Mason Pederson (my nephew)…

“Something’s not quite right. Mom, I need pancakes.”

Priorities.

Hat tip to @tsand for passing this along.

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From the Star Tribune:

Aimed at the district’s first-, second-, and third-graders, it demands using social media-type tools — forcing kids to interact — rather than working alone with paper-and-pencil worksheets.

Wow. Demanding and forcing 7-9 year olds to interact online.

Later on in the article:

First-grader Annalise Johnson worked on an online math program called Planet Turtle. She and her classmates were independently working on math skill activities or competitively playing against one of their classmates on Planet Turtle world. Planet Turtle is a software program made by a textbook company that the Minnetonka kids are using in class.

We now demand and force kids to interact with each other. Independently. In order to beat their classmates.

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The Internet is going to be big someday.

From the Political Math blog.

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[The following post is part of a series titled Demystifying Bandwidth, a non-technical guy's attempt to explain a few of the big concepts behind how the Internet works in schools.]

There is no such thing as the Internet. Seriously.

Lesson #2 touched on the infrastructure (transport) costs associated with the Internet. Understanding bandwidth gets really interesting when you begin to understand the costs associated with moving that data (transit) across networks. First though, you need to begin to understand there is no such thing as the Internet.

The Internet is a network of networks. Imagine a school district with two schools 10 miles apart. School A wants to connect with School B. They need to share an existing network with somebody that already has infrastructure, likely a telephone or cable company. To share that infrastructure involves contracting with a either the telephone or cable company for transport (infrastructure) and transit (the right to send data across…transit…their infrastructure). You are now internetworking School A <---> Telephone Company <---> School B, commonly referred to as “being on the Internet”.

Let’s take this out a few steps. Imagine School A wants to access the Google. This data will need to transit, or cross, many networks. School A <---> Telephone Company <---> Network A <---> Network B <---> Google. These networks need to get paid. Each network charges a tiny micropayment to pass data from on to the other. Think “toll booth operators”, but for data crossing networks.

Here’s where scale becomes a critical part of the story. If I’m shipping you 10,000 apples and you are shipping me 10,000 apples, there comes a point where we’ll agree it would be more efficient to share. In the Internet world, this is a practice called “peering”. I’ll carry your traffic if you carry my traffic. I’ll use your network and you can use my network. This is what the “Internet” looks like at a big scale.

Sharing is cool. It’s also within your reach.

[The following post is part of a series titled Demystifying Bandwidth, a non-technical guy's attempt to explain a few of the big concepts behind how the Internet works in schools.]

One critical piece to understanding broadband is knowing that the cost of your connection actually involves two factors. There is the cost of building the infrastructure to your home or school (transport) and there is the cost of delivering the data to your home or school (transit). These costs are purposefully blurred into a single price because it’s just too damn confusing to explain the difference. Here’s why.

Let’s say that the infrastructure (transport) cost to build to your neighborhood costs the telephone company $10,000. They know the average household will only stomach $50/month for Internet. Their strategy is to determine whether there are enough households in the neighborhood willing to pay $50/month to a) cover the cost to build and maintain the infrastructure, and b) cover the cost for them to deliver the data over the infrastructure.

10 households paying $50/month would pull in $6,000/year. The telephone company knows that it would recover the costs of the initial infrastructure build in less than 2 years. (That’s why they’ll lock you in for a 2 year contract.) Once the infrastructure is paid for, they’ll continue pulling $50/month to cover the cost of data over that network (transit), right?

Not exactly.

Remember why you ditched your “landline” telephone and saved $30/month? The telephone company (now your Internet provider) built themselves on the monthly fees ($30/month) and ($x/month) long distance charges. Now that the mobile phone has replaced that revenue, the $50/month you are now paying for Internet goes to keep the telephone company running in a “post landline and long distance minutes” world.

Factor in that the telephone company intends to make a profit and you begin to understand why there’s been no innovation in broadband Internet to your home or school over the past 10 years. All of the money we are paying since the infrastructure was paid is going towards subsidizing the dying (dead) business model upon which these companies became the most powerful in the 20th century.

It can’t be that bad though, right? Running the data over the lines (transit) costs something, right? We’ll explore the world of data over the network (transit) next.