International Education News

I saw this story in USAToday, while in Atlanta, but wasn’t able to pull it up until I found the original source, (First-Ever State-By-State Report on Internet Connection Speed Shows U.S. Far Behind Other Industrialized Nations) just a minute ago — a report from the Communications workers of America.  It’s important to note that the union has a vested interest in working to increase Internet speeds in the U.S. 

The first paragraph of the report reads…

Washington, DC.-Results released today (Jun 25, 2007) of the first-ever state-by-state report on Internet connection speed reveal that the United States is falling far behind other industrialized nations. The report, based on aggregated data from nearly 80,000 users, shows that the median real-time download speed in the U.S. is a mere 1.9 megabits per second (mbps). The best available estimates show average download speeds in Japan of 61 mbps, in South Korea of 45 mbps, in France of 17 mbps and in Canada of 7 mbps.

I extracted the data from the PDF file, and imported it into an MS Excel spreadheet.  You can get it here.  The top 10 states (fasted) for download speeds are:

1. Rhode Island
2. Kansas
3. New Jersey
4. New York
5. Massachusetts
6. Louisiana
7. Georgia
8. New Hampshire
9. Delaware
10. Maryland

The bottom ten (slowest) are:

41. Arkansas
42. Utah
43. Idaho
44. Montana
45. North Dakota
46. Iowa
47. Wyoming
48. West Virginia
49. South Dakota
50. Alaska

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“First-Ever State-By-State Report on Internet Connection Speed Shows U.S. Far Behind Other Industrialized Nations.” CWA. 25 Jun 2007. Communications Workshops of America. 30 Jun 2007 <http://www.cwa-union.org/news/page.jsp?itemID=28663094>.

Technorati Tags: warlick education technology bandwidth

I’m finally grounded again, sitting in my office, too early in the morning, with some nagging issues on my mind. ..and I wish that I could cause them to jell in my head so that I knew what I’m getting ready to write about. I guess I’m hoping that writing will cause it all to make sense.

TagsBlog PostsNECC0689NECC200616NECC07748NECC2007987StringsNECC 200664NECC 20073,149

The first thing I did, when I got up (afterchecking my Twitter listing), was to run a quick search on Technorati for the number of blog posts that mention NECC 2007 and compare them to mentions of NECC 2006. I searched for occurrances of necc06, necc2006, necc07, and necc2007. These, I reason, would pull up blog entries that are likely tagged, assuming that these are more sophisticated bloggers. As a second thought, I also search for blogs that mention “NECC 2006″ and “NECC 2007″ to include bloggers who are not yet tagging their entries.

As you can see, the blogging activity increased pretty significantly this year.  I suspect that there are a variety of reasons.  More educators are blogging, and many more opportunities to blog were available to us in Atlanta.  It was certainly a conference that shined like no other, as it has already reached position 35 on Hitchhikr’s sorting of visited conference pages (the #1 position held by NECC 2006).

Just a picture that I took in Charleston.  Lots of energy.

But I think my itch started with Steve Dembo’s June 28 Twitter..

Ok, I need feedback on this one. If EduBloggerCon and the Bloggers Cafe was the best part of NECC… Do we (bloggers) need NECC to do it?

and I very glibly replied

…i think we need necc. i also think necc needs us.

I just watched Chris Walsh’s NECC live wrap-up with ron Cravey, Donella Evonluk, Anita McAnear, and Linda Whitacre.  It was mentioned that there were almost 20,000 educators in attendance in Atlanta.  They were teaching, learning, conversing, and taking oh so much home with them —

and compared to that, we (bloggers) are just a cult. 

I think that what we are doing is extraordinarily important.  We are drilling through barriers that insist on keeping things the same.  But the barriers persist.  Too many schools still can’t view blog pages, podcasts, or other social sites.  Most teachers have no time built into their work schedules to participate in these conversations.  Way too many children do not have access to the technology they need to become in any way acquainted with today’s information landscape.  The concepts of Web 2.0 remain couched in tech-speak that is either to esoteric for many to understand or it down-right turns people off.

I guess I’m just trying to force a reality check on myself, now that I’m back home in my office and planning for more work over the coming months.  This year I’ll have a number of opportunities to speak to education leaders, both administrative and political.  It’s a huge and humbling responsibility, and I wish, so much, that I could just bring them NECC, or at least its energy.

I know one thing.  The cult is growing, and it’s happening because of the energy, passion, and inventiveness of the educators who are driving it.  If that’s all it’s going to take, then we’re home free.

Technorati Tags: warlick education technology edubloggercon necc07 necc2007

Just home from NECC 2007 and a side trip to Columbia for an all-day workshop with technology and media educators, and administrators from Richland Two School District, and scanning through some of the buzz about this years mega conference — only to run across a very interesting conference put on by a small school in New Zealand, Flaxmere Kid’s Conference. It’s kids, teaching kids, about how they are using contemporary technologies to do their work.

Educating the Dragon » Blog Archive » Flaxmere Kid’s Conference:

Iron Gate and Peterhead came together to showcase what they have been doing with ICT over the past couple of months. We had groups of children demonstrating how Google SketchUp, Art Rage and PowerPoint worked, we had some working with a green screen and my kids showed off their Talk and Write work with Taradale Intermediate School.

Alas, I think we (NECCsters) may congratulate ourselves a little too much   More about that later!

Technorati Tags: warlick education technology nz flaxmere kidsconference