Just catching up with blogs and posts just had a great week off with family around Scotland.
Surprised and rather disappointed that no-one picked up on first speakers real point about wi-fi
Even the TES Article "Give us Some Coffee Shop Technology " missed main point.
I tuned in and heard a very erudite Rhys McKenna state that even foreign campsites now have wifi.
Starbucks have had free Wifi in UK since 2009.
The offices I left in 2002 had guest wifi available on request.
There is not a city centre I've been too in last few years without a wifi hotspot of some kind, nor usually a conference , you can sometimes even do it on a train.
If you just read this sort of coverage - you can hear the nae sayers being very understanding about schools struggling to compete with global corporates even if they are - Coffee Chains.
But campsites now do wifi ( our camp-site had it as well last summer ) - even some Scottish ones do - and lots of homes have wifi too - so for goodness sake why not schools. What more is there to talk about? or should we set up temporary under canvas learning centres with wifi ?
Surprised and rather disappointed that no-one picked up on first speakers real point about wi-fi
Even the TES Article "Give us Some Coffee Shop Technology " missed main point.
I tuned in and heard a very erudite Rhys McKenna state that even foreign campsites now have wifi.
Starbucks have had free Wifi in UK since 2009.
The offices I left in 2002 had guest wifi available on request.
There is not a city centre I've been too in last few years without a wifi hotspot of some kind, nor usually a conference , you can sometimes even do it on a train.
If you just read this sort of coverage - you can hear the nae sayers being very understanding about schools struggling to compete with global corporates even if they are - Coffee Chains.
I have lots of sympathy for the view expressed here, but there is a major networking problem to overcome and it isn't the in-building wi-fi.
ReplyDeleteApparently (I'm told by people involved in paying for it) most Scottish schools have a truly dire Internet connection - often in the 4-10 Mbps range (that's plenty for a household, but not for a school) - because the cost of providing a better connection is prohibitive. Perhaps someone needs to ask questions about the pricing?
It is worth digging a bit deeper the network back bone to local authorities actually quite robust
ReplyDeleteand to date procured nationally http://networkedblogs.com/oMx1M
It will only get better.
Where there is decent bandwidth we need to make more of the asset was my point.
But there should be a lot more openess around how schools and local authorties provision links out to schools
I'd not normally post or respond to an anonymous comment