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Following Up and Some 'New' News By Royal Van Horn Illustration © 1998 by Mario Noche

NEARING THE end of five years as the writer of this column prompts me to recollect, reconsider, reaffirm, retract, and expand on some of the things I've written in the last 45 columns. What's more, I have new information as well!

Video on the Internet

In the March column I repeated my time-honored statement that the Internet is too "bandwidth challenged" to do multimedia -- especially digital video -- of any quality. Now, just a few weeks later, I must conditionally "eat my words." Shortly after posting that column, I happened on Gary Bitter's "mathedology" site at Arizona State University (http://mathedology.ed.asu.edu). Using the resources of a National Science Foundation grant to the Technology Based Learning and Research Center at ASU (http://tblr.ed.asu.edu/home.html), Gary and his colleagues put together some of the nicest streaming video I have ever seen of teachers implementing the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics guidelines. Gary's team did a super job, technically and pedagogically, with the sample lessons, which often contain more than 20 minutes of video. If you have direct Internet access via a school or university Internet connection, I heartily recommend that you visit the "mathedology" site and see for yourself.

Now for the conditional part of the eating my words. I use a reasonably fast Mac; I am the only person on a switched Ethernet port in my building, which is connected to a 155-mbs campus ATM backbone that has an Internet connection of at least T-3 speeds, and I connected to the "mathedology" site from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. EST -- before the California Internet users wake up. I also had to download a recent copy of the Real Networks G2 player (from http://www.real.com) before I could play the video. Nonetheless, it worked flawlessly at this early hour, and I was able to get a sustained data transfer rate of 300 kbs. At this speed, the Internet was delivering digital video at about the speed of a single- or double-speed CD-ROM drive! Unfortunately, this is six to 10 times faster than a 56-kbs modem user can expect.

Real Networks, Real Streaming Video and Audio

As I just mentioned, the technology that makes the mathedology site work is from Real Networks and includes a Real streaming video server at the ASU site and the Real Video player -- a Web browser add-on or helper that you'll need to view the videos. There is also a Real Audio side to the technology that has made Internet radio and other stereo music applications on the Internet a reality.

Take, for example, a techie friend of mine named Joseph. Joseph is a Hungarian, and most of his immediate family members still live in Hungary. Almost every night, Joseph points his Internet browser to a Hungarian Internet server in his hometown and launches the Real Networks Audio player to listen to the Hungarian radio station in his hometown. No long distance bills, no static-ridden short wave, just hometown news, music, and so on delivered to Joseph over the Internet, free of charge. Of course, Joseph also uses Internet e-mail and Internet chat rooms to stay in touch with his family. Joseph has not implemented Internet telephony in order to make free voice calls to his family in Hungary, but he plans to.

Proxy Servers

The credo of the technology business is "Find a work around." Simply put, if something doesn't work one way, find a different way to make it work. One way to work around congested Internet connections is to establish a "proxy server." Suppose you have a lot of local users who keep using certain webpages at a certain site, say, http://XYZ. All you have to do is store those webpages on a local server, and whenever your users go to http://XYZ your local proxy server gives them the webpages just as the real XYZ site would. Proxy servers take a huge load off congested Internet connections, but they obviously don't work well for time-sensitive information like news or weather reports. I believe that one feasible way to make video work well on your "intranet" is to establish a proxy server in your school or university that houses the video that is difficult to get reliably over long-haul Internet connections. Proxy servers exist all over the Internet, and to the best of my knowledge they do not infringe on copyright since they simply help out the end user when the Internet gets congested. On this technical/practical/legal issue, though, I'll have to defer to those more knowledgeable than I.

Curriculum Integration

The January 1997 column, headlined "Bad Ideas: Technology Integration and Job-Entry Skills," received more e-mail and was more widely quoted and reprinted than any column to date. In that column, I mentioned that an informal study I had done found that 12 of 37 teachers at a single elementary school had an "integrated teaching unit" on the rain forest. I received an e-mail regarding the column that mentioned a similar survey that had found about a dozen teachers at a single school using an integrated "butterfly" unit. Apparently, what prompted so many butterfly units was that a mail-order supply house was selling butterfly cocoons.

Here is a brief follow-up on curriculum integration. In March 1997, Candice Carter, now a faculty colleague of mine, delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association titled "A Review of the Literature on the Cognitive Effects of Integrated Curriculum" (ERIC ED 419 837). After thoroughly reviewing 13 studies, Candice and her co-author, DeWayne Mason, concluded, "Although researchers often assert that integrated curriculum creates positive effects, it is concluded that recent research comparing integrated and traditional curriculum shows no differences." This paper is largely quantitative, but Candice has also reported qualitative research with similar, if not more damning, conclusions.1

The 'Next Generation'

In the January 1998 column I wrote on the government-funded effort to create a very high-speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) that would form the basis of the Internet2. Currently, the Internet2 links about 150 research universities, research institutes, private labs, and the National Library of Medicine. In that same column I argued that K-12 schools and the teaching universities (different from the research universities) needed an InternetE, or Internet for Education. Unfortunately, anything akin to an InternetE is still a figment of my imagination. Of course, I know that the President promoted the "Next Generation Internet" (NGI) and its importance to education in his recent State of the Union address. But, to date, the NGI website (http://www.ngi.gov) has no mention of support for education.

Obviously, I am not surprised. In the fall of 1997 I offered this column to both the U.S. Department of Education and Sen. Bob Kerry (D-Neb.) for the express purpose of discussing the Internet and its use by pre-K-16 education. Neither of these dignitaries nor any of their aides had the courtesy to even acknowledge receipt of my letter.

Moreover, I believe things are getting worse for educational Internet users largely because of the advent of virtual private networks (VPNs). Briefly, here's how a VPN works. Suppose you're a moderately sized U.S. corporation, with offices in 50 cities worldwide and a huge phone bill for data-grade phone lines (both local and long distance). Obviously, if you could use the ubiquitous "public" Internet and eliminate all those phone bills for data lines, you would jump at the chance. But you wouldn't want your company's financial information to travel over a "public" Internet. The solution is simple: just encrypt the data, send it via multiple routes over the public Internet to ensure safe delivery, and get high-speed Internet connections. On the other side of the coin, if you did happen to own a few company-to-company Internet lines, you wouldn't want the public riffraff to use any of your bandwidth. No problem -- just zone or segment your piece of the Internet. Use the public lines, but don't let the public use your lines.

Creating a VPN is actually quite a bit more complicated, but you get the picture. An extremely close physical analogy goes as follows. There's a fire hydrant in your front yard, and you "tunnel" over to the fire hydrant and run a water line to your house. Then you cancel the water supply from your municipal utility corporation. The only problem with this analogy is that stealing water is illegal, while stealing bandwidth by tunneling on the Internet is legal. If you don't think VPNs will shortly become a problem, read the recent survey in Network World.2 The implementation of VPNs is likely to grow exponentially.

Convergence

The latest buzz word in the high-tech business and industry journals is "convergence." Essentially, the idea is to bring together on one network all the data, voice, video, and other traffic of a company. Currently, most large corporations have a variety of different kinds of connections between various company locations and with the outside world that may include hundreds of voice-grade telephone lines, data lines, satellite links, video-conferencing lines, Internet connections, microwave links, and so on. Not only are these myriad connections hard to manage, but they are also extremely expensive and not in any way redundant. That is to say, the voice lines can't carry a video conference and vice versa. So the prevalent thinking of corporate technology types is to bring together -- or converge -- lots of these kinds of traffic over super-fast, corporate, multipurpose, or VPN networks. General Motors, for example, plans to quickly implement a "converged" network that will let it decrease the time it takes to design and build a new model automobile from 33 months to about 18 months. Allowing designers and engineers to hold video conferences, share applications, and collaborate over a converged network -- in real time -- is a large part of the General Motors plan.

Honestly, I have no idea of how extensively these corporate convergence or VPN plans will affect your and my Internet connections, but I am worried. I believe that convergence and VPN issues form a commingled threat to any educational or personal user of any part of the World Wide Web! Maybe I am just being an alarmist. Maybe allowing the Josephs of the world to listen to a commercial radio station in their distant homeland is the same as allowing a corporation to tunnel into the Internet and create a VPN. Maybe these are both part of the same bundle of freedoms that we value so highly. But I wonder.

Beware: Techies Are Getting Smart!

In the "new" news category, an off-the-wall bright friend of mine recently quit his job as a university computer system administrator/analyst. Naturally, he did the customary things -- giving appropriate notice, sending all server passwords and configuration information to his bosses in sealed envelopes, and so on. He had previously made arrangements to become a high-tech "temp" with a local employment firm. Since he was irreplaceable at the university where he worked and since they couldn't find a replacement for him, it was necessary for the university to quickly hire him back from the "temp" employment agency at a very substantial salary increase. Now my friend makes substantially more money per week, has equal benefits, and has to clock in only 40 hours a week, compared to the 70- or 80-hour weeks he used to "devote" to his university work.

As you might have guessed by now, the high-tech "temporary employment firms" are beginning to think that this is a "replicable" model, and they are beginning to entice all the underpaid university, government, and other techie whiz kids to come to work for them. If I were the chief administrator of any nonprofit agency, school district, university, state, military unit, or government department, I would be worried, very worried. (Remember, you're not supposed to shoot the messenger!)

Church Steeples and Cell Phones

I like to end these columns on an upbeat note. So what do church steeples and cell phones have in common? Although it's not obvious, the answer is simple. What better place to hide a cell phone tower than in a tall church steeple, like the steeple of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.? As reported in the February issue of Wired, Motorola leases "steeple space" for a cell phone antenna in the National Cathedral for an estimated $100,000 per year.3 Wired mentions that other significant "steeple space" in and around the U.S. goes for rates ranging from $14,000 per year to "a sizable chunk of change." I can't help but wonder if ringing the church bell in the steeple has any effect on local cell phone calls.

2. Natalie Robb and Eric Zines, "Very Promising Networks," Network World, 25 January 1999, pp. 57-59.

3. "Divine Calling," Wired, February 1999, p. 70.

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