Matthew Allen

Realising our broadband future
Disclaimer: Liveblogging

Opening session of the 2009 Australian Govermment summit on broadband, http://broadbandfuture.gov.au, featuring Kevin Rudd, Mike Quigly (NBN) and Jeffrey Cole (Annenburg, USC).

Paul Twomey, ICANN, opens the forum: “we are using Web 2.0 tools throughout the forum” to encourage particiation both at the event and elsewhere. Stephen Conroy, Min DBCDE welcomes delegates: plenty of hype around the critical importance of NBN

Kevin Rudd, PM
(Full text of speech)
Economic strategy is a key point: for today and the future. The NBN is linked to that strategy. Rudd frames the summit by reminding us of the global financial crisis. Describes the NBN as “core infrastructure” for the new century like rail (19th) and roads (20th). Links the NBN to sustainability, but also emphasises health and education and the advantage for all Australians.

“The reality is that our current broadband…is not up to scratch”; “slow broadband is holding us back” “Australians want fast broadband”. Uses the rhetoric of international competition “we are even behind the Slovak Republic”. Notes 18 failed plans for broadband in 12 years before the Rudd Government elected. “This is like building the Snowy Mountain Scheme, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the national road network” – it’s about confidence in the future. “It is a massive task”. It is the work of government, because of this fact.

Potential to “transform our economy”, “transform many aspects of our lives”. Fast broadband is the answer to global communication, to regional disadvantage, to 24/7 businesses, to enabling advantages throughout Australia. “Plug our nation fully into the global economy”. It’s about addressing challenges in the future – climate change, ageing, city congestion. “Our national broadband policy is not just about communications policy…It is about the whole way government meets the needs of people”. Emphasises in particular greenhouse gas reduction, principally through telepresence technology to reduce travel; also smart metering of the electricity grid.

“What excites me about broadband is the applications that none of us have thought of yet”. It’s about new trade opportunities (access to global markets), smart business practices; it will create jobs now and into the future. NBN underpins innovation to create jobs across “every part of our economy”. Cost savings – eg paper, time, etc – and new growth at less cost.

Rudd then announces several innovative projects relating to health, emergency management, education all of which tend to focus on rural and regional disadvantage. Summarises the current progress on NBN – planning, testing in Tasmania, the new regional backbone development recently announced. Legislation for structural reform – more competition, innovation and protection for

Moves to the Goverment 2.0 agenda. “While the internet is the citizen’s most important point of contact with government, it is largely a passive engagement”; Gov 2.0 is to be about ‘listening’ to those using public services to improve them (eg “it’s buggered mate”); also about accountability. Calls on government to accept and embrace. Rudd website now includes comments and webchat, for example. “Accessible, transparent, accountable”. “Digital inclusion” for remote and regional – uniquely needed in Australia with its dispersd population and large area.

“Wider Australian Digital Community” called upon to participate: conference now opened.

Quigly, NBN co CEO
(great slides for this talk, with graphics of key points – pdf file).
3 objectives for NBN High speed; competitive level playing field; do this cost effectively. Achieve them transparently and accountable. Technical design, financial plan (with McKinsey) and project plan Supports the dual stream approach – NBN more focused on technologies; McKinsey-KPMG financials.

Two key questions:

• Why 100 MBits/sec? Cisco predicts, by 2013, 500% increase in the traffic over global networks based on the increased resolution of screens and power of computers to support massive data traffic. Nice graph showing, if we don’t go to 100, then we assume downstream traffic speed will level off from historical growth from 1990s.

• Why not all wireless?Cisco research = fixed line traffic will dwarf mobile. Laws of physics cannot be broken – limits in spectrum, will run out of tweaks of the wireless technology, but mostly, it’s about the increased number of cells available for mobile transmission. And, how does data get OUT of the cells? Fibre. Moreover, if we have to build many more cells, then this is likely to be just as expensive. Also notes the very low AVERAGE speeds of wireless because of sharing. Note too the problems of being at the edge of the cell – which can reduce single-user speeds by a factor of 10-20. Wireless still important, but it is not the only solution.

Critical importance of equivalent access across system to ensure competition. How? Fibre-based wholesale service…connects premises to points of interconnect via Layer-2 ethernet (layer 1 = passive optical), nothing above layer 2 which is for ISPs and others – BOTH wholesalers and retailers – covering services and application. Logical separation of streams to enable endusers to choose multiple providers of services; technology for maximum efficiency of bitstream. Note – layer 2 = access QoS, but not service QoS.

Quigly explains NBN relationship with ISPs backhaul etc. – Critical point – NBN is NOT going above layer 2, and will mainly focus on fibre from premises to Points of Interconnect. only where there is a single backhaul provider to a PoI will NBN then aggregate traffic from that PoI and haul it to another one where there is competitive backhaul provision. Essentially, the NBN will be putting in backhaul mainly in regional areas (as indeed NextGen is already starting to do); in well served areas, it will be focusing on fibre to the home/premises. Small footprint in the overall value chain. “Plumbers” of the network – everything else by other people.

Key is the suite and pricing of products; to cover both legacy and future applications and services.

Future proofing for further technology improvements.

One major building issue: the civil works involved in placing cables and equipment that supports cable. CLaims that the data needed to absolutely settle on a business plan (eg pricing) is not available – it’s such a complex business and many variables.

91% of premises served by roadside teclo pillars; (8% of land area). Remaining 9% = rural and served by radio or direct copper from exchange.

Cole, USC Annenberg

There is a bigger gap between dialup and broadband than between no access and dialup. BB changes the world “like nothing we have ever seen except the printing press and electricity”. What are some of the early changes from dialup

Dialup – households – 2-3 times a day, 20-30 minutes at a time. logging on was a big deal, we aggregated our tasks and did them en masse at one time. Time was focused ON the internet and its use, not on as many local interactions (eg with family). People wanted to be undisturbed. But, broadband – from 2002-3 – people were on 30-50 times a day, but for 2-3 minutes at a time. There was no aggregation of tasks, no scheduling. The internet is not in the background now, but integrated into our lives, where we were in life. Broadband moves the internet into the centre stage [what evidence? see http://www.digitalcenter.org/]. This has also got something to do with wireless, however. The changes broadband enacts are changes in how and when we do things involving online activity.

Broadband is not a threat to TV in the same way dialup is. “It’s the best friend TV ever had”. But… newspapers? No. teenagers are interested in the news – more so than any time in last 70 years. But just not from newspapers. When net penetration hits 30%, newspaper sales decline. (Annenberg research). So news has to be online, constantly updated – broadband is the only way for news institutions to survive since they are so much more readable and immediate. [Not sure these assertions are sustainable given the changes in the nature of the media - feels like a re-run of 'put the newspaper online in 1980s-1990s].

Cole moves onto more sustainable ground when he moves into discussion of interaction and user-generated content – especially saying don’t forget upload speed and limits, particularly in the era of video creation.

Key points – uploading is vital “democractic part of broadband”; younger people have grown up with internet and, increasingly, growing up with broadband; collaboration is the absolute essential component of broadband; cites some research showing people who went back to dialup from broadband were shattered to discover that whole parts of the net they were used to using had become unusable.

We know that we have the right kind of broadband when we stop talking about speed etc, and the system just does what you want and only noticeable when it is not there (like electricity). Always on, always there is the goal.

Commentary

Note the change in rhetoric around NBN to include current issues such as climate change which were far less significant earlier; similarly, the emphasis on short-term jobs which did not matter prior to the GFC. I also believe there is a deeper emphasis now on the economic dimensions of the NBN, even though Rudd also says that NBN is not ‘communications’ policy, but policy across all areas of government. The political aspects are also clear: note the reference to Howard government failures on broadband; look at the appeal to rural and, especially, regional voters utilising the NBN as a mechanism to articulate the ‘whole of Australia’ position by the government. Note also the linking of other digital initiatives (Government 2.0) which, largely, are independent of broadband development, to the NBN – creating an all-encompassing ‘we are the digital government’ image.

Reflect on the notion of ‘revolution’ and change of state. Why is NBN not understood as incremental change? How does it fit with the actual history of incrementalism over past 15 years? Is the promising of NBN’s radical potential ever going to be realised because, fundamentally, it will not be experienced as a radical phase shift?

Cole’s presentation is an important statement about the radical changes involved in internet use, especially as experienced by younger users who are the future (note link to Rudd’s future rhetoric). What is interesting is that he discussed what people are doing now online and have been for 4-5 years as part of promoting a network for the future. The real fact to take away from this presentation is that we can’t easily predict what people will do online in 10 years given that noone was really expecting the whole social media craze in the 1990s.

Attending a workshop / roundtable as part of the “Web 2.0 Authoring Tools in Higher Education Learning and Teaching: New Directions for Assessment and Academic Integrity” Project (wiki here).

[Discovering the difficulty of jumpong between twitter and blogging: need to learn to use RSS feed from my twitter stream! Raises the question: how the hell can students and academics keep up with the opportunities when so much changes, so rapidly? It requires a remaking of the everyday business of knowledge work - eg do I read that article or learn RSSing twitter]

Summary of morning session

Several things emerge from this morning discussion which focused on seven broad groups of technologies (see website above):

• further evidence of significant differences in how people understand the term Web 2.0, even while recognising its useful role to open debate and create interest in new approaches to teaching.

• a degree of scepticism about ‘standards’ for judging student work – enthusiasm and interest in the publicness of assessment that is possible via the Internet, utilising the public audience as a way of assessment
• competing and contrasting assumptions about the social nature of technology – environment or tool? Clear that ‘how’ we use technologies in learning is governed by these assumptions
• one difference depending on what counts as Web 2.0 is the time it might take to ‘do’ or ‘use’ it: eg twitter vs vodcasting
• if Web 2.0 is, to some extent, a move to collaboration, how does this fit with the university’s requirement for individual certification?

Summary of afternoon session – principles, do’s and dont’s for web 2.0 assessment

Overall – the session was broken up into several sections (discussed in small groups) which then were combined at a plenary. The following is a brief summary of each sub-section. I would note that, at times, the groups obviously struggled to limit their discussions to the specific briefs given. I think this behaviuour demonstrates the complexity of assessment and learning as a systemic functional construct; it feels more, to me, like an experience whose design is quite personal / individual, and while it is enacted in stages, it is understood as a whole.

Designing assessment
4 principles for designing assessment:

• Reflect on what Web 2.0 means to you as an educator
• Triangulation and Iteration in design: outcomes AND tasks AND applications
• Make assessment tasks pertinent to students (pertinent includes realism, authenticity, relevance, purpose)
• From Feedback to “feed” – feedback is inherent to the assessment process, from students to students, from teachers to students, from students to teachers, throughout the task – continuous error correction

Conducting assessment
Relevance; choice of technology important; is the task something do-able outside of Web 2.0 – if so, why the complexity?; how to assess and grade relative performance? Engaging students in a conversation about why doing this. Weighting of the assessment grade = time and effort required of student. Web environment is more persistent, make for living tasks (relates to students’ sense of purpose); importance of ‘program’ (course / major / degree) approach which generates learning over several units and years. Don’t mandate Web 2.0 unless it actually makes a difference. Don’t confuse the task with the environment. Respecting students as individuals. Important to persevere with one’s innovation and change.

Marking assessment
Consider the relationship between the technology’s form and the assessment criteria; assess across a range of tasks [criteria? components of a task]; importance of audience (in various ways); establish standards for marking; for large cohorts – agreement of standards across all graders and students. prepare yourself and students. Links Web 2.0 to ability to detect plagiarism [hmm?]. Moderating easier with online systems. Peer review as a positive. Dangers in publicness of assessed work, especially in the future.

Reporting/Feedback
Importance of application developers to address the needs of learning online. Ethical standards. Individual and group feedback processes differ. Complications of meeting university requirements vs students requirements.

Quality assurance
[ran out of batteries for this one - that is apposite, eh?]

Reflections
Well, interesting. Very clearly, the phrase “web 2.0″ generates very different perspectives and emphases, to the point where it appears ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-construction’ of knowledge have come to dominate – largely from people’s experiences with blogging, collaborative environments, and wikis. Not clear with Web 2.0 actually the right term, yet. There remains, also, a sense that web 2.0 is a synonym for ‘another go at online learning’ either because it has failed to be adopted in areas prior to this time or because people are unaware of the significant impact of the Internet on learning throughout the 1990s. Difficult, sometimes, to generate broader perspectives because putative benefits, uses, and disadvantages etc are all – actually – specific to a system, or a particular use of system. Fundamentally, we see some new orthodoxies emerging around the term Web 2.0 and its application to learning – orthodoxies that owe more to the way Web 2.0 is positioned oppositionally to prior elearning and to the ‘failures’ in current practice without the Internet that it might solve.

Children, early reading and a literate Australia
Strempel, Deputy Chair PLA

brain development in very young children, from a few weeks old, is massive; reading to them, sharing pictures and reading, etc is essential; especially linking sounds to signs. This is not just something to do at schools or at home.

[interestingly, the formal schooling system starts too late to make a difference, in many cases - 5 or 6 - , placing significant burdens on parents; who supports them in that? libraries is one of the few social institutions; some research to show first year at school is critical for intervention, implicitly, better to reduce needs for intervention]

Suggests the role of library in actively promoting literacy is not well recognised; suggests the competence of librarians in doing this is also not recognised. Librarians with interest in this field are facilitators and educators as well as librarians. None of this literacy work is mainstreamed and poor resources; no national agenda or standards for equity.

Mentions the Early Big Book Club (SA), Better Beginnings (WA) as excellent examples

[ key role in creating successful 'families' - some skills, technology etc not available in some families - libraries provide this on behalf of the state.]

Encouraging the digital economy and digital citizenship
Missingham, Parliamentary Librarian

Refers to recent government reporting Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions; recent stats dramatically demonstrate the ‘lag’ of Australia in inernational terms – insufficient networking, low broadband, challenges of content. So, there are major access problems, cost, speed, availability.

Critical of much content online, either too much opinion or too little accuracy, with limited signals to allow users to judge quality.

Paints a relatively grim picture of Internet especially in regional areas; Internet is now essential to many aspects of life. and adds that there is insufficient interaction between three tiers of government to address these challenges.

Implicitly, she argues, citizenship demands access to information and ONLY available via the Internet (especially as we move to transactional web);

evidence for a national, single approach to resources is from success of ERA – providing ‘high-quality’ resources electronically for all australians. – so save money and get quality by coordination; need ‘proper’ online information

[perhaps too much focus on quality information provided FOR people; or government information necessary to people - user-generated content? participatory culture? greater capacity for people to learn how to asses information?]

Social inclusion and commuity partnerships
McGuire, Hume Global Learning village

Loss of power – these presentations are probably available from ALIA website

Health and ageing
Sutton, State Librarian NSW

Libraries and Social Inclusion
Jan Richards, ALIA President

1500 public libraries; 8 state networks; national collaborative programs; 8200 library staff; 50% of Australians are library members; many non-members visit too; over 90% of Australians see libraries as a good thing; 111 million visit annually; 183 million loans; 10 million questions; 7000 internet-accessing PCs; budget is $757 million (stats from 2007-2008)

Why do people come to libraries? interviews with library users and quotes from library ambassadors
– fair and equitable society via libraries – free, welcoming social spaces for all; non-judgmental spaces; people treated equally; place of creativity; finding information is fundamentally democratic
– critical importance of libraries for education, internet access, and especially the link between net and learning. Continued emphasis from the users – computers, internet.
– cost – borrowing books, doing things for free at libraries vitally important for poorer families

“How do we build on all this community goodwill?”

Big ideas: important for libraries across australia to be united; common goals, shared practice, be part of community, universality and freedom of access, future generations – need new librarians in future, more sustainable library infrastructure, valuing what we do / standards

[Subtheme always concerning online information: libraries can give free/equal access to 'quality' online information'; ALIA very enthusiastic on NBN]

Opening Address to Public Libraries Summit, Canberra, 2009
Hon Ursula Stephens, Parliamentary Sec for Social Inclusion
Impressive: clearly committed and passionate, not patronising, limited spin

Cites UK futurist Richard Watson: his transformation of thought from pessimism about libraries (the internet will replace them) to optimism – because of their role in giving people access to the net, spaces in which to use these resources, especially with others.

Libraries “connect people with the outside world”; they are not the quiet places for borrowing books of the 1970s; you do things in libraries now. “Libraries are hubs for community life”; “neutral safe spaces”; this is a response to the “challenge of the information age” [implicitly, the info age challenges libraries because of the reorganisation of social structures for access to information for those not actually purchasing it]. It is also important to recognise value of librarians to civil society.

[Interesting emphasis on relationship between libraries and learning - Stephens is an educator]

Social inclusion agenda, (Rudd Labor Government): “capability and capacity for all Australians to learn, to work, to engage and have a voice” – leads to a rich civil society. [There's a link here to UK - talking about focus on children at risk, to prevent generational exclusion]. Key aspect “locational disadvantage”. Need to emphasise prevention, not cure.

Promoting the Rudd government’s emphasis on consultation and policy development, to move into a new kind of social policy around inclusion.

[Emphasis on children "investing in the future of our society" - ties in with various social policy agendas; further deployment of 'youth' as a key site for governmental action, children as a plastic resource to be moulded for national prosperity - the nation is its young people because of the desire for a future nation of a particular character (nation as teleology)].

Ultimately, it’s about voice; to have a voice is the key outcome of social inclusion and the ‘third sector‘ is essential to social inclusion

In my role as member of the Board of the State Library of Western Australia, I am today attending the ALIA Public Libraries Summit, which will be discussing key issues in the further development of effective library services in Australia. The aim is as follows.

A key goal of the ALIA Public Libraries Summit is to develop a stronger relationship with the Federal Government in achieving its agendas in a range of portfolios. Ideally, the country’s 1,522 public libraries will be regarded as ‘national champions’ advancing social, educational, cultural, broadband and digital programs and policies.

Not surprisingly, given the significant role librarians have played in the utilisation and development of the Internet in Australia, there is a strong concentration on the importance of libraries in the digital economy, information literacy; the strong emphasis on ‘common spaces’ (the library as third space – home, work and library) is an interesting fit with increased virtual and networked learning and information. Although libraries are building strong public spaces for individuals to use freely for online information activities (e.g. free wireless networks in safe and comfortable spaces – such as is coming on the ground floor of the Alexander Library Building, the WA State Library), there is still a tension between the capacity of networks to distribute resources in such a manner that they don’t need to visit a physical library space. What perhaps this tension suggests (apart from the important practical issues facing libraries) is that networking and computing in society have a dimension that is not about the utilitarian search for information but the pleasurable occupation of time and space, a consequence of which might be the use of networked information and computing to ‘fill in’ that time and space.