FCC looks to update school connectivity fund

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has voted to take the first step toward revamping its program that subsidizes Internet connections to schools and libraries, with the focus in the future on big bandwidth instead of simple connectivity.

The FCC on Friday voted to launch a notice of proposed rulemaking, or NPRM, focused on updating the 16-year-old E-Rate program. E-Rate, with a US$2.25 billion annual budget, has helped bring Internet service to nearly all U.S. schools, but the program is outdated, commissioners said.

About 80 percent of U.S. schools and libraries say they don't have enough bandwidth, Margaret Spellings, former U.S. secretary of education, told commissioners at Friday's FCC meeting. Schools need higher bandwidth to deliver modern technology-focused education, she said.

Commissioners agreed. "We are quickly moving from a world where what matters is connectivity to what matters is capacity," Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said.

Rosenworcel listed many other countries that have programs focused on bringing new technology into classrooms. "We are at a moment when the world is trying to out-educate us," she said.

The NPRM asks several questions on how to update the E-Rate program, but commissioners said the changes are likely to focus on increasing broadband capacity, increasing purchasing power for schools, and streamlining the application process.

A focus on increased capacity and new technologies is important, said Commissioner Ajit Pai. In recent years, about a quarter of E-Rate's budget has supported telephone service to schools and libraries, he said.
A streamlined application process is also needed, he added. In recent years, hundreds of millions of dollars of E-Rate money has gone unspent partly because of the complicated application process. A simplified process will mean more dollars going to help students, instead of paying advisors to help fill out forms, added Pai, who laid out his vision for a new E-Rate program in a speech this week.

The FCC's action earned praise from several U.S. lawmakers and technology trade groups.

"We must provide our schools and libraries with next-generation Internet connectivity so that they benefit from the rapid advances in digital education technology," Senator John "Jay" Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, said in a statement. "The global economy demands an increasingly educated workforce with higher skills and strong backgrounds in science, math and technology."

Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, held a hearing this week in which he called for an update to the E-Rate program.

FCC looks to update school connectivity fund

The Federal Communications Commission has voted to take the first step toward revamping its program that subsidizes Internet connections to schools and libraries, with the focus in the future on big bandwidth instead of simple connectivity.

The FCC on Friday voted to launch a notice of proposed rulemaking, or NPRM, focused on updating the 16-year-old E-Rate program. E-Rate, with a $2.25 billion annual budget, has helped bring Internet service to nearly all U.S. schools, but the program is outdated, commissioners said.

About 80 percent of U.S. schools and libraries say they don’t have enough bandwidth, Margaret Spellings, former U.S. secretary of education, told commissioners at Friday’s FCC meeting. Schools need higher bandwidth to deliver modern technology-focused education, she said.

Commissioners agreed. “We are quickly moving from a world where what matters is connectivity to what matters is capacity,” Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said.

Rosenworcel listed many other countries that have programs focused on bringing new technology into classrooms. “We are at a moment when the world is trying to out-educate us,” she said.

The NPRM asks several questions on how to update the E-Rate program, but commissioners said the changes are likely to focus on increasing broadband capacity, increasing purchasing power for schools, and streamlining the application process.

A focus on increased capacity and new technologies is important, said Commissioner Ajit Pai. In recent years, about a quarter of E-Rate’s budget has supported telephone service to schools and libraries, he said.
A streamlined application process is also needed, he added. In recent years, hundreds of millions of dollars of E-Rate money has gone unspent partly because of the complicated application process. A simplified process will mean more dollars going to help students, instead of paying advisors to help fill out forms, added Pai, who laid out his vision for a new E-Rate program in a speech this week.

The FCC’s action earned praise from several U.S. lawmakers and technology trade groups.

Grant GrossSen. Jay Rockefeller
“We must provide our schools and libraries with next-generation Internet connectivity so that they benefit from the rapid advances in digital education technology,” Senator John “Jay” Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, said in a statement. “The global economy demands an increasingly educated workforce with higher skills and strong backgrounds in science, math and technology.”

Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, held a hearing this week in which he called for an update to the E-Rate program. 

Ashridge Business School revamps network with HP

HP has deployed networking infrastructure at the Ashridge Business School to boost connectivity for the institution’s students.

The independent school provides short courses and postgraduate education for executives, teaching business skills and practical lessons on how to improve management. They run their own conference centre and have a number of repeat clients who come in to use the facilities.

But, with up to 8,000 visitors each year expecting to work on their abilities in the corporate world, they needed infrastructure which would keep up with their demands.

“We used to have Enterasys networking equipment mostly due to legacy and just kept upgrading with the product line,” said Matt Woodland, IT operations manager at Ashridge Business School. “But we got to a position where we needed a forklift upgrade as the network wasn’t up to speed.”

Being based in a grade-one listed building in acres of rural grounds, Wi-Fi was also very challenging.

“We have difficulty with cabling and have to keep our equipment in cupboards and loft spaces,” he added.

“Stately homes are not exactly designed for cooling.”

As a result, there were a lot of issues with downtime and the school even got to a stage where they were having to rip and replace sections of the network every three months.

Now, they have done a deal with HP to roll out the supplier’s FlexCampus network, giving wired and wireless options to student and staff and encouraging both to bring their own devices into the school.

“All of our clients were pushing for this solution,” said Woodland. “They come with all sorts of devices, from the larger laptops with one big antenna to tablets, phablets and all manner of modern devices.

"Being quite isolated, we needed to provide them with better connectivity.

“Our own staff are also using their equipment on our network and we are looking to move to a model of rather than issue corporate laptops, bring your own device. We needed a network that gave us that flexibility.”

The virtualised local area network installed by HP has two 10500 series switches at its centre, providing 10GB connections, with the option of 40GB or 100GB over Ethernet in the future. Once the network has travelled through the virtualised switch, it then continues out to 32 HP 5120 power over Ethernet (PoE) switches to provide 1GB connections over wires.

There is also a wireless local area network (WLAN) running on dual HP MSM760 access controllers, which in turn connect to 195 HP MSM460 access points, giving Wi-Fi to staff, students and visitors to the school.

Woodland said the planning process was “a really easy journey” with a lot of thanks put at the door of HP’s partner NETconnection Systems.

“All the kit was put together in labs off-site and tested there, which took about one month,” he said. “Then we did a piecemeal roll-out of the edges and a big bang on the core.”

Network downtime and speed... is no longer a water cooler conversation
Matt Woodland, IT operations manager, Ashridge Business School

“We had enough cabling and fibre in place to run the networks parallel, meaning our users didn’t experience any downtime. When we went live, pushing over onto our last switch, it was a good day!”

This process again took about one month and, since it went live in December 2012, the school has had no downtime at all.

Woodland and his team now manage the network with HP Intelligent Management Centre (IMC) software with additional HP IMC User Access Management (UAM) and Endpoint Admission Defence (EAD) modules to ensure a safe and secure network for its users.

“Network downtime and speed is no longer the concern of our users,” added Woodland. “It is no longer a water cooler conversation, which says it all.”

Sean Brown, head of public sector at HP Networking, concluded: “Multimedia communications and ubiquitous mobile devices are taxing legacy network architectures and stifling the ability to innovate and compete.”

“HP Networking has enabled Ashridge Business School to securely deploy and centrally orchestrate a mobile-optimised environment that scales from the datacentre to the network edge.”

Among Conservatives, Concerns Grow Over New School Standards

Tea Party members protest Common Core in Ocala, Fla., in April. The new educational standards, adopted by almost all the states, are the object of a growing conservative backlash.
Tea Party members protest Common Core in Ocala, Fla., in April. The new educational standards, adopted by almost all the states, are the object of a growing conservative backlash.
Bruce Ackerman/Ocala Star-Banner /Landov
"Common Core" is one of the biggest phrases in education today. To many educators and policymakers, it's a big, exciting idea that will ensure that America's students have the tools to succeed after graduation.

But a growing number of conservatives see things differently.

For years, states used their own, state-specific standards to lay out what K-12 students should be learning, for everything from punctuation to algebra. But those standards varied wildly, so the Common Core replaces them with one set of national standards for math and English language arts.

Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have signed on to the Common Core. But with those states now beginning to implement them, the core standards have become a rallying cry for some conservatives. Opponents have levied several arguments against the common standards.

Argument 1: "Washington Should Stay Out Of The Classroom"

"This is an effort largely driven by national organizations and the federal government," says Lindsey Burke, an education fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "And for many, the fear is that that will come at the expense of state and local control of education."

Burke is quick to point out, however, that the federal government is actually prohibited by law from telling states what or how to teach.

But Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, a nonprofit that helped create the Common Core standards, says Common Core didn't come from Washington.

"The idea of creating the standards and the work of creating them was led by governors of both parties," he says. "And there was not a federal dollar involved in their development."

While the Common Core standards were created by those state leaders in 2009, federal dollars do
come into the story. President Obama used them, through No Child Left Behind and his own program, Race to the Top, to entice states to adopt the core. And some conservatives say that effort crosses a line.
Argument 2: "Don't Tell Us How to Teach Our Kids"

As backers see it, these national standards tell states what kids should know by which age — but not how to teach them. But to opponents, there's little difference between standards and curriculum.

"You actually see textbooks now [that] bright and splashy on the cover say, 'Common Core-aligned textbooks,' " says Burke.

The new standards even come with a list of recommended reading, including Macbeth
and The Grapes of Wrath. The concern for many is that a teacher who has assigned books not included on that list will now stick to the recommended titles instead. Then, opponents say, every kid in the country will end up reading the same books and the same ideas.
Argument 3: "This Will Cost Money"

Everyone on both sides of the standards agrees that implementation of Common Core will cost money. There are tests and new textbooks, and teachers will need to be retrained. But Achieve's Cohen says the Common Core is money well-spent if it means kids are taught to read and think critically — something he says schools have not been doing.

"We can
continue to not do that," he says. But saving money on things like new instructional materials, he says, will also mean "[continuing] to have students who need to take remedial courses when they get to college, and [about] whom employers say, 'They're not well-prepared for the jobs that I've got.' "
Michigan State Rep. Tom McMillin, a Republican opposed to the standards, has decided the Common Core's price tag could help him stop school systems from using it. Schools may decide they want to adopt the core, he says, "but if they don't have the money to implement it, then they're not going to be able to do it."

That's because in Michigan, as in most states, adoption of the core was up to the State Board of Education. But funding has to go through McMillin and the state Legislature, so McMillin added an amendment to the budget that as he describes it, says, "Not a dime of the money that's given to the Michigan Department of Education can be spent on implementing Common Core unless there's an affirmative vote of the Legislature to do so." Conservative lawmakers in other states are using similar tactics.

So while districts across the country move ahead with implementation, one big question still looms over it all: Just how common will the Common Core be?

 

Why Warren Spector is taking a vacation and going back to school

Warren Spector is a name known well by dedicated PC gamers. The man helped make innovative games like System Shock, Deus Ex and Thief. More recently, Warren Spector worked with Disney Interactive on Disney's Epic Mickey games. With Disney shuttering his Junction Point Studios, Spector is taking a vacation for the first time in his life.

But he’s keeping busy with speaking engagements and going back to school, designing a game development program for the University of Texas Austin. Now free of public relations restrictions, Spector opens up to us about game development and his own future in this exclusive interview.

Game On: You’ve partnered with Blizzard’s Paul Sams to create the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy at the University of Texas. What’s it going to be like to teach the next generation of game makers?

Spector: For 30 years I’ve been arguing for the need to take a more structured approach to training the next generation of developers; it’s important to teach them what makes games work. Now, it’s much easier to convince people that games education has a place in the colleges and the universities in the country.

How will your Denius-Sams Gaming Academy differentiate itself?

We want to take the best candidates and put them through a rigorous boot camp approach to actually making games. It’s not about games as art—although I believe that—and it’s not about games made by four people who sit in a room and talk.

The University of Texas at Austin College of Communications, future home of the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy.

Games are an industrial art and the way Disney and Electronic Arts and all the other places I’ve worked at actually work is not the way most universities teach game development. We want to take those 20 people and actually prepare them very specifically for a career in creative or production leadership.

What opportunities are there for graduating game developers today?

Games offer a terrific career opportunity for people who have the passion and dedication and don’t mind the hard work. The major players are laying people off right and left now; even my studio just got shut down recently. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities in game development.

There are still thousands of people working at major publishers and every time a studio shuts down a thousand flowers bloom. You see a group go the indie route, which is now a much more viable space to be in than it was five years ago. Others go the mobile route, which is more viable and it didn’t even exist five years ago. So there are still plenty of job opportunities.

What advice would you give to someone who wants a career in games?

First of all, make games. If you’re not making games on your own, the odds are very slim you’re going to be able to do it professionally. No one’s going to give you a chance unless you have a portfolio of some kind.

We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. We were making it up as we went along.

For artists and programmers, that’s relatively straightforward. I always love it when a programmer comes to me and claims to have reverse-engineered the tech in Deus Ex. Grab Unreal Engine or the Source Engine or Unity and actually start building stuff. You may discover that you don’t have the knack for it. You may discover you don’t like it. God knows no one wants me touching a game editor anymore, that’s for sure.  You have to make sure you love it and you have skill. If you’re a designer, build stuff, write some design docs, write up a world description.

Having spent so much time with Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, do you see those characters working in the Disney Infinity platform?

I have nothing to do with Mickey and Oswald anymore, so if anybody does anything with them—and obviously I hope they do—it will likely be on the Infinity platform, though again I’m not really sure about that.

Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit co-starred in Spector's last game, Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two.

I think the idea of creating a platform is a great one and I love the way Infinity is using toys and more traditional game styles together. The success of Skylanders speaks to that.  Who better than Disney to use that kind of approach, given the characters and the IP they have to exploit? The only danger I see is if it turns into everything has to be squeezed into the platform. I think you can go too far with the idea of a platform, but I’m not remotely close enough to Infinity to have any thoughts on what their approach is.

How long of a break do you feel you’re going to take before you get back into game development?

I told my wife I was going to take as much time off as it took for me to experience what normal people describe as “bored.” I’m ready to find out what the hell that feels like. I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for, holy cow, thirty years.

My wife will tell you we’ve never had a vacation that didn’t involve some work. It says on my LinkedIn page I’ll talk to anybody and so if someone puts the perfect thing in front of me then I might come back a little sooner. But I’m not going to rush back in. I’m going to burn to do something or I’m not going to do anything.

The sad thing for me is I really want to take off until at least the fall. I don’t know why, but I have October in my head. But some folks are throwing some pretty interesting opportunities at me, so I might have to get up off the couch and head back to work sooner than I expected.

What excites you about game development today?

When I came in it was like we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. We didn’t have any idea how to do user controls or cameras or first-person-perspective games. They were primitive. We had no clue, so we were making it up as we went along.

Wing Commander 2 for the PC was a first-person starfighter simulator with a surprisingly tense narrative.

Chris Roberts when he proposed Wing Commander—the first cinematic game that combined drama with a fully texture-mapped space combat game—a lot of people thought he was nuts because no one had ever seen anything like that. And here we are today in the mobile world, the tablet world, where it’s like, how do you make a first-person-perspective game with controls that actually work? How do we do anything on this device? How do we tell a story to an audience that expects to play in five-minute chunks while they’re waiting for a cup of coffee?

I don’t know, so in that sense it’s kind of the Wild West again. A lot of people are going to fail, but a lot of people are going to be creating yet another new medium and that’s hugely exciting.