Technology Futures

Henrico County, Virginia, has garnered national attention for its program of giving laptops to kids once they reach sixth grade. But if the school system is not prepared to truly transform the teaching and learning process, the results may not be what we expect. In this article, at least one mother made her daughter give the laptop back because it had become a time waster for the girl and her grades had dropped.

It is easy to blame it on kids spending too much time chatting and goofing off on online Web sites, but those are only symptoms of the real problem. I can take some of the blame for all this, as the Blacksburg Electronic Village project helped our county schools become the first school system in the country to have broadband to every school and to become the first school system in the country to have broadband in every classroom. Since then I have worked on many other K12 technology projects--all with the best of intentions, but the results have been mixed at best.

Teaching kids is a complext process that requires years of experience, and you can't just drop a few computers into the middle of a centuries old way of doing things and expect magical results. I have learned that the hard way. In my experience, it is school administrators that are most often at fault. They are eager to win grants and push technology into the classroom; it looks good to parents and to elected leaders that decide school budgets.

But those same administrators are often much less enthusiastic about actually rolling up their sleeves, working side by side with teachers, and trying to figure out what changes need to be made to really leverage the promise of all this technology. And there is what I call the "five percent problem." Dump a bunch of technology into a school, and under any circumstances, you will have about five percent of teachers who are motivated to dig in and do amazing things with the stuff. Those "five percent" projects become the poster children for technology in the classroom. They are used to say, "See what great stuff all this is!"

But those five percenters are the exception, not the rule. Most teachers need a lot of help and support from the top down to get comparable results, and it usually is not there. So while computer manufacturers make money selling computers to schools, our kids are still learning the same old way. If your school district wants money for technology efforts, ask some hard questions about how administrators intend to support teachers with good tech support, appropriate learning resources, and assistance with curriculum changes.

This article demonstrates how easy it is for others to snoop around in your personal affairs if you like to use "free" services like Google Calendar. The author, simply by clicking on calendar items and using the information to dig up additional detail, was quickly able to identify where a woman lived and when she would be out of the house (handy for burglars).

Google Calendar has a privacy setting, but not everyone uses it. Sharing a calendar with your friends and family often has the unintended side effect of sharing it with everyone else in the world. Use these services carefully, and never, ever let your children use these.

The owner of 26 Massachusetts and Rhode Island papers is thinking about selling the whole lot and simply publishing on the Web, where he says ad revenues are higher. It's about time somebody in the newspaper business acknowledged that putting gobs of ink on dead trees and tossing the finished product onto people's driveways is not the best way to do things anymore.

The Web is a nearly perfect news distribution medium--virtually zero distribution costs and the potential for nearly unlimited content. All that is needed is thoughtful editing, which is still dreadfully short on the Web. As I've been saying since 1993, it could be the Golden Age for newspapers, if they fire everybody, get some people that have a clue, and toss their printing presses away.

This CNet article describes how telephone and cable companies are responding to competition with better customer service. As cable companies roll out voice services and telephone companies are slowly rolling out TV service, we are getting a glimpse of what happens when these companies have to worry about keeping their customers--they treat them better.

But a duopoly also tends to lead to cartel-like pricing, where service may be slightly better but you don't see much movement in prices. With just two firms, there is little reason for either firm to cut prices very much or to try to do things differently. That is one reason why you see a lot of low ball "introductory pricing" for DSL and cable modem services, but never see any permanent price cuts. The phone companies still have a much smaller broadband marketshare, so DSL tends to be about $10 cheaper than cable modem service in most markets--consumers won't bother to switch at all if the savings are less than that.

But prices for all services--voice, video, and data--could be much less expensive if all those services were carried over an Open Service Provider Network (OSPN) using an Open Service Architecture (OSA) system. Then and only then do things really get interesting, because now instead of two providers for a service, you are much more likely to have four or more, making cartel pricing much more difficult.

The future of broadband is Open Service Provider Networks. They work--you get more services at much lower cost. The OSPN concept started in Europe, but once we get a couple of communities in the U.S. with OSPN systems, it will be hard to imagine doing it any other way. Oh, and one more thing.....OSPN networks make communitywide broadband systems financially viable over the long term. Design Nine is the only broadband architecture firm in the U.S. that specializes in the design and implementation of OSPN systems; call us if you want help with your community fiber and wireless projects.