to cover. This month’s issue of the magazine has the following articles:

What Apple’s Education Initiative Really Means for You - Terry Heick

Technology: Changing the Expectations for Individuals with Disabilities - Dr Robin Parker

How Technology has Education on the Cusp of Revolution - David Kinane

iPads and Classrooms: Towards Meaningful iPad Integration - Francisco Nieto Salazar

Technology Versus the Student - Jesse Langley

New Web Tool Amps Up Google Docs and Turns Collaboration up to 11 - Erin Klein

Why All Ed Reform Fails - Terry Heick

All in all a good read.  And just to whet your appetites, here is a snippet from my article, but to read the full transcript you will have to download the February issue.

The evolving app based world we are currently entering into is enabling educators to cheaply create bespoke suites of tools that meet the personalised needs of their students. What is more, many of the apps that appear on their mlearning devices have a web based counterpart. Often the app is free as is the web based service. The benefit to learning is that students have multiple modes of access to the tools that enable them to demonstrate their learning, in this case to capture and publish their voice. The opportunities for sharing learning are becoming ubiquitous, location and time independent. School is always on, open and accessible as a result.

Enjoy the read!

image sourced from: http://www.networkinghardwares.com/cisco857-k9.html

Over the last couple of years the Internet and the opportunities it offers for learning, have grown exponentially. With this exponential growth has come the parallel expectations of teachers and students for it to deliver content rich resources quickly and effortlessly. Speed as we know with the Internet is king.

The elephant in the room with this rosy view of the new education paradigm’s learning playground, is the infrastructure to deliver this content. It was not very long ago that one connection per school via a 56kbps modem was all that we had to work with, then came ISDN, a quantum leap in speed, then broadband via ADSL and now ADSL2. The trouble is we keep eating more than can be delivered to us quickly enough.

At one school I worked at we literally crashed the Internet, well the Internet connection. We had recently purchased a school wide Mathletics licence for 720 students with 180+ machines in the school and a 512/512 DSL connection to the internet. One Monday morning shortly after this 29 classes all jumped onto their Mathletics account at 9:10 and grid lock and failure quickly ensued. A classic case of expectations out stripping infrastructure capability.

New Zealand has been patiently waiting for its Government funded UFB (UltraFast Broadband) project to be rolled out. Whilst it has been trialled in some regions, the current state of affairs could not be said to be ‘universal.’ Running in tandem with this has been the SNUP (Schools Network Upgrade Project) which is designed to ensure that all schools in New Zealand have the internal capability to handle the blistering speeds promised by the UFB, when it arrives.

And this is the trouble, we know it is coming but it is taking time for both projects to be rolled out and some estimates say that the project is still 5 years away from completion, schools and students can not wait that long for a fast solution to their internet connection issues. Even two years is too long. If the potential that the Internet promises continues to fail, because of slow connection speeds or bandwidth issues, then teachers who are reluctant users of this technology will be turned away from it. Once put off they are doubly hard to win their trust again. Teacher time is precious and we do not want to waste it.

I have argued before on this blog and in Interface Magazine that THE mission critical infrastructure component in all schools is their connection to the Internet. Most schools rely on a single connection to the Internet and many are now toying with cloud base solutions such as Google Apps. If their Internet connection should fail then they will be blind. With my experience of expectations outstripping capability outlined above, I pondered what to do about this. I sat down with my fantastic tech support company and we thrashed out what at the time we thought was an elegant solution, and it was. We introduced the notion of redundancy.

Instead of waiting for the Government’s fast Internet connection, we built our own through redundancy. What we did was purchase an ADSL modem for every telephone line coming into the school. We then allocated specific computers to specific IP ranges to each modem. The overall effect was that we increased the perceived speed of the internet for an individual user by distributing the load over multiple connections. It was and still remains, an elegant and cheap solution to bandwidth whilst we patiently wait for the UFB to arrive. What this solution meant to us was that when we were ‘cabinetised’ and went from DSL to ADSL2 our connection to the internet on each circuit increased overnight to 16mbps.

This solution has now been improved. The tech company I work with have provided this same solution to another school I work in but the solution now has a ‘box’ that sits in the school’s main server rack that not only load balances all the connections for up and down traffic, but real time monitors content and viruses. The effect is that the school now enjoys a 60mbps connection to the internet for a fraction of the cost of a conventional fibre connection and all done through the existing telephone infrastructure of the school.

So is 4mbps the new dial up? I think that it is and we need to find elegant and financially viable ways to ensure that we do not let our students languish in the slow lane of the internet. The solution outlined above has several very happy customers, who are waiting with less anxiety for the UFB to be rolled out in their region at some point in the future. You can vote on whether the 4mbps is the new dial up on my Facebook page.

I have spent the day with the students of Upper Harbour Primary. We have been looking at using tools such as the iPad to capture change over time using apps such as those highlighted here.  They will be using their iPad or iPod’s next year to capture this kind of change over time.  The web cams in their computers can also be used to record time lapse videos really easily by downloading and installing the free version of Sam Animation from Tufts University.

The following site has some good examples of time lapse in the wild, to get students thinking about what they could make the focus of their time lapse work.  However, speeding up the world of the slow in the class or the school environment is made easy with the techniques I demonstrated to the students today.  Once I got home  I set up my camera and took the following study of the clouds.

image ref: http://cr.ucdavis.edu/images/iphone.jpg

Earlier in the week I Tweeted an article from Wired Magazine, it was their cover article which procalimed that the WWW is in terminal decline.  Subsequently the article has also been given a reality check by technologizer’s article which reminds us that life is not quite so black and white and that the screaming banner headlines are just that.

However the app based reality envisioned by the Wired article got me thinking.  Talk of the digital divide has subsided somewhat over the last couple of years, the proliferation of cheaper tools to access the internet has seen to that.  Palfrey and Gasser in their book Born Digital argue that the digital divide was never about equipment, but about skills.  The skills required to effectively work with the exponential explosion of information that the Internet gives us access to and the ablility to make sense of that whilst working collaboratively with our physical and virtual peers.  The key here is that we all have equal access to the information and resources on offer on the Internet.   The Internet has become the great leveller and videos like Karl Fisch’s Did You Know, highlight the potential issues confronting all of us competing on a globally leveled environment.

So what of the app based reality envisioned or predicted by the Wired Magazine article?  This potentially puts access to and control of content back in the hands of the providers and producers. To date making money out of the Internet has been a difficult thing to master.  Wired magazine itself has just made an iPad app for their magazine and Rupert Murdoch is trying to charge for his news content.  How long will it be before the only way to read Wired online is through an app - subscription payment model?   Apps are marketed as code that works, a classic case of “it does what it says on the tin.”  My fear is that if the app based predicitons become reality, then education and e-learning will be the poorer for it.  It will bring back the user pays bad old days, which creates divides, creates information walled gardens, which education will be on the outside of, unless they pay.  The beauty of the open, unfettered net is that creative teachers can design and implement packages, experiences and stimuli catered to the needs of their children.  An app based internet reality will either bypass education completely as the returns are not high enough for developers to spend any meaningful time in that sphere or the apps themselves will be created for mass market appeal and not terribly educationally relevant.  The solution?  Educators should jump on the app band waggon and start to develop apps for schools, either that or the net should remain open to all.

I ran a VC session into Haast School last week.  The session was aimed at community and business leaders harnessing web2.0 technology to communicate and collaborate.  The special impact here being that Haast being so remote from the rest of New Zealand has a special need to harness this kind of technology, in order to keep the community alive and connected to the rest of the world, whilst keeping the community viable and vibrant in Haast.  It was a good session and from my end was facilitated by the good guys at Gen-i in Auckland, on the 17th floor to be exact.  Once I had been set up the staff melted away and left me to it, I had the Pukeko room to myself.  Whilst there I took the liberty to run a speedtest on the network connection I was using for my Internet access, not the VC connection.  This is the result that it returned:

The speeds were stellar!  Just imagine what a school could do with that kind of bandwidth, imagine the collaboration opportunities, the multi-media rich potential of such a resource.  I went to share this information on Twitter, but was blocked.  I tried Skype, but was blocked.  I wanted to use Team Viewer, but was blocked.  What an irony, stellar internet performance in a business environment where  sending e-mails and browsing filtered internet are the norm.  By comparison look at the kind of performance a school that I work in gets on their Telecom connection 5.5km from the exchange and an apathetic at best indifferent,help desk who have taken 63 calls to get some kind of attention to the fault evident in these stats.  The school and the staff are bursting to use the Internet to its fullest potential but with this kind of connectivity find they can’t.  As the crow flies this school is 10km from Gen-i and their blistering connection.  This has all the echoes of a story I posted in 2008 http://dakinane.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/limping-along-in-the-internets-slow-lane/ How many other schools, not even in remote situations like Haast, but in urban settings like the school below, in New Zealand get results like this?