Following Up and Some ONew' News
Royal Van Horn · Phi Delta Kappan · 1999
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 Shortly after posting that column, I happened on Gary Bitter's 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 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 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 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. …