TechTalks Transcript
Wireless Trends and Surprises in Teaching and Learning
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Carl Berger [CB] |
September 14, 2000
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JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk series for Fall of 2000, and to this session on Wireless Trends and Surprises in Teaching and Learning, featuring Carl Berger of the University of Michigan. You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and I'd like to thank Compaq for their support of this Tech Talk. Be sure to check out their array of wireless LAN products, a link can be found on our event site. I'm also very pleased to welcome back Howard Strauss of Princeton as the technology anchor for this series of Tech Talks. Howard is a well-known Web technology and portal expert. And Howard, I'm really looking forward to the surprise you always provide to us in your intro. Welcome!
HS: Thank you, Judith. It gets harder every time, really! You just demand more and more of me each time I do this!
HS: I don't know. Okay. Anyway, I'm Howard Strauss. I'm the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts. In this webcast, I invite you to join Judith and me in a lively technical dialogue with our guest expert, Carl Berger, that will answer the questions you'd like answered and to ask those very important follow-up questions. You can join in this dialogue by sending your questions via e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this webcast. If we don't get to your questions during the webcast, we'll provide an answer in the webcast archives.
On August 20th, in a 20-page, four-color insert, the New York Times proclaimed that we were all about to embark on what they called "the mobility revolution." Above a sketch of Gen X people, their laptops and PDA's unshackled at last from the chains of fixed network connections, an inch-high headline shouted, "THE INTERNET UNTETHERED: LIVING AND WORKING WITH THE WIRELESS WEB." "The four killer apps of the wireless world, as they called them," said the Times, were "synchronization, messaging, content rendering and M-commerce." As in mobile commerce, I suppose.
Whatever the killer wireless applications turn out to be, the ubiquity of cell phones and PDAs leaves little doubt that a new mobility revolution is in fact under way. And this revolution may have even more unexpected results and may be far more far-reaching than the mobility revolution caused by the introduction of cars - which, you'll recall, led to the creation of suburban sprawl and even the sexual revolution. Not every new technology has the effect its advocates expect. This revolution is not just a matter of adding wireless network connections to our laptops. It is turning every device we commonly use into a portable, communicating, network-connected Internet appliance by creating new wireless applications and new ways of doing most everything we do.
Having portable devices that communicate, however, will not do us much good unless all of them can talk to each other. Today, that's not possible. For example, phones don't talk too well to computers. But that is about to change thanks to Blue Tooth, a new wireless communication technology standard named after the tenth-century Danish king, Harald (spelled H-A-R-A-L-D) Blue Tooth, who unified Denmark and Norway.
How does all this wireless technology really work? Perhaps the clearest description was given by Albert Einstein when he was asked to describe how radio-an early form of wireless communication-worked. He said, "You see, radio is kind of a very long cat. You pull his tail in New York, and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Radio operates exactly the same way!" You're laughing at the wrong time here! "Radio operates exactly the same way. The only difference is that there is no cat!" Of course, since our wireless networks communicate in both directions, we need at least two cats, facing opposite coasts.
Next month, October 19th, in another Tech Talk on wireless, our focus will be on the details of the cats. In today's webcast, we will largely ignore the cats and focus on what's happening at both ends of them. Will wireless technology change the way courses are taught, labs are run and meetings are conducted? Will our campuses really be a different place once they go wireless, or is this just another novel technology, a field of dreams experiment in which we build a wireless network and hope great things will happen? In campuses around the world, wireless networks are appearing. Some are doing careful planning on the part of IT groups and others are being created ad hoc by users. Getting control of this inevitable new technology and using it most effectively can be more difficult than herding cats.
On today's webcast of Tech Talk, Carl Berger, while no tenth-century Viking, will help us tame Einstein's cats and see if unifying wireless and wired networks is any easier than unifying Denmark and Norway. Judith?
JB: Thanks very much, Howard, and that was great. Speaking of, you know, just how we use some of the wireless technology, I just have to contribute one other little comment that I saw in a paper on wireless from an analyst and he was talking specifically about the wireless Web. You know, five years ago, we were talking about the web and thinking about how it might impact teaching and learning, and now today, we get to talk about how the wireless web might impact teaching and learning.
HS: Which means we need a retronym for this thing we used to call the Web.
JB: A what again?
HS: A retronym.
JB: A retronym. Okay.
HS: We'll do that someday. We'll talk about retronyms.
JB: We'll do that later. Okay. May sound like retrograde. Anyway, the idea is that - the quote was that consumers don't think they want the wireless Web yet, but they will, you know, and it brings to mind what, in fact, we may in fact hear, what Carl will be talking about today. So we're very pleased to have Carl with us here today to talk about what's happening today in teaching and learning in wireless and also take a peek into some future possibilities.
Carl's a professor at the University of Michigan, in the School of Education, where he specializes in science and instructional technology. He is also the director of Advanced Academic Technologies and the Center for Advanced Research and Academic Technologies. Much more about Carl is at the site, and I'm sure you'll want to follow some of the links on the projects he's involved in, such as the Visible Human project that we'll talk about later in our session. Welcome, Carl, and thanks so much for joining us here on Tech Talk today.
CB: It's my pleasure, and I've just been sitting here having a good time laughing, wondering if this thing really doesn't sound more like Car Talk than Tech Talk.
HS: We tried to turn this into Car Talk, and we will.
CB: I think, you know, at some time I'm going to have to say, "Don't surf the web like my brother, Howard," but I'll try to ignore that. It is good to be here, and like you said, I'm not probably going to answer a great deal about the technological aspects, the fine techie details, but really about what's going on, what I've seen, some trends and some real surprises. So thank you for having me!
HS: Carl, could you start by telling us what you think wireless computing is? I mean, we see all these people talking in cell phones and maybe, I mean, the cell phones and PDAs and all the other wireless stuff we see floating around, is that part of this? Could you . . .
CB: Absolutely.
HS: . . . kind of define what we're talking about here?
CB: Absolutely. I think anytime you think of wireless, you have to really believe that that's what you're talking about, whether it's wireless from the standpoint of two students beaming information on their PDAs across a room or whether it's the more complex wireless that we often think of, where we don't have to connect our computer to an Ethernet jack, or whether you really think of wireless as one of our questioners did today, where they said, "How far could it really reach if we really wanted to get it to a great distance?" And you can imagine a great tower out there that almost has a radio signal reaching out. And you don't even have to think of radio. You can think of light. You can think of all kinds of avenues as well. So I think we should limit ourselves, if we're going to think about what happens with wireless, rather than what wireless really is. I'll let my colleagues in a few weeks really tear that one apart.
HS: Okay, but I was thinking of it more in terms of the applications. Can we talk about what some of the things that people are doing with this thing - and again, you said we're not going to restrict this just to people with computers. This is people doing all kinds of things.
CB: Absolutely. For example, the whole notion of people just out remote sensing, gathering data, so that they don't actually have to reach into the water. They can stand near the water and have some instrument lay out in the water and the data is transferred in over a wireless line that could be infrared or could be a radio, so they can take that. We're doing some of that now with our students and it's making a big difference in that they don't have to go out and collect the data and then come back to a laboratory. They can be right in the laboratory and see the data in real time being collected. And those are several, but very, very fascinating shifts in what happens when you watch students work with wireless devices.
HS: Maybe that would be a useful thing to do. I mean, we're trying to understand what this kind of thing can do and it seems like you're alluding to an experiment that involves some students wading into a river or something.
CB: Um-hum.
HS: Could you tell us more about that? [inaudible]?
CB: In some of our projects here at Michigan, we're actually working with junior high and high school students, that they go out and gather data on water quality. And they'll actually go out and model a stream or a river. In fact, we've got one of our projects called "Model It" which includes a toolkit that allows them to do these kinds of things. Well, they've actually, then, after they've modeled the ideal of what's happening with the stream in terms of oxygen content and temperature and, oh, for example, even acid concentration. They then can go out actually into the stream and measure these things and see how it fits the model and modify the model to make it much more realistic. It's surprising how well the students can actually work. Now, where does the wireless come on this? Well . . .
HS: That was going to be my question!
CB: . . . where does the wireless come on this? One of the interesting things that we're noticing lately is that proximity, both in time and in space, makes a big difference. Now, what do we mean by proximity in time? Well, you can remember in high school, perhaps, in one of your high school science classes, going out and gathering data in the laboratory, often. Coming back and sitting down at your desk and making a graph of that data. And if you were like I was, Murphy's three laws of graphs always applied. Number one, the last data point that you tried putting on the graph from your data was off the paper. The second thing was, you did the whole thing in ink and so you had to throw it away. And the third thing was that about as much as you ever got out of it was called "connect the dots," which is a common American phenomenon. And so the problem you had there is very often by the time you got the data back out of the laboratory and back to where you were going to analyze it, it no longer had any immediacy to really understand it. And we're finding the same thing now, for example, as students really are out in the field gathering data using wireless devices, they're actually watching where the data is being gathered.
HS: That's actually doing a lot of analysis on the spot. When the data comes in.
CB: On the spot, yeah, the data comes in, goes into the computer, automatically graphed and the students watch the graph. They can then call to their colleagues who are out in the stream with the data probes in the water and say, "Move it over that way!" or "Move it this way, to the left," you know, and . . .
HS: Okay, we'll go back and try that again.
CB: . . . and try it again. And almost always, it's "try it again," obviously. But that's really great as well because again, you don't have the problem of coming back to the classroom and saying, "Well, I wonder why that data came out that way?" And somebody tries to recollect whether they were in the wrong spot or the right spot. When they're there, overlooking the thing, it's just great. The nice thing about it is we actually started this experiment back in the early '80s with old computers, Apple II computers, but the problem we had is the computers kept falling in the water because we actually had to attach them physically to the probes going in the water. And they didn't work too well afterwards, and bringing out all the batteries to keep them running was a tough time, too.
HS: Oh, I was going to wonder how you got electricity to them, how parents would have felt about long electric cords going into a river. Could you give us any examples of wireless use in the classroom?
CB: Oh, absolutely! One of the nice, nice ideas about wireless use in the classroom that I really enjoy is not only the wireless to a hub that you often think about, the notion that you're going to have a hub that's going to have an Ethernet connection and then you're going to be able to use the Ethernet from your computer to that connection, so that enables you to get into the "Worldwide Web" from wherever you are, down the hall, out the street. But there's another avenue that's really interesting and that's computer-to-computer, if you will. A lot of the new wireless that's coming out now - in fact, I even had a chance to call our sponsor to check to make sure that theirs did it, because I wanted to be able to give them credit if they did, and sure enough, it does - that you can take two of their computers - this is Compaq - and if they're equipped with the cards, they can actually talk to one another without going through a hub. So you can imagine students - and I'm actually seeing this happen, although where I've seen it, it's been done with little Apple I Books - where they're sitting around in a classroom with their I-Books and they're all not actually going through a hub, but literally going from computer to computer with each other and carrying on a cooperative activity that requires collaboration.
HS: So they can just move around all over the classroom?
CB: And they just move around and go wherever they need to be and sit wherever they need to be and it is not only what you would call a liberating experience, where they can get up and move. But you begin to realize that it has quite a different social consequence as you get away from this notion that computers are isolating and actually begin to realize that they are just like any other agent. They can work together.
HS: This really increases the kinds of collaboration that students are able to do.
CB: Absolutely!
HS: Collaborate in ways that you never would have thought they could have.
CB: That's right, and it isn't that they're doing exactly the same thing on each computer. They've got all their computers arranged around and they're sitting around and one person's doing one, on person's doing another. They're leaning over and looking, they're actually typing in and talking and all, and they get up and move and carry their computer and go over to another place and share it with them, so that the computer just becomes almost like what we used to do with a clipboard, where you draw something and take it over and show it to someone else. So it's really quite exciting. The nice thing about it is, when you're done, all that material can be translated from one student to another very quickly and they can all walk out with the data. They can all walk out with the results, they can all walk out with the collaboration. It's fascinating to watch.
HS: Okay, we have a question that came in and I'd just like to make the point to people who are sending questions in to expert@cren.net. Please give us your name on the thing, and if you do, we'll actually use it when we say who the question is from. Since I don't have a name on this one, I'm just going to read what the from line on the e-mail says. This is from mcnamee@med.sc.edu, and this person says, "What are some of the beneficial unintended consequences of wireless technology in higher education and graduate education?" I assume it's being used in the graduate schools as well.
CB: Um-hum. Well, I think one of the big unintended consequences is that suddenly find yourself using - I'm going to use computers, but it could be a lot of other things, but I'll focus mainly today on computers in areas where you didn't realize you were going to be able to use them. We'll talk a little bit later in greater depth about the Visible Human project, but in reality, here's an area where we're in the Gross Anatomy lab and we're actually having the students working with cadavers. And any of you who work with medical students, dental students, nursing students, know that their time is just crucial to them. And having a portable there . . . .
HS: Engineering students, too.
CB: Yeah. And having the - a portable right there where they need it to assist them in identification, to help them in dissection, to be able to do all these things is truly amazing, and something we didn't realize and we didn't even realize it even when we had computers in the Gross Anatomy labs, but arranged around the walls, connected to the Internet. Here, they're right - I'll tell you later where they are with the cadaver, but here they are, I can tell you, they're very close to the cadaver.
HS: Why don't you tell us about that?
CB: What's that?
HS: Since you're talking about it anyway, let's do it!
JB: Yeah!
CB: You bet. Well, our Visible Human project . . . .
HS: Talk about the Visible Human.
CB: Our Visible Human project is really an exciting project that takes the two visible human databases that were developed when two people, when they died, were frozen, sliced and diced and then ... .
HS: Judith, do we have links to those things?
JB: Yes, right under the very last sentence of Carl's biography there is a link to the Visible Human Project.
CB: Yep, you can take a look and see what we're doing there and actually see some of the slices and dices. Nice thing about it is, when you get all the slices digitally analyzed, you can put them back together and slice them in different ways. So right now, we're doing some wonderful work of being able to take that entire Visible Human database and make it appear as if the entire Visible Human database is available for the students on a portable, complete with all the hyperlinked information about labels and things of that nature that are really very close together. Then our whole idea is to take that and translate that information, using wireless, to the portable and the portable then takes a smaller chunk of that, which it can handle better, and the student can actually do that and navigate through that. And for example, if they're working on the abdomen and they see this strange structure there and they click on it, you and I might know it as the navel, but they find out that indeed, the true scientific name for it is bellius buttoni, and they click on it, the label comes up and there's bellius buttoni right there. I'm sure all of you know that that is the scientific name for the navel.
HS: We all know now! You never know what you're going to learn when you listen to Tech Talk.
CB: That's right. There's always unintended learnings in these Tech Talks, right?
JB: Right.
CB: But the joy of it is that in reality - and somewhat facetiously - we can actually prop up the arms of the cadaver and put the notebook and have the cadaver hold the notebook, as it shows in one of our quarterly reports that we're turning in. Again, in a little bit of a humorous way, but it's one of those wonderful unintended consequences. The nice thing about the wireless and the way the technology works is that we can use the wireless to send signals back and forth to our servers so that new databases actually are coming in, new database sets are coming in, that are subsets of the total Visible Human database because, as you can imagine, that's up in the terabyte range. And that's just as exciting.
JB: We might mention that a little bit more, Carl. This is a collaborative project with the National Library of Medicine and then the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.
CB: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, which is working on the Internet 2 notion of being able to take great, huge chunks of that data, transfer them by Internet 2 to the various places around the world and around the country, and then those chunks are further reduced to bits of data that go down into the server and then those are further reduced to actually go into the student's database. So the student actually has the feeling that they have the entire database, with all of its hyperlinked work, all attached. And it's just wonderful.
JB: I got really excited when you were telling us about this earlier, Carl, and that it's a really great example of a distributed database, then. You've got a huge database. The wholeness of it is at the supercomputing center, but then pieces and segments of it are really played out.
CB: That's right.
HS: Yeah, we really should have used this in our Internet 2 Tech Talk. It sounds like a really nice application.
CB: Now, this will be a fun application. I can show you some greater stuff, and then from that, we go from the notion of the whole idea where we can help break down the data for the students to students-and when we say students, we mean even people like surgeons, using an idea which we call Medster. Some people might call it Napster, but we call it Medster because it's really being able to set up the medical information in such a way that just as you would use Napster, you'd use this to go out and find medical information that you needed and have it quickly downloaded. Well, when you think about it, for physicians who are near patients who need information, or nurses, for example, who are working on floors and have a few seconds to find out information that can truly help the patient and don't have to know all that information but know how to get it just by Medsterizing it. You can imagine how exciting that would be, and how wireless can really make a difference.
JB: Well, Carl, let's think about, you know, you mentioned the nurse on the floor. What kind of a device do you envision that students are going to have in five years? Are they going to be walking around with portables or larger cell phones or what do you think they're going to be walking around with?
CB: I think we're really going to see something like hybrids and that's one of the reasons why we put on the site there some of the work that Sony is doing because it's actually coming up with a hybrid that's halfway between a PDA, a little Personal Digital Assistant like the Mindspring or the Palm Pilot and an I Book. Something in between there, and it's very thin and it's very easy to carry around. You can just drop it on your belt and you wouldn't even know it was there. You could put it around your neck. Heaven only knows, if you've ever watched nurses in modern hospitals, they sure have enough around their neck right now. And so this thing would actually fit right on.
HS: It would actually fit right into the stethoscope.
CB: That's right! No, quite seriously, it could be, and when you think about the stethoscope, you can think about some new modern advances on the stethoscope that'd be quite delightful that indeed would be wireless and they'd put the application right on the person and they can, in fact, look at their screen or the screen that happens to be in every patient's room. And there, of course, is the entire display up there as they move around and you get not only the sound, but the vision. Now, notice I said "not only the sound, but the vision." It's like anything else. I don't think we're going to see a lot of replacement. In other words, we're not going to say, "Oh, isn't it wonderful? Now we can suddenly see the heart," something like you'd see with an EKG. You probably would have all of that kind of information coming in because the more we can use more information, I think the better off we are.
HS: But today, Carl, are students starting to carry their laptops around in their book bags?
CB: Oh, yes, absolutely.
HS: And you think they're doing that because wireless makes it more useful to have one of these things around?
CB: Well, just an example of why I think that's so. I was at one of the other campuses across country and I happened to notice a student out there with a portable. And I thought, "Oh, isn't that wonderful, they're out there and they've obviously got a wireless because the computer's on and there's some things on the screen there." And I walked up and I noticed that they kept moving. And I finally said, "Do you mind if I ask you what you're doing?" And he says, "I'm searching for leakage." And I said, "What do you mean, searching for leakage?" And he said, "Well, I've got this wireless," and he said, "I'm looking for a place where I can latch on to the Internet." And so he was looking for places around the building where the wireless actually came out of the building, actually stretched out of the building, so he could move his portable into that area and then that would automatically connect him with the Internet because of these wonderful wireless features now which both have active and passive roaming. And I thought it was very fascinating that we see students sneaking around buildings, looking for leakage.
HS: Yeah, many campuses are putting antennas outside now. We are, so that we can really bathe the entire campus thus [inaudible].
CB: That's right. Unfortunately, you won't have sneaky students anymore. That's really kind of sad.
JB: I'd like to go back, even though we've got a lot of other questions coming in here. The question on unintended consequences and just delve into that just a tad bit more, Carl. In terms of, as we've looked at and you've described all of the medical applications, can we come back? What consequences do you see in terms of the actual, you know, the course and instruction? What things are happening within the, you know, within the actual expected, shall we say, semester or course that's happening with students? What are they doing differently?
CB: Well, a lot of this - as with most of this technology - isn't just, oh, suddenly up comes wireless and everything changes. It's the amazing thing that we're doing a lot of different things on a lot of different fronts and wireless happens to be another piece that makes something else which was very difficult to do now much more simple to do. And that enables it to do something that's even more simple to do that wasn't able to be almost done at all in the past. Let me give you an example. Like many places around the country, we're adopting a course tool structure. This is a course management design . . . .
HS: Like Web CT or-�
CB: Yeah, Web CT or Blackboard. We have our own version which we call U of M Course Tools. Now, U of M course tools allows the students to not only get their assignments, but turn their assignments in online and work on their assignments. And one of the neat things about wireless, as one of the students said, is that literally, wherever they were where there was a wireless connection, they really felt that they had the ability to get to the resources and do their assignment and not, for example, have to do the common thing like students have done in the past which is, you go to the library. You get the information, you bring it back, you lay it all out.
JB: Um-hum.
CB: And then you start to pull it all together and put it on your computer. It almost harks back to what our junior, senior high school students are doing out in the field. Here, they're actually getting the data right in the spot they are. For example, they're in the library, they've got their I-Book, they're hooked up to the node there. And they're doing it right on the spot. They're loading it in, putting it in right as it's going, and I think it makes a subtle difference. But we're beginning to see, as all these pieces start to fit together, it makes a very powerful difference.
HS: Okay, Carl, we have a bunch of questions here, actually.
HS: Handle a couple of them. This first one is from Jay Connolly at EduArchitects.com. And Jay Connolly says - and I know we've answered a little of this, but - "What role does wireless technology play in furthering a student's education while reducing administrative tasks and costs?"
CB: Yeah. And I think I'm going to tackle that in two ways. One, I'm going to say - and you're right, Howard, we have covered part of that by saying what role does wireless technology play in furthering a student's education, and I think we can see that it'll further it by supporting it even more. And I'm going to use the example of books, by thinking about a book in much the same way. The book is really a wonderful chunk of technology. You can think of it as a chunk of technology because a book in generally doesn't have any content until you put something in it. But it does have a certain structure and a certain function, a certain way to work. And so it does - books obviously further a student's education.
The problem I've got with a question like that is it assumes that if we do everything just right, we're going to reduce administrative tasks and costs. And here's where I don't agree with the person. I really worry that in fact, by assuming that if we do something exactly right, we're going to reduce administrative tasks and costs is not necessarily correct. But I think that what we have to look at is what I call almost a cost-benefit ratio or an efficiency. Are we going to be able to do much better with the same amount of money? Or at least the same thing with less amount of money. In this case, I think it may cost us the same or even more, but we're going to get a much greater benefit out of it. And when we look at it that way, it's - I think that's the way we have to look at it. You take a look at wireless, and for example, we can think that it might reduce some costs. There are buildings out there that I'd hate to imagine what it's going to cost for us to wire them. And by putting in wireless, it actually may save us some costs and the students will still be able to do the same things they can do if it were wired and were even more expensive to do it wired.
HS: But of course, they're going to do more, right? As soon as we make it easier to do something, people do more of whatever it is.
CB: Oh, absolutely, and you know, just taking a look at the amount of bandwidth we've got across our campuses now and the amount of time students are on that! I had one group that's working with, I think it's Course Info, which said that they've actually had to go out and talk to the professors about staggering the assignments they give the students because the students are taking up so much bandwidth because all the assignments are due on the same day. And of course, then the obvious Sunday night phenomenon, which I don't think we're ever going to solve with students. You know, the Sunday night phenomenon, and that is that if you've got these . . . .
HS: They do the entire week's worth of work.
CB: The entire week's worth of work is done on Sunday night, and now they're doing it all on the web, so . . . .
JB: I don't know about you, I can't even access the Web with my wires on Sunday! I know all about it now. Bringing up bandwidth, we do have a couple of questions about bandwidth that I think we should probably address. We've got one here from marvinl@gwm.sc.edu, and let me ask folks again to send in their questions, but include their name and institution. The question says that we hear we need more bandwidth to address digital video and audio and other types of multimedia transmission. Doesn't wireless technology actually limit the speed at which we can access data? And then the second part of it is what is the effect on data security? Maybe you'd like to take the first part of that, Carl.
CB: You betcha. If you think that we need more bandwidth in order to address digital and audio transmission, the answer is, we certainly do. And what I often think about wireless is, I compare it to what I see is the common bandwidth that we have on our campuses in which everybody claims - every techie on campus claims we've got 100 base T, and it's really about 10 megabits per second.
HS: And it's probably shared, too.
CB: Yeah. And it's shared. And when you take a look and you notice that wireless is about 11 megabits, down to about 2 megabits, it's about that order of magnitude. Now, I'm surprised at how well students do when they're operating with 56K modems which obviously never give 56K. 56K is a myth that I think somebody invented because I've never seen anybody ever get it. And I'm sure that even with wireless or even with the wire that I've got in my walls, I'm certainly not up to 10 megabits, but nevertheless, I'd be able to get the work done. And the answer, I think, in that one implies that we've always got to continue to take a look at trade-offs and the nice thing about it is, as the technology improves, the information that we gather on the previous trade-off really applies. In other words, what we've done on our campus is we've found ways to make our streaming video work by making our screen shots slightly smaller. Well, we do that because we know it's a trade-off in bandwidth, in order to get the screen shots out there and make the motion work properly. We've got to trade off size for motion. Well, as the technology gets better, we expand that a little bit, but we realize that there's always going to be that trade-off.
HS: Yeah, I think that Marvin's point is that wireless technology today in terms of bandwidth lags what you'd find in a wired network, and I think that's going to be true for a while.
CB: Yeah.
HS: But both are going to be improved, so . . . .
CB: But I think some people are going to be surprised. I know I was on our campus. I thought that when I got a wired thing, it would be kind of like halfway between what I have at home and what I have at the office, and I was surprised that when I went from point to point or computer to computer in my office, it was actually faster than what I was getting from the network to my office.
HS: Might some of that be performance, though, because you don't have that many people competing with you yet?
CB: That's right, absolutely.
HS: So this is one of those things that, if it's successful, then it's not going to be as good.
CB: That's right.
JB: Until they change other things.
HS: Well, right, when you put more access points in.
CB: Yeah, and you know, it's the same thing. I'm sure several of our listeners out there are, you know, toying with the idea of getting DSL or cable modem for home. Well, I was only able to get cable modem because we're not in the DSL available area, but I did get a cable modem and I am so happy, but I am not saying a word to my neighbors.
HS: That's right, sure. A cable modem is going to be a shared thing. DSL is not shared, though, so if you could get DSL, you'd be happy forever.
CB: That's right.
HS: Well, not forever.
CB: I'm sure I would be.
HS: You'd be happy for a year.
CB: Sure.
JB: Actually, there's another question we might want to bring up here, and this, Carl, is from someone who looks like he knows you. Mike Abiedi from . . . .
JB: There you go! His question is, "We've been experimenting with wireless Internet video distribution. Will this be an important application in education?"
CB: I sure think so, but I think it's going to be a mixed application. I think, going back to my previous comments, Mike, I think you're really on the right track. And I think one of the things we have almost an obligation to do in education because of where we are and our students and the whole notion of where we're going is to try these things and push out the edges on them. But I think what we're going to find out is that video transfer is going to work to a certain point and then we're going to see it, it's going to require kind of a mixed mode, where you use video transfer for some things and you don't use it for others, or you go to statics for others. And you balance it so that when you start getting more and more users who are using it varied modes, it does a kind of statistical or randomizing balancing of the entire bandwidth. Because, as Howard has said, sooner or later, these things saturate. Apple, for example, says that you can get ten people up working on a single cluster of people on using their little Airport hub. Well, we had 35 one time without a bit of trouble, but they weren't doing the heavy video loading that I'm sure I know you're talking about.
HS: Carl, what do you have to do to get these things in the hands of students and faculty? I mean, for one, students and faculty need laptops. A lot of them either have no laptops or have no computers at all or desktop machines. What does it take to make this thing happen?
CB: It's - we're finding out that it's almost the same kind of problem or joy, if you want to call it a joy, that we're having with our U of M Course Tools. And that is that it was the notion of how could we get this into the hands of the students, and now we've got faculty coming in and saying, "Would you please get it out of the hands of the students? I'm getting overloaded, I'm getting overwhelmed." And I think we're doing the same thing with our wireless solutions. For example, we're now starting in some of our schools and colleges at Michigan - and at some point, I want to talk briefly about kind of the long term strategy that we've taken because of a whole series of financial constraints that we've got. Yes, we have financial constraints in Michigan! You folks haven't bought enough cars! But I wanted to talk about that ultimately, but what we've done is literally set up situations where we loan out portables that have the wireless built into them with the hubs, and they roll in the cart for a class and for that class period, the computers are loaned out. We loan out the computers for part of a day. We even loan out some of the computers - in part of our campus, some people are trying out, loaning out the computers for a day or what they call a project's life. Now, you often think about loaning out a computer for a fixed period of time. These people are thinking about loaning out a computer for a fixed period of a project, which can change depending upon the student, depending upon the time. You need to have this kind of research in order to do this kind of project. When you're done, you turn it back in.
HS: Is Michigan thinking about requiring students to have computers?
CB: No. No, we've not done that all across the university. We've done that in certain schools and departments, just like everybody else has, to a great extent, where some schools and colleges have said, "Yes, it's important that our students have portables and we're going to require portables." And then you pursue and find out, what do they mean by "it's important?" And the answer is, "Well, Princeton's doing it, so we've got to do it."
HS: We're not.
CB: Good! Whew! That just saved us a bundle right there!
JB: Which parts of your campus are wireless right now?
CB: Right now, it's Business and Law.
JB: Howard, what about at Princeton? Is there any particular part of Princeton that's wireless right now?
HS: Well, the Princeton campus is really quite small and so it's really quite easy, actually. The people who are going to do this are going to kill me, saying it's quite easy. But it's easy compared to a university like University of Michigan. Many campuses and just huge acreage and things to cover. But I mean, there's a couple places outside, for example, where students congregate. And we've made it so that students can congregate out there, which brings up an interesting issue of is the stuff available? Are the laptops and PDA's and all that kind of stuff good enough? I mean, I don't think they're good enough to sit on my back deck, wired or wireless or whatever, because the screens just [inaudible].
CB: You know, Howard, I think that the three of us should start a wonderful new IPO taking the old camera, portrait cameras they had in the early parts of the century where the photographer came out and not only did he have the portrait camera, but he had this great black hood that he put around his head so he could see what was in the portrait camera. I think we'd make a fortune with these great black hoods and providing them for students, and all we'd have to do is put fancy logos on the side. We'd make a million!
HS: Yeah, I've tried actually to do this with a copy of the New York Times, just wrapping it around my laptop to kind of shield it and things, but I think they have to make thicker paper.
JB: Oh, well, I think with that, let me put forward another question here, having to do with - it takes us into the field of sport and physical activity. We have a question for you, Carl, from Richard Danielson, asking about if you have any tips regarding possible use of wireless applications in the field of sport and physical activity. You've come close to it, I think, with, you know, the medical applications you've talked about.
CB: Yes, one of our professors in Physiology, Melissa Gross-wonderful gal-has done just a beautiful, beautiful project where she has the students take the digital cameras and photograph - see, you can tell my age! And video each other as they do sports activities. And then they turn those into quick time movies and using the technology, then they do the analysis of the physiology and kinesiology of those activities.
JB: They use the wireless for the capture of that.
CB: That's right.
JB: Okay.
CB: Now, ta dum, ta dum, ta dum, ta dum. Just as we said before, that turns out to be a really interesting and long process. One of the reasons it's a long process is they go out and take the video, they come in, they put it in the computer, they look at it. They find out that it's all just about right, but unfortunately, I can't do the measurements properly because we did it at the wrong angle. Answer? You go back out in the field and you do it again. So one of the reasons that we're taking a look at the wireless technology is can we use the wireless technology to transfer the data almost instantaneously, get it on the screen, then translate it into the quick time moves and actually do the analysis on the spot? So once again, you could say, "Okay, look, we've got a little bit wrong. Change it. There, we've got it." And they're done.
And you know, it's fascinating to me that we as professors and educators often think about how much time is such an important commodity for us and we're more and more beginning realize, it's equally if not more an important commodity for the students. And when we want to improve the entire quality and the entire production of our students, we've got to honor their commitments for being able to do things in a given amount of time. We no longer have a leisure to just pile on the work and say, "It's your job to get it done." We've got to find out ways of making it truly efficient for them as well.
HS: Carl, you said you wanted to talk for a bit about Michigan's long range strategy of the stuff. Could you now, since we're getting close to the end of this talk?
CB: One of the nice things about this great land of ours is the tremendous diversity I've noticed of different ways people are doing things. You'll hear in a few weeks-because it's part of our Tech Talk-about some of the things they're doing at Carnegie Mellon where they, in fact, went and really did the job, so to speak. At Michigan, we took a kind of a different tack. One was because we realized we didn't have a great deal of money to do everything at once. And second was because we realized that we weren't committed that the technology was there yet to make a quick move. Now things have changed, and with the new 80211 coming along and all that kind of stuff, it seems to have settled down, but even now, we've got some security issues that we're concerned about.
So the way we've solved that is that rather than going to a campus-wide solution, we decided to work with schools and colleges that have interesting and unusual ideas, and we'll try out ideas with them using wireless technology and see if it works, if and when, and generally it's both. If and when it does or doesn't work, we can make adjustments at that time, make changes without really taking down the whole system and building it up. And once the word got out that we were interested in working with individual schools and colleges and even departments on trying out these things, we got a whole series of very, very interesting, very casual proposals for trying things out and we've been able to work almost on a one-on-one basis.
The nice thing about that is, as the word leaks out of what's happening in one college, another college takes a look at it and makes a modification of it and may give it a try as well. The unintended consequence of this-which was rather interesting, and that is very often when you go in, as we've done in the past, and make a total university commitment, the schools and colleges in our institution - I'm sure it doesn't happen at any other institution-essentially say, "Okay, university, you put up the money for the whole thing." And the university then turns around and - of course, again, this only happens at Michigan, it can't happen anywhere else - and says, "Fine, we'll put up the money, but we're going to tax everybody for it." And in this particular technique that we're doing, one of the unintended consequences is that as the schools and colleges come forward, they've almost always come forward and said, "Oh, by the way, here's how much we can put into it."
HS: That's wonderful!
CB: And that's a completely different turnaround. Now, you know, we immediately turn to them and say, "Well, that certainly isn't enough!"
JB: Right!
CB: But, boy, what a nice way to have an operation go! Now, I'm sure that we're not going to be there as soon or in great and wondrous form as some of the institutions out there, like Carnegie Mellon. I think they're doing just a wonderful job. But for us, it's almost a lesson on our campus in how sometimes not being able, not making the big push is starting to save us a little bit as we're looking out, and I think we're going to look back on this one and say, "You know, that might have been an advantage rather than a disadvantage."
JB: Well, Howard, do you want to ask one of our final questions before wrap-up here?
HS: Yeah, I have really a couple questions, but they're all kind of related. And the question, the kind of things I think we want to understand in closing, is how universities can get started. But when you were talking about Carnegie Mellon being able to do bigger and broader things than University of Michigan, I wonder about community colleges and other places like that. Can they still play in this wireless stuff?
CB: Absolutely, because - and you mentioned it early on, when you started your talk. The cool thing about this is that we're on this marvelous convergent path where the cost of wireless is dropping amazingly. The second thing is the size of the space given in any kind of application to wireless is also dropping amazingly, and Blue Tooth, I think is going to be - maybe Blue Tooth itself may not continue, but, boy, it has started us on a trajectory that microcomputers started us on, when you can think of that whole change in genre at that time. But number one, the cost is coming down. Right now, for example, I was just noticing here, going up to our sponsor and some others, the cost of a card to connect for wireless is somewhere between $80 and around $200. The cost of a hub is somewhere around $300 and $856. Blue Tooth is talking about five or six years from now, a cost of $2.
CB: Yeah, for the chip itself. And when you think about that and you add on a lot extra to it, what you realize is that, rather than saying, "Okay, I've got to go out and get a card for our portable," it'll already be built in. And you'll activate it. And not only will it be built into computers, but it will be built into a whole bunch of other stuff. For example, our plan here at Michigan is, is that there is going to be some way that our students can walk in, sit down, turn on their computer, and their computer says, "Boy, we're awfully glad to see you're here! Here's the things that have happened, and oh, by the way, the coffee just turned on and will be ready in five minutes," because there's a Blue Tooth chip in the coffee maker. So that the environment is interacting to the student being there and the student is interacting with the environment by, for example, the night before, getting everything set up and walking on campus and that triggers a wireless signal that goes across to a receiver and that causes something to happen on campus that the student needs to have done such as, "I wanted to check on something on my financial records" or something like that. And that triggers and goes in and gets that information so that when the student sits down, it's there. Now, that's kind of a facet that-�
HS: That's sort of-the future looks really [inaudible]. But if somebody wants to do something this semester or next semester, they want to get started on this, how do they get started? Where do they go? What's the first couple things they do?
CB: Well, I'll just give you a simple example of what we did that, once again, had true unintended consequences and then that was, we've got a small set of I Books and an Airport hub and we tried it out with a set of students in one of our classes and said, "How's this going to change the way things are going?" and just did it as an experiment with students in that class with that teacher. When we got done, we couldn't get it away from them. And so when you say, "How much is it going to cost to get us started?" Well, if you've already got the portables, you're talking about putting the PCMA-cards in the sides or you're talking about adding the cards or you're talking about not adding the portables and you go out and get the portables with it in there, the lowest cost right now that I can see is probably an I Book with the low cost hubs of about $200 or $300, something like that.
HS: Do you think we should start by just putting a couple hubs in one building, pick a candidate building, put a couple hubs in and let the thing go?
CB: And let the thing go. For example, one of the things that we're doing in our university in several schools and colleges is just putting a hub in the library. Not even supplying . . .
JB: Interesting.
CB: . . . the portables.
HS: The library is a particularly good place to start?
CB: I think it's a great place to start. One of the reasons in a lot of our places it's a great place to start is because the library also happens to be the place where the multimedia stuff is, and so it's kind of a natural because the people there don't mind having a hub there. And the students come in and sit down and the library and the student and the hubs and the computers all seem to fit together. And they're there and the students walk in and they can connect. And so students walk in across campus, and maybe at Princeton, they go out under the tree in front of . . ?
HS: Alexander Hall.
CB: You betcha. That hall. And they sit under that. In our campus, they walk into one of the many, many libraries on campus and they sit down on the floor and they open up their I-Book and connect to the mainframe - excuse me, boy, I'm showing my age! And connect up! And start getting the data, getting their mail and getting their Course Tools and going that way.
JB: You know, it starts to give new meaning to this anywhere, anytime education, doesn't it?
CB: Yeah.
JB: You know, we're really seeing that access to resources just exploding.
CB: I think that's one of the things that is going to make a difference, and I think - you know, we talked a lot today about unintended consequences. I think that we tend to look at what is the most visible with wireless. That's a marvelous play on words there! What's most visible with wireless.
JB: Cute!
CB: And that is, in reality for us, it's the freedom it gives the students to be able to do something somewhere else. What I think we're going to be very much surprised at is not only the freedom, but the change in the wealth and direction of what they do as they use it. And we haven't even seen it yet because we haven't tried it.
JB: Well, I think maybe that means that we're going to have to have you come back next year, Carl, and give us an update on what's been going on. I think we are past the time and I think we could have . . . .
HS: We're more than out of time!
JB: We could have stayed for another hour!
CB: Okay, in that case, I've got to say the expression, "Don't surf the web like my brother, Howard!"
JB: All right, thanks! And I'd like to thank everyone who sent in all their questions. I know that we didn't get to all of them, but we'll do some of them offline and also the archives, as you know, will all be posted. So thank you all for joining us here today and I'd like you to go ahead and plan on setting aside Thursdays at 4:00 Eastern time for these series of Tech Talks. Our next session is two weeks from today and is asking an all-important question that I'm sure you've been wondering about, and that is, just where is the digital library? Cliff Lynch from the Coalition for Network Information is our guest expert, who will clue us in all on just where this is, where the digital library is . . . .
HS: And what it is.
JB: Pardon?
JB: And what it is, that's right, and who's building it. How is it getting built? Thanks, too, to all of you who responded to the survey on what you'd like to hear about Tech Talks. We're still following up with some of your suggestions and in the meantime, if you have more, just please send them on to CREN at cren.net. Many thanks to all of the institutions who support the Tech Talks and also to our corporate sponsor for today, Compaq. A special thanks to guest expert, Carl Berger; to our technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, our Tech Talk Web guru; to David Smith and Patty Gaul of CREN; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit Network; to Susie Berneis, who is the audio file transcriber; and finally, thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it's time. Bye, Howard.
HS: Bye, Judith.
JB: Bye, Carl.
HS: Bye, Carl.
CB: Bye, Judith. Bye, Howard.
JB: Take care. This was great!
HS: Bye-bye!
END OF WEBCAST
