June 2009 Archives

Much has been written recently about California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Digital Textbook Initiative" -- announced earlier this month.

Hype Aside

To be sure, much of this is political hype. The Governor is touting this measure as one way to trim a budget deficit of some $24.3 billion, while the fact is that school books only constitute about 1% of a school district's budget, and the $300 million savings forecast for the initial year is roughly one tenth of a percent (1/1000th) of the budget deficit. It is not what is going to solve the fiscal crisis.

But it makes for good copy, and the Governor is nothing if not PR savvy. Also, this has raised some interesting issues.

Kids today are much more familiar and at home with electronic gadgetry--including laptops, iPhones, eBook readers--than with analog (as in printed) books. Using this information channel to educate may be a stroke of genius.

Also, comparing the cost of updating a printed textbook (which, by the way, run the state of California roughly $100 a copy) with updating online educational content, well, that math surely speaks for itself. Not only is the cost of a digital update a fraction (and a small one at that) of updating a printed book, but it can be done quickly, keeping the educational content current, economically.

Wikis

The digital textbook arena also includes the wikis, that is to say, the community-based information resources that anyone, really, can update with current, or more accurate, information. The world is in flux, and the wikis--to a very large degree--are keeping pace; and, by extension, so can the digital textbooks.

DEC

I think--budget benefits aside--that here lies the greatest benefit to digital educational content (watch for the acronym DEC to arrive at a laptop screen near you in the not so distant future--and when it does, remember, you saw it here first); a current snapshot of the world, or state of science--delivered to the student in a familiar, and economical way.

Critics

As with anything proposed anywhere by anyone, ready-made critics are quick to point out the many flaws with the plan. The Digital Textbook Initiative is no exception.

Of most concern is the Digital Divide that would prevent many school children from viewing such educational content from home.

The State of Texas approaches this problem with an interesting solution: take the savings made on digital books and buy computer equipment to bridge the divide with it. Unfortunately, California cannot afford to follow suit.

However, the thing to remember is that much of the new ditiral textbooks in the classroom will be printed out by the teacher and handed to students, while displayed on overhead projectors. Yes, it would be nice if everyone (and every state in the Union is working on that) had a laptop at home, with broadband access, but that is not a must for implementation of this plan.

Teacher Freedom

Other critical voices complain that digital educational content does not come in as complete a package as textbooks do: Teacher's Guides, Sample Lessons, Tests, Teacher Training Courses. In the DEC scenario, teachers will have to assemble their own packages, combining the newly released, and state board of education approved, e-books with the Wiki universe. Teachers will also be expected to network with each other over the web to discover and share best practices.

In my book, this opens the door to wonderful teacher creativity and much more freedom to actually teach (rather than to tow some official line). Those, however, more interested in tenure and paycheck, would rather not be bothered with all that responsibility, and much prefer to continue to be the conduit of spoon-feeding children what the printed textbooks, and their teaching plans dictate.

I would have thought that this is an opportunity any teacher would jump at.

Trial Results

San Jose School District in California has run a digital educational content pilot program this year, and while the grades are not in yet, Assistant superintendent Bill Erlendson reports that his teachers see learning improvements in the classrooms. 87% of the teachers involved in the pilot had a favorable impression of it, and 62% of them plan to continue, if not expand, the use of digital educational content.

Bottom Line

While it's being touted as a money-saving measure today, I think that digital educational content will soon be the order of the day for educational, and teacher-freedom reasons, much to the chagrin of Gutenberg, who is probably spinning in his grave by now.

Few events in recent times have highlighted the liberating use of digital technology like the protests and upheaval in Iran following the somewhat suspect election.

While the authorities scramble to clamp down on the free use of cell phones, blogs, and tweets, innovative citizens find new loopholes to keep the world informed despite the best and ongoing effort of the ruling regime.

With only about 9,000 tweeter registrants whose profile indicate that they are from Iran, it is doubtful that the often reported romantic notion of the "Twitter Revolution" bears much resemblance to truth. Much more likely is that the word about demonstrations got out via regular land lines, cell phone, SMS messaging, and good old door-to-door word of mouth.

However, there is no denying that Twitter has been instrumental in keeping the world informed about events in Teheran and elsewhere in Iran. Witness the Obama Administration's request that Twitter defer regularly schedule maintenance from July 15 to later the next day (and what a PR coup for Twitter).

But consider the risk the tweeters (and bloggers) are running:

Winston Smith, in George Orwell's 1984, was very wary of the Ministry of Love's telescreens which monitored all inhabitants of Oceania: "The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide."

The Iranian Ministry of Love is probably not sleeping much these days, busy tracing and tracking cell calls, tweets, blog posts, etc. that have not found a way to hide their IP addresses behind proxies. Also, the Ministry of Love has of course blocked the Twitter site, and getting around that takes the kind of geek mind that perhaps is not prevalent in Teheran as yet.

Still word keeps coming, cell-videos, tweets, blogs, keeping the world informed, much recorded and reported at personal peril. These, to my mind, are the true digital revolutionaries of today.

And it seems like the digital genie is out of the Iranian lamp, and despite concerted regime efforts to stuff it back in, it will remain released.

A little while back Associated Press reported that one of the largest newspapers in Germany, Bild--which means "picture" in English--is expanding their reported base, but not by hiring.

Instead, they have partnered with a large German grocery chain, Lidl, to sell inexpensive digital cameras to what they hope to be an army of citizens, who in effect will then become "digitally deputized" reporters for the paper.

According to AP, Michael Paustian, a managing editor for the paper with a circulation of 3.3 million weekday copies, said, "We can't cover everything. We think it is an advance for journalism."

The camera, which comes with 2 gigabytes of memory, and is good for both stills and video, comes with necessary software, and a USB port that allows the digital deputy (also referred to as "reader-reporter") to upload pictures directly to Bild editors, assigned with the specific task of reviewing such images for publication.

Tobias Froehlich, a Bild spokesman, said that the paper's goal was to encourage such deputies to gain the widest possible exposure for their work.

The idea, of course, is not new--how often do we not see "public images" or video in newscasts, but this is probably the first active push to recruit such reader-reporters.

Not so sure how the existing photographers/reporters feel about that, but this the story doesn't tell.

It does however go on to mention that Eva Werner, a spokeswoman for the German Journalists' Association, begged to differ with this being such a great concept. In fact, she feared that Bild's army of digital deputies would undermine the work of the paper's full-time counterparts by using paparazzi like tactics to photograph celebrities, or even interfere with police in their enthusiasm to capture the ins and outs of a crime or accident scene for the paper.

"It poses a threat to quality journalism," she said. "The more images from non-professionals that are pushed onto the market, even though professional images are available."

Perhaps the paper is also trying to save a buck, no?

The jury is still out on this one.

According to a new OECD report, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development has just released its official broadband statistics for December 2008.

This data, accompanied by graphs and Excel files, can be found in full here.

Separately, as part of the OECD's ongoing response to the economic crisis, a new report has just been released that focuses the role of broadband investment in aiding economic recovery. This paper argues that policy makers need to evaluate the costs and benefits of any public investment in telecommunication infrastructure and select projects which can stimulate current demand but simultaneously expand the productive capacity of the economy in the longer term. All public investments in telecommunications should balance four key items - connectivity, competition, innovation/growth and social benefit.

Report Highlights

The number of broadband subscribers in the OECD reached 267 million in December 2008, or the equivalent of  22.6 subscribers per 100 inhabitants. The number of broadband subscriptions grew 13% during 2008. The economic crisis has not significantly slowed broadband adoption. In fact, broadband growth during the last six months of the year was slightly stronger at 6.23% than in the first six months at 6.16%. 

The strongest per-capita subscriber growth over the year was in the Slovak Republic, Greece, New Zealand and Norway, Germany, France and the United States. Each country added more than 3 subscribers per 100 inhabitants during the past year. On average, the OECD area increased 2.5 subscribers per 100 inhabitants over the year.

Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Sweden, Korea and Finland maintain their lead the OECD with broadband penetration well above the OECD average, each surpassing the 30 subscribers per 100 inhabitants threshold. There was no change in rankings in the past 6 months among these leading countries.

The United States is the largest broadband market in the OECD with 80 million subscribers, representing 30% of all broadband connections in the OECD.

The upgrade to fiber-based broadband connections continues in the OECD. Fiber subscriptions now comprise 10% of all broadband connections in the OECD (up from 9% in June 2008). Fiber is the dominant connection technology in Korea and Japan and now accounts for 48% of all Japanese broadband subscriptions and 43% in Korea. Korea has the highest fiber penetration rate at 13.8 fiber subscribers per 100 inhabitants. 

Interesting Statistics

Speed

• Twelve countries offers connectivity of 50 Mbit/s or greater.
• Connections of 20 Mbit/s were available in all but two OECD countries in September 2008.
• The average advertised speed of fiber-based connections is 6 times greater than DSL and 4 times greater than cable.
• The average advertised speed for DSL is 9.6 Mbit/s,  for cable is 14.9 Mbit/s and for fiber is 65.3 Mbit/s.
• Japanese providers now offer cable broadband services at 160 megabits per second.

Prices

• As of September 2008, each of the thirty OECD countries had entry levels plans available for less than $34 US.
• DSL subscribers pay an average of $40 US per month for broadband service. The lowest average price for DSL service was in Japan at $26 US.
• Cable subscribers pay an average of $45 US per month for broadband service. France has the least-expensive average price at $22 US.
• The average price of one megabit per second of broadband capacity is $12 US.
• On average, subscribers in OECD countries pay 15 times more per advertised megabit of connectivity than Koreans.
• Even though speeds were increasing, DSL subscription prices fell an average of 14% and cable 15% per year since 2005.

More to follow.

An opinion written by Tim Rutten of Los Angeles Times last Tuesday, brought to the fore the main hurdle preventing newspapers to charge for online contents: should one paper start, but go it alone, the web-visitor will simply go elsewhere. For a fee based web-news service to truly function, all major players have to synchronize and begin charging at the same time.

But that, as Mr. Rutten points out, smacks of antitrust issues and price-fixing.

What he suggests is that the Obama administration affords the newspaper industry the same antitrust leeway that major league baseball currently enjoys.

According to the opinion, "Executives from many of America's leading newspaper companies and the head of the Associated Press met quietly in Chicago on Thursday to discuss ways to increase revenues from their online operations--presumably by charging visitors to their websites--as well as how to recapture some share of their catastrophically declining classified ad business.

"The meeting, whose participants included an antitrust lawyer to make sure the conversation didn't stray into impermissible collusion or price-fixing, was conducted under the auspices of the Newspaper Assn. of America, and its agenda was titled 'Models to Lawfully Monetize Content.' These guys may be slow on the uptake, but their legal departments have schooled them well in risk management."

Mr. Rutten goes on to say that "Unless the English-speaking world's newspapers find a way to charge for the content they currently give away free on their websites and allow to be aggregated and sold to advertisers by Internet search-engine companies that pay no fees for the privilege, most papers won't survive very far into the next decade."

And this is not crying wolf. American newspapers are losing classified advertising to Craigslist and others by the bucket load--by the $7 billion worth bucket load. To rub salt into these wounds they have also lost 25% of their display advertising over the same eighteen month period, which translates in to an annual loss of $12 billion. Real money, that.

The Associated Press reports that over the same period newspapers online advertising revenue, although rising, only adds up to $445 million, and that's a far cry from spelling viability.

And when it comes to the cost-cutting necessary to meet the financial realities of a vastly reduced revenue stream, what will go first? You guessed it: that oh, so expensive, and most likely over-qualified journalist we currently pay for in Paris, or Rome, or Barcelona, or even in our own backyard.

Make do with less in the newspaper world means, essentially, make do with less quality unbiased reporting. That, in any concerned citizen's book is too hefty a price to pay.

But the problem, as Mr. Rutten points out, "is that newspapers can't begin charging for online content or licensing their journalism to search engines unless all the English-speaking papers do it at once. That's currently illegal under laws barring collusion and price-fixing."

I wanted to clarify that very paragraph with him, and he kindly responded to my email and had no problem with me quoting his reply.

Here's the exchange:

My question:

"When you say the problem is that that newspapers can't begin charging for online content or licensing their journalism to search engines unless all the English-speaking papers do it at once, do you mean that if all newspapers do not do so simultaneously, online readers will simply go somewhere else that's still free?

"Or is there a specific/legal reason LA Times, for example, could not begin charging for its online content tomorrow (which I, for one, would pay for)?"

Tim Rutten's reply:

"You've got the point exactly. Given the reach of the web--every Saturday, for example, I read the Guardian's excellent book section--unless all the quality English language newspapers are allowed to act in concert, readers simply will vote with their clicks and go to the free sites."

And that's the crux.

For although Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has endorsed the idea of allowing the newspaper industry at least a temporary exemption from the antitrust and price-fixing statues--which would allow such a concerted and coordinated start to fee-based online news--the Justice Department's antitrust division begs to differ, and sees no reason for such an exemption.

This looks to shape up as a very interesting confrontation, one with the survival of the newspaper industry in general--and good journalism in particular--at stake.