Friday, July 27, 2007

Speed Matters

Speed Matters is trying to:

identify educators who would be interested in talking about their vision of what they could do if every child had home access to a computer with a real high speed connection (think FTTH [fiber to the home] with speeds of 30 mbps or more).

To contribute ideas visit http://www.speedmatters.org/contact.html

You can also test the speed of the last mile of your Internet connection and compare it to other countries. Here is my result. Not too shabby compared to Canada, Germany, and Iceland. Whoa...what's up with Japan?



Here's my vision...
I am a teacher. If every child had high speed access, I would disregard the textbooks. Children would learn and work collaboratively on real problems posed by other children. They would speak directly to experts, work with primary sources of information, create new content for others to learn, and navigate the read, write web with intelligence, finesse, and responsibility. Their parents and extended family would participate in their learning no matter where they live. They would learn diversity by communicating with children across socioeconomic and physical boundaries. They would start to solve the world's problems with dialogue across these boundaries, as well. They would debate, argue, agree, and disagree passionately with support from an endless supply of sources. They would learn how to tell the difference between reliable and unreliable sources. They would use this power to create new ways to communicate and change the world.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very poignantly put Wendy, and I share the same vision too. I think it's all about getting everyone on the same page and headed in this digital direction, which can be a hard sell. However, I do believe in the saying that says you can move a mountain, one stone at a time. Maybe it'll take a few of us to get the stones rolling.

Anonymous said...

Wouldn't this be awesome!

Wendy, I am a CWA member working with the Speed Matters team and wanted to say thanks for mentioning our project. I just wanted to add that we have a link with an easy way for folks to contact Congerss to let them know how important this issue is.
http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/highspeedpolicy/