Streaming, bandwidth and the "YouTube effect"

This will not be a well thought-out post... more likely the general ramblings that were the basis of blogs, so let's dive in!

In K-12 technology, there's an ongoing and growing dichotomy (or it seems so) between those who want to be more open about Internet access and those who want to (choose your phrase) block, filter, lock it down, control, police access to the web. Both sides have valid points and I'll try to touch on them briefly:

Open it up, we filter too much as it is - Who are you, technician and non-educator, to say what is or is not relevant to my students' instruction? Do you not trust the teachers, degreed professionals, to properly manage their classrooms and the students' Internet browsing habits? Filters are notorious for blocking legitimate web content along with "bad sites". YouTube has tons of educational videos! I can use Pandora to teach about various cultures and their musical backgrounds! If the kids are spending their time on Facebook, why can't they use that environment in school? We can't ask them to unplug or turn off when they enter the school and expect to hold their interest! HELP!!!

Block those sites - I have a responsibility to manage the environment for everyone. Bandwidth is not unlimited. Do you know what happens when hundreds (or thousands) of simultaneous connections are made to streaming media sites? You're the ones complaining about slow Internet access and I'm trying to help. Have you seen your Internet logs? If I open up YouTube for students, bandwidth use will skyrocket and it will all be a bunch of YouTube usage! We have teachers that are not on task and that are allowing kids to play poker. Music? Let kids use their iPod because I can't have everyone streaming audio. HELP!!!

What we're talking about here are resources, utilities... and opportunities! As tech leaders, we need to run with the utility analogy and help educate our educators. As tech leaders, we need to wake up to the fact that there are TONS of educational resources on a site like YouTube. What is a flipped classroom? How do I tie a Windsor knot? How do I sharpen a lawn mower blade? Can the Oak Ridge Boys sing 'Seven Nation Army'? So, yeah... you can find pretty much anything on YouTube. It is a library. We don't keep our kids out of the library! Sure, not every book in the world in in our library and there's a time to be reading Shakespeare and a time to be reading Sports Illustrated.

As with any utility, though, there is a responsibility to promote proper use and there's a need to realize that the resource is limited. My good friend Marty has convinced me that kids can often focus better on tests with instrumental music playing. We might argue over whether hundreds of concurrent music streams or iPods are the better solution, and proper resource management is a factor. Hopefully, though, we can get past the fact that all [insert here: streaming media, social networking, etc] sites are bad. True, we have to manage utilities and everyone can't flush their toilet at the same time. Cutting peak demand can sometimes lower your electric bill.

Like your utility provider, IT staff DOES have a responsibility to help educate others and, yes, potentially help manage bandwidth as a resource. However, the school district or company as a whole needs to be involved in the conversation about the solution. The solution may be to restrict high-bandwidth content at times, and the solution may simply be to find more bandwidth for the benefit of your users. Educate and inform, but don't make that decision in a vacuum on behalf of your users.

[Image: http://www.hometoys.com/mentors/caswell/aug02/bandwidth.htm] Ironically, a post from 2002!

Science education - effective use of video!

One of the biggest challenges we have in the K-12 environment is to keep kids interested and on task. Depending on how it's used, technology can be either a great help or great hindrance in the quest to maintain interest and stay focused on learning.

Video-related sites like YouTube can be of immense value in this quest. The University of Nottingham has some really interesting science content in the form of YouTube video clips arranged around specific topics.

The first site of theirs is "The Periodic Table of Videos." Pick an element on the periodic table and you'll find a brief video explaining the element or giving facts about it. Go ahead - learn why we can't live without Molybdenum in one minute! :)

I also like their "Sixty Symbols" site. These are longer videos about various symbols related to physics or astronomy. I'll confess that I knew nothing about Schrödinger's cat (do you?)and clicked a link to a video explaining the experiment. Would you rather hear someone talking about a cat in a box or read some material on the paradox of quantum superpositioning? Exactly.

I'm not a science guru, but I find these videos very interesting and I think it's a great illustration as to how well-created video clips can be used to enhance (or change instruction as we know it.

"To Fee or Not To Fee" - What Should Be Free?

Granted, the title of this post isn't well thought out. I'm sure that's why I'm blogging and not publishing a novel. I did want to briefly touch on a coming debate that could impact us in education. An eSchoolNews article today mentions the topic. It's probably in the current news based on comments made at the World Media Summit. Comments from the summit by Rupert Murdoch center around the need for 'traditional' news sources to charge internet search engines and other web sites for news reports.

There's some validity to the point. I regularly read news stories from any number of popular search engine sites. I can't say with 100% certainty that they are paying for that content. I haven't been paying specifically to read those stories. However, a reporter somewhere is being paid to write much of what we consume as 'news'. We've read about it as newspapers struggle to maintain subscribers, as network news programs struggle to maintain viewers. Our methods of news consumption have changed. The medium for delivery has changed. At this point, though, many of the sources of the news have not.

How does this affect K-12? As the eSchoolNews article points out, it might leave students scrambling to access certain resources (assuming that some resources go out of business or price themselves beyond some of their customer base). The debate goes beyond newspaper sites. Tech-savvy users tend to gravitate toward free, easy-to-use products with great features. YouTube is a great example and is used by many K-12 teachers. One of the biggest questions asked since Google's purchase of YouTube (and asked here) revolves around the eventual need to generate revenue.

The same could be said for popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter. How do these sites make money? I'm not sure they do as of yet. "Advertising" is always the most common answer, but there are no ads on Twitter and only limited ads on Facebook. However, both companies have had sizeable investors. Why? Because people are gathering and communicating and this is where they're gathering. Become a part of it, we're told.

Just as newspapers are dipping their toe in the water of fee-based content (in an effort to survive), I think we'll see companies like this do the same. The ad revenue won't be there forever and these free services still require a hefty infrastructure and personnel to maintain and update.

I think the business model will be similar to the highly-profitable text messages we all send. Perhaps it will be similar to another very profitable model, iTunes. Eventually, I think we'll be asking ourselves whether it's worth a penny per tweet to use Twitter or worth some minimal fee to 'subscribe' to Facebook and keep up with others.

Can it all really be free forever?