Greetings!
The link here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520241258/qid=1144416041/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-8602016-6142408?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
Brings you to the Amazon page featuring a powerful book that I recommend be on your shelf. The collection of pieces unites the expanding and narrowing global perspectives to the technology education movement...or lack of movement. In parallel to "The World is Flat," this reads more favorably toward the issues that "our group" is attempting to address.
View the "Inside this book" section to get the idea!
Enjoy!
K2
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Let's hear it for the Digital Science Laboratories & Adventures
Why American College Students Hate Science
The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, opened for business in a former cow pasture not far from downtown just 40 years ago. Still in its infancy as universities go, U.M.B.C. is less well known than Maryland's venerable flagship campus at College Park or the blue-blooded giant Johns Hopkins. But the upstart campus in the pasture is rocking the house when it comes to the increasingly critical mission of turning American college students into scientists.
A study of the university's science program published in the March 31 issue of the journal Science sets forth an eye-opening recipe for remaking science education in America generally — and in particular, for increasing minority participation, which lags even after decades of federally supported initiatives.
But following U.M.B.C.'s blueprint won't be easy. Among other things, it will require the scientific establishment to rethink its approach to teaching from the ground up.
Science education in this country faces two serious problems. The first is that too few Americans perform at the highest level in science, compared with our competitors abroad. The second problem is that large numbers of aspiring science majors, perhaps as many as half, are turned off by unimaginative teaching and migrate to other disciplines before graduating.
The science establishment explains these defections as part of a natural "weeding out" — a view flatly rejected by U.M.B.C. and a few other campuses where administrators are getting top performance from students who would ordinarily have become demoralized and jumped ship.
Initiated in 1989, U.M.B.C.'s Meyerhoff Scholars Program is so well known that the university no longer needs to recruit for it. High school counselors and teachers nominate about 1,900 students annually, mostly from Maryland, for merit-based scholarships. About 100 scholarships are offered, and of these about 50 are accepted. The new students are welcomed into a well-established community of scientists and scientists-to-be through a summer program that sets the stage for the next four years.
The students are encouraged to study in groups and taught to solve complex problems collectively, as teams of scientists do. Most important, they are quickly exposed to cutting-edge science in laboratory settings, which demystifies the profession and gives them early access to work that often leads to early publication in scientific journals. At the same time, however, the students are pushed to perform at the highest level. Those who earn C's, for example, are encouraged to repeat those courses so they can master basic concepts before moving on.
The laboratory approach keeps the students excited and prevents them from drifting off into less challenging disciplines. Indeed, according to Science, 86 percent of the Meyerhoff participants have graduated with science or engineering degrees. Nearly 9 in 10 of those graduates went on to graduate or professional programs, with a significant number earning M.D.'s or Ph.D's, or both.
Critics have sometimes accused the Meyerhoff program of cherry-picking bright students who would perform spectacularly well wherever they went to school. But the numbers suggest that the school's instructional strategy makes a real difference. Meyerhoff students are twice as likely to earn undergraduate degrees in science or engineering as similar students who declined the scholarships and went to school elsewhere. Most significantly, students who completed the Meyerhoff program are 5.3 times as likely to enroll in graduate study as the students who said no and went elsewhere.
The higher education establishment is generally startled to learn that more than half of the high-flying Meyerhoff students are black. This surprise stems from the unstated but nonetheless well-established belief that high-performing science students don't actually exist in the black community.
U.M.B.C.'s president, Freeman Hrabowski III, knows better. He has spent years expanding his school's access to high-performing minority students and has taken great pains to reassure black families that their children will be well looked after on his campus.
It has long been known that teachers' low expectations, particularly those related to race and racism, can depress student performance. At U.M.B.C., sustained success by minority students seems to have alleviated this poisonous problem. Faculty members who once looked askance when asked to take on minority students in their laboratories now clamor for them.
Off campus, meanwhile, the students are much sought after as research assistants and as candidates for summer internships. Those who finish their education and take their places in the ranks of researchers and professors often become powerful proselytizers for science.
The Meyerhoff model shows that a vibrant, well-structured science program can produce large numbers of students who excel and remain in the field. It has also debunked the myth that academic excellence and minority access are mutually exclusive goals.
The university community needs to absorb these lessons quickly, so the country can begin to train scientists in the numbers that it clearly needs. Without them, America is unlikely to preserve its privileged position in an increasingly competitive and science-based global economy.
Something to CHEER about!
Compliments to Paul Briercheck
Students complete state of the art fuel cell vehicle
Students to showcase vehicle at Oakland Schools Board of Education meeting
A team of five students enrolled in the General Motors Technical Academy (GMTA) have recently completed a state of the art fuel cell vehicle. On Tuesday, May 23, 2006 at 7 PM the GMTA students will showcase their fuel cell vehicle at the Oakland Schools Board of Education meeting.
GMTA Students Matt Dzurka (12th Grade, Rochester Adams High School, Rochester Hills), Jason Kloss (12th Grade, Rochester Stoney Creek High School, Rochester Hills), Anastisia McKendrick (Bloomfield Hills Andover High School, Bloomfield Hills), Paul Shenkosky (12th Grade, Rochester Stoney Creek High School, Rochester Hills), and Mike Stracke (12th Grade, Rochester Adams High School, Rochester) are members of the Aviner Fuel Cell Research and Design remote control racing team.
The students were presented with the task of designing, building and producing a fully functional remote controlled vehicle powered by hydrogen. Their goal was to create this vehicle for no more than $3,000. Similar projects have not been attempted by high school students.
This project is the first to embrace the goals of Oakland County’s "Emerging Sectors TM" Alternative Energy and Power Generation. The students claim they were also inspired and energized from a speech given by General Motors R&D and Planning chief Larry Burns at the Tokyo International Auto Conference (October 17, 2005) where he stated; "Its Not a Question of If But When for Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles."
The vehicle took seven months to research, design and build. The students have tested and validated the vehicle’s performance April 13th and April 27th at Larry’s Performance R/C located in Sterling Heights. The GMTA graduating class is now looking forward to taking the lessons learned in advanced vehicle design /engineering to the next level of engineering education and employment.
For more information, please contact Alethia Barnes, GMTA Instructor, at 248.456.7016.
Students complete state of the art fuel cell vehicle
Students to showcase vehicle at Oakland Schools Board of Education meeting
A team of five students enrolled in the General Motors Technical Academy (GMTA) have recently completed a state of the art fuel cell vehicle. On Tuesday, May 23, 2006 at 7 PM the GMTA students will showcase their fuel cell vehicle at the Oakland Schools Board of Education meeting.
GMTA Students Matt Dzurka (12th Grade, Rochester Adams High School, Rochester Hills), Jason Kloss (12th Grade, Rochester Stoney Creek High School, Rochester Hills), Anastisia McKendrick (Bloomfield Hills Andover High School, Bloomfield Hills), Paul Shenkosky (12th Grade, Rochester Stoney Creek High School, Rochester Hills), and Mike Stracke (12th Grade, Rochester Adams High School, Rochester) are members of the Aviner Fuel Cell Research and Design remote control racing team.
The students were presented with the task of designing, building and producing a fully functional remote controlled vehicle powered by hydrogen. Their goal was to create this vehicle for no more than $3,000. Similar projects have not been attempted by high school students.
This project is the first to embrace the goals of Oakland County’s "Emerging Sectors TM" Alternative Energy and Power Generation. The students claim they were also inspired and energized from a speech given by General Motors R&D and Planning chief Larry Burns at the Tokyo International Auto Conference (October 17, 2005) where he stated; "Its Not a Question of If But When for Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles."
The vehicle took seven months to research, design and build. The students have tested and validated the vehicle’s performance April 13th and April 27th at Larry’s Performance R/C located in Sterling Heights. The GMTA graduating class is now looking forward to taking the lessons learned in advanced vehicle design /engineering to the next level of engineering education and employment.
For more information, please contact Alethia Barnes, GMTA Instructor, at 248.456.7016.
Something to JEER about (But Think Planetarium)
NEW YORK TIMES
May 25, 2006
Test Shows Drop in Science Achievement for 12th Graders
By SAM DILLON
WASHINGTON, May 24 — The first nationwide science test administered in five years shows that achievement among high school seniors has declined across the past decade, even as scores in science rose among fourth graders and held steady among eighth graders, the federal Education Department reported on Wednesday.
The falling average science test scores among high school students appeared certain to increase anxiety about America's academic competitiveness and to add new urgency to calls from President Bush, governors and philanthropists like Bill Gates for an overhaul of the nation's high schools.
The drop in science proficiency appeared to reflect a broader trend in which some academic gains made in elementary grades and middle school have been seen to fade during the high school years.
The science results came from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a comprehensive examination administered in early 2005 by the Department of Education to more than 300,000 students in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and on military bases around the world.
"Our fourth graders are doing better — that's the good news," said Darvin M. Winick, chairman of the bipartisan body set up by Congress to oversee the test. "But the 12th-grade results are distressing, there's no other way to slice it. The Bush administration and just about everybody else is complaining about the high schools, and these results show there's really something to complain about."
The science test, which was administered in the first months of 2005, covered the earth, physical and life sciences. The science test was last given in 2000 and in 1996. The test administrators translate scores into three achievement levels: advanced, proficient and basic.
On the most recent test, 68 percent of fourth graders achieved at or above the basic level, compared with 63 percent on the 2000 and 1996 tests. Twenty-nine percent of fourth graders performed at or above the proficient level in 2005, up from 27 percent in 2000 and 28 percent in 1996.
The rising science achievement among fourth graders mirrored similar trends on nationwide reading and math tests released last fall. In interviews, analysts attributed those increases to the broad movements for higher standards and accountability that began in most states in the 1990's and gained force when President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind law in 2002.
The fourth-grade science results showed scores of black and Hispanic students rising more than those of white students, thus narrowing the gap between minority and white students who, on average, have traditionally scored much higher. But the gaps persisted or widened in the higher grades.
Eighth-grade scores were largely unchanged from 10 years ago, with 59 percent of those tested scoring at or above the basic level in 2005, while 60 percent of students were at or above basic in 1996. Officials called those results disappointing, but the results from the nation's secondary schools were worse.
Among high school seniors, 54 percent performed at or above the basic level in science in 2005, compared with 57 percent in 1996. Eighteen percent of high school students performed at the proficient level in 2005, down from 21 percent in 1996.
To achieve at the basic level on the National Assessment, high school seniors must demonstrate knowledge of very basic concepts about the earth, physical and life sciences, and show a rudimentary understanding of scientific principles.
There was some debate on Wednesday about how to explain the 12th-grade declines.
Assistant Secretary of Education Tom Luce said they reflected a national shortage of fully qualified science teachers, especially in regions of poverty, where physics and chemistry classes are often taught by teachers untrained in those subjects.
"We lack enough teachers with content knowledge in math and science," Mr. Luce said. "We have too few teachers with majors or minors in math and science. That clearly is a problem."
Michael J. Padilla, a professor at the University of Georgia who is president of the National Science Teachers Association, said that the problem was not that universities were failing to train sufficient numbers of science majors or that too few were opting for classroom careers, but that about a third of those who accepted teaching jobs abandoned the profession within five years.
"What happens is that the system tends to beat them down," Mr. Padilla said. "Working conditions are poor, it's a difficult job, and the pay isn't that great."
Some teachers cited the decreasing amount of time devoted to science in schools, which they attributed in part to the annual tests in reading and math required by the No Child Left Behind law. That has led many elementary schools to cancel some science classes. On average, the time devoted to science instruction among elementary teachers across the nation declined from a weekly average of 2.6 hours in 2000 to 2.3 hours in 2004, Department of Education statistics show.
The No Child Left Behind law requires states to begin testing in science, however, in the 2007-2008 school year. P. John Whitsett, a physics teacher at Fond du Lac High School in Wisconsin who has taught science for 36 years, said that children who had the opportunity to study science in elementary school tended to develop an excitement for the field that lasted into high school. But when elementary and middle schools neglect science, students seek to avoid taking science courses in high school.
"Overall interest in science is down," Mr. Whitsett said.
The results showed considerable regional variations, with some states' scores stagnant or falling and others rising sharply. The National Assessment's report on the test praised five states — California, Hawaii, Kentucky, South Carolina and Virginia — because both fourth- and eighth-grade scores there improved from 2000 to 2005.
Michael Petrilli, a vice president at the Thomas Fordham Foundation, an educational research organization that supports testing, attributed the science successes in Virginia and California to what he described as those states' clearly defined science standards. And Kentucky, South Carolina and Virginia, he said, are among those states that hold local schools accountable for low science scores.
States must by law participate in the National Assessment's biennial reading and math exams. But the science test is voluntary, and New York and five other states — Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Pennsylvania — declined to help federal officials administer the test to a large enough number of students to allow their states' scores to be compared with those of other states.
A few students were tested even in the six states that did not participate fully, allowing the collection of a nationally representative sample.
Tom Dunn, a spokesman for New York's Department of Education, said that state officials decided not to participate fully in the federal science testing because during the spring of 2005 they were preoccupied with field trials for a series of new reading and math exams required by No Child Left Behind.
In New Jersey, 31 percent of fourth graders in public schools scored at proficient or above, compared with 33 percent in Connecticut. The national average for fourth graders attending public school was 27 percent scoring at proficient or above.
The report is available online at nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006466.
May 25, 2006
Test Shows Drop in Science Achievement for 12th Graders
By SAM DILLON
WASHINGTON, May 24 — The first nationwide science test administered in five years shows that achievement among high school seniors has declined across the past decade, even as scores in science rose among fourth graders and held steady among eighth graders, the federal Education Department reported on Wednesday.
The falling average science test scores among high school students appeared certain to increase anxiety about America's academic competitiveness and to add new urgency to calls from President Bush, governors and philanthropists like Bill Gates for an overhaul of the nation's high schools.
The drop in science proficiency appeared to reflect a broader trend in which some academic gains made in elementary grades and middle school have been seen to fade during the high school years.
The science results came from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a comprehensive examination administered in early 2005 by the Department of Education to more than 300,000 students in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and on military bases around the world.
"Our fourth graders are doing better — that's the good news," said Darvin M. Winick, chairman of the bipartisan body set up by Congress to oversee the test. "But the 12th-grade results are distressing, there's no other way to slice it. The Bush administration and just about everybody else is complaining about the high schools, and these results show there's really something to complain about."
The science test, which was administered in the first months of 2005, covered the earth, physical and life sciences. The science test was last given in 2000 and in 1996. The test administrators translate scores into three achievement levels: advanced, proficient and basic.
On the most recent test, 68 percent of fourth graders achieved at or above the basic level, compared with 63 percent on the 2000 and 1996 tests. Twenty-nine percent of fourth graders performed at or above the proficient level in 2005, up from 27 percent in 2000 and 28 percent in 1996.
The rising science achievement among fourth graders mirrored similar trends on nationwide reading and math tests released last fall. In interviews, analysts attributed those increases to the broad movements for higher standards and accountability that began in most states in the 1990's and gained force when President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind law in 2002.
The fourth-grade science results showed scores of black and Hispanic students rising more than those of white students, thus narrowing the gap between minority and white students who, on average, have traditionally scored much higher. But the gaps persisted or widened in the higher grades.
Eighth-grade scores were largely unchanged from 10 years ago, with 59 percent of those tested scoring at or above the basic level in 2005, while 60 percent of students were at or above basic in 1996. Officials called those results disappointing, but the results from the nation's secondary schools were worse.
Among high school seniors, 54 percent performed at or above the basic level in science in 2005, compared with 57 percent in 1996. Eighteen percent of high school students performed at the proficient level in 2005, down from 21 percent in 1996.
To achieve at the basic level on the National Assessment, high school seniors must demonstrate knowledge of very basic concepts about the earth, physical and life sciences, and show a rudimentary understanding of scientific principles.
There was some debate on Wednesday about how to explain the 12th-grade declines.
Assistant Secretary of Education Tom Luce said they reflected a national shortage of fully qualified science teachers, especially in regions of poverty, where physics and chemistry classes are often taught by teachers untrained in those subjects.
"We lack enough teachers with content knowledge in math and science," Mr. Luce said. "We have too few teachers with majors or minors in math and science. That clearly is a problem."
Michael J. Padilla, a professor at the University of Georgia who is president of the National Science Teachers Association, said that the problem was not that universities were failing to train sufficient numbers of science majors or that too few were opting for classroom careers, but that about a third of those who accepted teaching jobs abandoned the profession within five years.
"What happens is that the system tends to beat them down," Mr. Padilla said. "Working conditions are poor, it's a difficult job, and the pay isn't that great."
Some teachers cited the decreasing amount of time devoted to science in schools, which they attributed in part to the annual tests in reading and math required by the No Child Left Behind law. That has led many elementary schools to cancel some science classes. On average, the time devoted to science instruction among elementary teachers across the nation declined from a weekly average of 2.6 hours in 2000 to 2.3 hours in 2004, Department of Education statistics show.
The No Child Left Behind law requires states to begin testing in science, however, in the 2007-2008 school year. P. John Whitsett, a physics teacher at Fond du Lac High School in Wisconsin who has taught science for 36 years, said that children who had the opportunity to study science in elementary school tended to develop an excitement for the field that lasted into high school. But when elementary and middle schools neglect science, students seek to avoid taking science courses in high school.
"Overall interest in science is down," Mr. Whitsett said.
The results showed considerable regional variations, with some states' scores stagnant or falling and others rising sharply. The National Assessment's report on the test praised five states — California, Hawaii, Kentucky, South Carolina and Virginia — because both fourth- and eighth-grade scores there improved from 2000 to 2005.
Michael Petrilli, a vice president at the Thomas Fordham Foundation, an educational research organization that supports testing, attributed the science successes in Virginia and California to what he described as those states' clearly defined science standards. And Kentucky, South Carolina and Virginia, he said, are among those states that hold local schools accountable for low science scores.
States must by law participate in the National Assessment's biennial reading and math exams. But the science test is voluntary, and New York and five other states — Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Pennsylvania — declined to help federal officials administer the test to a large enough number of students to allow their states' scores to be compared with those of other states.
A few students were tested even in the six states that did not participate fully, allowing the collection of a nationally representative sample.
Tom Dunn, a spokesman for New York's Department of Education, said that state officials decided not to participate fully in the federal science testing because during the spring of 2005 they were preoccupied with field trials for a series of new reading and math exams required by No Child Left Behind.
In New Jersey, 31 percent of fourth graders in public schools scored at proficient or above, compared with 33 percent in Connecticut. The national average for fourth graders attending public school was 27 percent scoring at proficient or above.
The report is available online at nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006466.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
A Road to Far or A Bar to High?
EDUCATION WEEK
Published: May 24, 2006
Ambiguity About Preparation for Workforce Clouds Efforts to Equip Students for Future
By Lynn Olson
Ask Billy Harper, the president of Harper Industries, if he has trouble finding employees for his eight construction-related companies scattered across the United States, and he doesn’t mince words. “Absolutely,” he replies.
“It’s the same story, not only in Kentucky, but everywhere,” says the head of the Paducah, Ky.-based enterprise, which has some 1,000 employees. “Just finding warm bodies is hard in itself, people willing to work. And then finding the skills and the traits that you’re looking for makes it even more difficult.”
Employers’ Views
In a 2005 survey of manufacturers, schools got low marks for students’ work readiness.
SOURCE: 2005 Skills Gap Report. The National Association of Manufacturers, The Manufacturing Institute, and Deloitte Consulting (CHART: 84% said NO)
Figuring out what employers like Mr. Harper want has become an urgent issue as educators try to retool schools to prepare students for both work and college in a rapidly changing economy. And, so far, there are no clear-cut answers.
“I think there’s a lot of ambiguity about what ‘workforce readiness’ means,” said Donna Desrochers, a vice president and the director of education studies at the Committee for Economic Development, a business group based in New York City. “Some people are talking about: When you graduate from college, are you ready for work? Others are asking: If you don’t have any postsecondary education, are you work-ready?
“The general public, when you say ‘work ready,’ probably doesn’t think of any postsecondary education at all,” she said.
Yet even in the construction industry, Mr. Harper said, most jobs now need something beyond a high school education.
“We used to have a construction crew—if they were digging a ditch, you needed three or four laborers with a shovel and a supervisor,” he said. “Now, you’ll have one individual with no supervisor and a backhoe that’s laser-controlled, and he’s got to know how to set that up and how to use it. And that’s an entry-level job.”
But press Mr. Harper a little further about the work-readiness skills he’s looking for, and the list sounds less academic and technical than social—showing up for work on time every day, looking presentable, and being able to communicate with customers.
‘Top Priority’
Plenty of efforts to define work readiness are under way.
Through the American Diploma Project Network, for instance, 22 states are collaborating with Achieve Inc., a Washington-based nonprofit group, to align what employers and colleges expect of students with the knowledge and skills needed to graduate from high school.
This biotechnology academy at Minuteman Regional High School in Lexington, Mass., has been recognized for effectively combining academics and preparation for careers.
Last month, the New York City-based Conference Board and partner organizations sent out a survey to some 10,000 human-resource and training executives asking them what knowledge and skills their companies are looking for in recent job entrants.
And this summer, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its partners hope to unveil a “workforce-readiness credential” that businesses can use to identify qualified applicants for entry-level jobs.
“Education for the workforce has become one of our top priorities,” said Arthur J. Rothkopf, a senior vice president for the chamber, located in Washington. “It’s an American-competitiveness issue. It’s all about competing and all about having trained people to do the job.”
What’s clear, at least from poll results, is that employers and the general public don’t think that schools are doing enough.
In a 2005 survey commissioned by the Washington-based National Association of Manufacturers, 84 percent of responding members said K-12 schools weren’t doing a good job in preparing students for the workplace. Nearly half indicated their current employees had inadequate basic employability skills, such as attendance, timeliness, and work ethic. Forty-six percent reported inadequate problem-solving skills, and 36 percent pointed to insufficient reading, writing, and communication skills.
Another poll last year sponsored by an influential Washington group, the Business Roundtable, found that 62 percent of the public thought public high schools were not doing a good job “adequately preparing graduates to meet the demands they will face in college and the world of work.”
Employability Skills Get Low Marks
Manufacturers polled were less happy with students’ work-related skills than with their academic preparation.
But Michael J. Handel, an associate professor of sociology at Northeastern University in Boston, noted that while employers complain about the skills of young and high-school-educated workers, “it is unclear whether they are dissatisfied mainly with workers’ cognitive skills or rather with their effort and attitude.”
Predicting Future Needs
Manufacturers surveyed foresee a need for workers with strong technical skills who can work in teams.
A study released this month by ACT Inc., which produces one of the nation’s two major college-admissions exams, suggests that the reading and mathematics skills needed for success in the workplace are comparable to those needed for success in the first year of college.
The Iowa City, Iowa-based nonprofit organization reached its conclusions based on a comparison of scores on the ACT admissions exam and scores on WorkKeys, an ACT test that measures employability skills. The study looked at scores for more than 476,000 Illinois high school juniors. ("Skills for Work, College Readiness Are Found Comparable," May 10, 2006.)
The ACT researchers found that the scores needed to do well in first-year college courses were statistically comparable to the scores needed on the WorkKeys test to qualify for a range of occupations that pay enough to support a family of four and offer the potential for career advancement, but that do not require a four-year college degree. Those jobs—such as electrician and construction worker—typically do require some combination of vocational and on-the-job experience or an associate’s degree.
“What do we mean by ready for the workplace?” said Cynthia B. Schmeiser, ACT’s senior vice president of research and development. “What we’re really seeing is it requires comparable skills to readiness for college.”
What Employers Want
The ACT findings echo earlier work conducted by Ms. Desrochers of the Committee for Economic Development and Anthony P. Carnevale, an economist with the Washington-based National Center on Education and the Economy, for the American Diploma Project.
Defining 'Work Readiness'
For years, experts have been trying to identify what high school graduates need for success in the workplace.
1987:
"Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century," by the Washington-based Hudson Institute, argues that rapidly increasing demands will create a gap between workers' skills and those required on the job. By the year 2000, it asserts, "even the least-skilled jobs will require a command of reading, computing, and thinking that was once necessary only for the professions."
Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, formed by the U.S. secretary of labor, releases "What Work Requires of Schools." The report argues that all American high school students must develop a new set of competencies and foundation skills if they are to enjoy a productive, full, and satisfying life. The list includes the ability to allocate resources; acquire, evaluate, organize, and interpret data and information; systems thinking; the ability to select and apply technology to specific tasks; and the ability to think creatively, make decisions, and problem solve.'
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills releases "Learning for the 21st Century." The report urges schools to go beyond teaching the core academic subjects and include a focus on learning and thinking skills, information and communications technology, life skills, and such 21st-century content as global awareness and financial, business, and economic literacy.'
The American Diploma Project—a joint venture of three Washington-based organizations—releases "Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts," which argues that the knowledge and skills required for work and college are converging. The report includes a set of benchmarks in English and mathematics to help anchor states’ high school assessments and graduation requirements.'
The Center for Workforce Preparation at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce works with five states and the District of Columbia to craft a portable assessment that could be used to certify individuals’ readiness for entry-level employment. The assessment is scheduled for release this June.'
View the entire timeline
Using data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Current Population Surveys, the researchers divided occupations into highly paid professional jobs; well-paid, skilled blue-collar and white-collar jobs; and low-paid, low-skill jobs. They then used data from a federal longitudinal database to look at the course transcripts for 26-year-olds whose occupations fell into those categories.
The upshot, said Ms. Desrochers: “Most young workers who were employed in highly paid professional or well-paid skilled jobs early in their careers had taken at least Algebra 2 while in high school, though about half of young professional workers had taken a higher-level math.” They’d also taken at least four years of grade-level English.
But a forthcoming report by Paul E. Barton, a senior associate at the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service, does not support the proposition that those not going to college need to be qualified for college-credit courses in order to enter the workforce.
The report, “High School Reform and Work: Facing Labor Market Realities,” analyzes half of the 20 million job openings projected for 2001 to 2012 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in terms of their educational requirements and the quantitative abilities needed to perform each job.
See Also
See related story, “Vocational Programs Earn Mixed Reviews, Face Academic Push.”
It concludes that while a strong case could be made for improving the academic skills of a large proportion of high school graduates, what’s needed is closer to a rigorous 9th grade level of performance. Based on previous studies of what employers say they are looking for when they hire for jobs that do not require a college degree, it finds that employers typically put school achievement below other qualities and attributes—such as attendance, timeliness, and work ethic.
“Academic skills are truly important,” agreed sociologist James E. Rosenbaum, who surveyed plant and office managers who hire entry-level workers, “but they’re not the only thing that’s important. As it turns out, when it comes to what employers want, they do want academic skills, but far more important to them are the work habits and social skills, the ‘soft’ skills.”
Of the 51 employers he interviewed for a study described in his book, Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half, 35 said that basic academic skills in math and English were needed for the entry-level jobs they were seeking to fill; 13 of those described job tasks requiring math skills, with some requiring algebra and trigonometry. Ten reported tasks requiring reading, writing, and communication skills, with many saying those skills must be above an 8th grade level.
No Help on ‘Soft’ Skills?
Although academic skills aren’t needed for their entry-level jobs, some employers noted, they are needed for their higher-level jobs that entry-level workers can move into.
Mr. Rosenbaum, a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., also found evidence that employers who cited academic-skill needs increased supervisors’ responsibilities and simplified job tasks to match workers with poor skills, and altered job conditions or rules to accommodate more-skilled job applicants or employees.
He worries, though, that by focusing on college goals, not job goals, education policies have been overly concerned with academic deficiencies and not with other weaknesses that employers complain about.
“Policies underestimate how many students are work-bound,” Mr. Rosenbaum said. “They do not help some students develop soft skills, and they do not help many students prepare realistically for their careers.”
“I think there’s a growing recognition and consensus that a higher level of academic knowledge and skills is required for all students for both college and career,” said Gary Hoachlander, the president of ConnectEd, a new California center for college and career preparation, based in Berkeley. “That said, academics is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.”
He argued that there is a substantial body of knowledge and skill that is more oriented to careers and occupations, which requires more systematic attention to students’ problem-solving skills, their diagnostic skills, their ability to interpret and respond appropriately to others, and their understanding of systems.
“I’m not saying that academics don’t pay any attention to those things,” Mr. Hoachlander said. “Of course they do, but not in an explicit, systematic way. And frankly, we don’t assess it, and that’s an issue.”
His concern is being attended to. The ability to solve problems and make decisions and to use and understand systems are two critical entry-level tasks workers need to be able to do, according to a new credential.
Work-Readiness Credential
The Work Readiness Credential is a voluntary national assessment being developed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; five states—Florida, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Washington—and the District of Columbia; and JA Worldwide, formerly Junior Achievement, based in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Ready to Hire?
A new credential will assess applicants for entry-level jobs based on the following “equipped for the future” standards.
New workers need to be able to use these EFF skills.
Communication Skills
1. Speak so others can understand
2. Listen actively
3. Read with understanding
4. Observe critically
Interpersonal Skills
1. Cooperate with others
2. Resolve conflict and negotiate
Decisionmaking Skills
1. Use math to solve problems and communicate
2. Solve problems and make decisions
Lifelong-Learning Skills
1. Take responsibility for learning
2. Use information and communications technology*
“The assessment measures nine skills that employers believe are critical to employment for entry-level jobs” that are not supervisory, not managerial, and not professional, according to Karen R. Elzey, the senior director of the chamber’s Center for Workforce Preparation. Working with technical contractors, the partners brought together groups of employers and sent out surveys to identify the skills needed for entry-level work that cut across industries, she said.
The test will be available in a limited number of states and communities this summer, with a full national release scheduled for next January. It is composed of four computer-based modules: reading, math, speaking and listening, and something called “situational judgment.” For the latter, participants will be presented with real-world scenarios coming from the workplace and asked about the best and worst way to resolve the problem.
The credential was designed to improve the quality of job applicants coming out of state workforce-development systems and to help employers in hiring. However, Ms. Elzey said, “we’ve talked with school systems who are interested in using this for students engaged in internships and work-based learning opportunities, to demonstrate that their students not only possess the necessary academic skills, but also employability and soft skills.”
One of the reasons the states took on the project, she said, is that “there wasn’t a clear definition of what it means to be work-ready.”
To find out what employers think, four national organizations—the Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management—are working together to conduct an in-depth survey of corporate views on the readiness of new entrants to the U.S. workforce. Those entrants include recently hired graduates from high schools, two-year colleges or technical schools, and four-year colleges.
The survey, sent to some 10,000 human-resource and training executives last month, asks them to rate the knowledge and skill levels of recent job entrants in areas ranging from reading comprehension to creativity; to rate how important each of those skills is to performing successfully; and to predict whether their importance will increase or decrease over the next five years.
“Skills needs are changing so rapidly that we felt it was more realistic to take a five-year outlook on this,” said Jill Casner-Lotto, the project’s research director. “The purpose is for the businesses to clearly articulate their needs to educators, to community groups.”
The project also will include case studies of organizations that are addressing issues of workforce readiness, she said, and panel discussions involving business people, educators, policymakers, and community members.
One structural problem rarely attended to, according to Mr. Barton of the ETS, is that many employers don’t like to hire high school graduates until they are well into their 20s, irrespective of how well they do in high school. Mr. Handel of Northeastern University said that suggests the problem may be one of maturity, not a more general lack of skills.
When it comes to reliable data on workforce competencies and job demands, said Mr. Handel of Northeastern, “there isn’t a lot of hard data on most of these issues.”
The author of a 2005 book, Worker Skills and Job Requirements: Is There a Mismatch?, Mr. Handel just completed a nationally representative survey of wage and salary workers to find out what types of reading, writing, math, problem-solving, technology, and interpersonal skills they actually use on the job.
His goal: to “get some real hard data and numbers on what has really been a very soft debate.”
Published: May 24, 2006
Ambiguity About Preparation for Workforce Clouds Efforts to Equip Students for Future
By Lynn Olson
Ask Billy Harper, the president of Harper Industries, if he has trouble finding employees for his eight construction-related companies scattered across the United States, and he doesn’t mince words. “Absolutely,” he replies.
“It’s the same story, not only in Kentucky, but everywhere,” says the head of the Paducah, Ky.-based enterprise, which has some 1,000 employees. “Just finding warm bodies is hard in itself, people willing to work. And then finding the skills and the traits that you’re looking for makes it even more difficult.”
Employers’ Views
In a 2005 survey of manufacturers, schools got low marks for students’ work readiness.
SOURCE: 2005 Skills Gap Report. The National Association of Manufacturers, The Manufacturing Institute, and Deloitte Consulting (CHART: 84% said NO)
Figuring out what employers like Mr. Harper want has become an urgent issue as educators try to retool schools to prepare students for both work and college in a rapidly changing economy. And, so far, there are no clear-cut answers.
“I think there’s a lot of ambiguity about what ‘workforce readiness’ means,” said Donna Desrochers, a vice president and the director of education studies at the Committee for Economic Development, a business group based in New York City. “Some people are talking about: When you graduate from college, are you ready for work? Others are asking: If you don’t have any postsecondary education, are you work-ready?
“The general public, when you say ‘work ready,’ probably doesn’t think of any postsecondary education at all,” she said.
Yet even in the construction industry, Mr. Harper said, most jobs now need something beyond a high school education.
“We used to have a construction crew—if they were digging a ditch, you needed three or four laborers with a shovel and a supervisor,” he said. “Now, you’ll have one individual with no supervisor and a backhoe that’s laser-controlled, and he’s got to know how to set that up and how to use it. And that’s an entry-level job.”
But press Mr. Harper a little further about the work-readiness skills he’s looking for, and the list sounds less academic and technical than social—showing up for work on time every day, looking presentable, and being able to communicate with customers.
‘Top Priority’
Plenty of efforts to define work readiness are under way.
Through the American Diploma Project Network, for instance, 22 states are collaborating with Achieve Inc., a Washington-based nonprofit group, to align what employers and colleges expect of students with the knowledge and skills needed to graduate from high school.
This biotechnology academy at Minuteman Regional High School in Lexington, Mass., has been recognized for effectively combining academics and preparation for careers.
Last month, the New York City-based Conference Board and partner organizations sent out a survey to some 10,000 human-resource and training executives asking them what knowledge and skills their companies are looking for in recent job entrants.
And this summer, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its partners hope to unveil a “workforce-readiness credential” that businesses can use to identify qualified applicants for entry-level jobs.
“Education for the workforce has become one of our top priorities,” said Arthur J. Rothkopf, a senior vice president for the chamber, located in Washington. “It’s an American-competitiveness issue. It’s all about competing and all about having trained people to do the job.”
What’s clear, at least from poll results, is that employers and the general public don’t think that schools are doing enough.
In a 2005 survey commissioned by the Washington-based National Association of Manufacturers, 84 percent of responding members said K-12 schools weren’t doing a good job in preparing students for the workplace. Nearly half indicated their current employees had inadequate basic employability skills, such as attendance, timeliness, and work ethic. Forty-six percent reported inadequate problem-solving skills, and 36 percent pointed to insufficient reading, writing, and communication skills.
Another poll last year sponsored by an influential Washington group, the Business Roundtable, found that 62 percent of the public thought public high schools were not doing a good job “adequately preparing graduates to meet the demands they will face in college and the world of work.”
Employability Skills Get Low Marks
Manufacturers polled were less happy with students’ work-related skills than with their academic preparation.
But Michael J. Handel, an associate professor of sociology at Northeastern University in Boston, noted that while employers complain about the skills of young and high-school-educated workers, “it is unclear whether they are dissatisfied mainly with workers’ cognitive skills or rather with their effort and attitude.”
Predicting Future Needs
Manufacturers surveyed foresee a need for workers with strong technical skills who can work in teams.
A study released this month by ACT Inc., which produces one of the nation’s two major college-admissions exams, suggests that the reading and mathematics skills needed for success in the workplace are comparable to those needed for success in the first year of college.
The Iowa City, Iowa-based nonprofit organization reached its conclusions based on a comparison of scores on the ACT admissions exam and scores on WorkKeys, an ACT test that measures employability skills. The study looked at scores for more than 476,000 Illinois high school juniors. ("Skills for Work, College Readiness Are Found Comparable," May 10, 2006.)
The ACT researchers found that the scores needed to do well in first-year college courses were statistically comparable to the scores needed on the WorkKeys test to qualify for a range of occupations that pay enough to support a family of four and offer the potential for career advancement, but that do not require a four-year college degree. Those jobs—such as electrician and construction worker—typically do require some combination of vocational and on-the-job experience or an associate’s degree.
“What do we mean by ready for the workplace?” said Cynthia B. Schmeiser, ACT’s senior vice president of research and development. “What we’re really seeing is it requires comparable skills to readiness for college.”
What Employers Want
The ACT findings echo earlier work conducted by Ms. Desrochers of the Committee for Economic Development and Anthony P. Carnevale, an economist with the Washington-based National Center on Education and the Economy, for the American Diploma Project.
Defining 'Work Readiness'
For years, experts have been trying to identify what high school graduates need for success in the workplace.
1987:
"Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century," by the Washington-based Hudson Institute, argues that rapidly increasing demands will create a gap between workers' skills and those required on the job. By the year 2000, it asserts, "even the least-skilled jobs will require a command of reading, computing, and thinking that was once necessary only for the professions."
Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, formed by the U.S. secretary of labor, releases "What Work Requires of Schools." The report argues that all American high school students must develop a new set of competencies and foundation skills if they are to enjoy a productive, full, and satisfying life. The list includes the ability to allocate resources; acquire, evaluate, organize, and interpret data and information; systems thinking; the ability to select and apply technology to specific tasks; and the ability to think creatively, make decisions, and problem solve.'
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills releases "Learning for the 21st Century." The report urges schools to go beyond teaching the core academic subjects and include a focus on learning and thinking skills, information and communications technology, life skills, and such 21st-century content as global awareness and financial, business, and economic literacy.'
The American Diploma Project—a joint venture of three Washington-based organizations—releases "Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts," which argues that the knowledge and skills required for work and college are converging. The report includes a set of benchmarks in English and mathematics to help anchor states’ high school assessments and graduation requirements.'
The Center for Workforce Preparation at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce works with five states and the District of Columbia to craft a portable assessment that could be used to certify individuals’ readiness for entry-level employment. The assessment is scheduled for release this June.'
View the entire timeline
Using data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Current Population Surveys, the researchers divided occupations into highly paid professional jobs; well-paid, skilled blue-collar and white-collar jobs; and low-paid, low-skill jobs. They then used data from a federal longitudinal database to look at the course transcripts for 26-year-olds whose occupations fell into those categories.
The upshot, said Ms. Desrochers: “Most young workers who were employed in highly paid professional or well-paid skilled jobs early in their careers had taken at least Algebra 2 while in high school, though about half of young professional workers had taken a higher-level math.” They’d also taken at least four years of grade-level English.
But a forthcoming report by Paul E. Barton, a senior associate at the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service, does not support the proposition that those not going to college need to be qualified for college-credit courses in order to enter the workforce.
The report, “High School Reform and Work: Facing Labor Market Realities,” analyzes half of the 20 million job openings projected for 2001 to 2012 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in terms of their educational requirements and the quantitative abilities needed to perform each job.
See Also
See related story, “Vocational Programs Earn Mixed Reviews, Face Academic Push.”
It concludes that while a strong case could be made for improving the academic skills of a large proportion of high school graduates, what’s needed is closer to a rigorous 9th grade level of performance. Based on previous studies of what employers say they are looking for when they hire for jobs that do not require a college degree, it finds that employers typically put school achievement below other qualities and attributes—such as attendance, timeliness, and work ethic.
“Academic skills are truly important,” agreed sociologist James E. Rosenbaum, who surveyed plant and office managers who hire entry-level workers, “but they’re not the only thing that’s important. As it turns out, when it comes to what employers want, they do want academic skills, but far more important to them are the work habits and social skills, the ‘soft’ skills.”
Of the 51 employers he interviewed for a study described in his book, Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half, 35 said that basic academic skills in math and English were needed for the entry-level jobs they were seeking to fill; 13 of those described job tasks requiring math skills, with some requiring algebra and trigonometry. Ten reported tasks requiring reading, writing, and communication skills, with many saying those skills must be above an 8th grade level.
No Help on ‘Soft’ Skills?
Although academic skills aren’t needed for their entry-level jobs, some employers noted, they are needed for their higher-level jobs that entry-level workers can move into.
Mr. Rosenbaum, a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., also found evidence that employers who cited academic-skill needs increased supervisors’ responsibilities and simplified job tasks to match workers with poor skills, and altered job conditions or rules to accommodate more-skilled job applicants or employees.
He worries, though, that by focusing on college goals, not job goals, education policies have been overly concerned with academic deficiencies and not with other weaknesses that employers complain about.
“Policies underestimate how many students are work-bound,” Mr. Rosenbaum said. “They do not help some students develop soft skills, and they do not help many students prepare realistically for their careers.”
“I think there’s a growing recognition and consensus that a higher level of academic knowledge and skills is required for all students for both college and career,” said Gary Hoachlander, the president of ConnectEd, a new California center for college and career preparation, based in Berkeley. “That said, academics is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.”
He argued that there is a substantial body of knowledge and skill that is more oriented to careers and occupations, which requires more systematic attention to students’ problem-solving skills, their diagnostic skills, their ability to interpret and respond appropriately to others, and their understanding of systems.
“I’m not saying that academics don’t pay any attention to those things,” Mr. Hoachlander said. “Of course they do, but not in an explicit, systematic way. And frankly, we don’t assess it, and that’s an issue.”
His concern is being attended to. The ability to solve problems and make decisions and to use and understand systems are two critical entry-level tasks workers need to be able to do, according to a new credential.
Work-Readiness Credential
The Work Readiness Credential is a voluntary national assessment being developed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; five states—Florida, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Washington—and the District of Columbia; and JA Worldwide, formerly Junior Achievement, based in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Ready to Hire?
A new credential will assess applicants for entry-level jobs based on the following “equipped for the future” standards.
New workers need to be able to use these EFF skills.
Communication Skills
1. Speak so others can understand
2. Listen actively
3. Read with understanding
4. Observe critically
Interpersonal Skills
1. Cooperate with others
2. Resolve conflict and negotiate
Decisionmaking Skills
1. Use math to solve problems and communicate
2. Solve problems and make decisions
Lifelong-Learning Skills
1. Take responsibility for learning
2. Use information and communications technology*
“The assessment measures nine skills that employers believe are critical to employment for entry-level jobs” that are not supervisory, not managerial, and not professional, according to Karen R. Elzey, the senior director of the chamber’s Center for Workforce Preparation. Working with technical contractors, the partners brought together groups of employers and sent out surveys to identify the skills needed for entry-level work that cut across industries, she said.
The test will be available in a limited number of states and communities this summer, with a full national release scheduled for next January. It is composed of four computer-based modules: reading, math, speaking and listening, and something called “situational judgment.” For the latter, participants will be presented with real-world scenarios coming from the workplace and asked about the best and worst way to resolve the problem.
The credential was designed to improve the quality of job applicants coming out of state workforce-development systems and to help employers in hiring. However, Ms. Elzey said, “we’ve talked with school systems who are interested in using this for students engaged in internships and work-based learning opportunities, to demonstrate that their students not only possess the necessary academic skills, but also employability and soft skills.”
One of the reasons the states took on the project, she said, is that “there wasn’t a clear definition of what it means to be work-ready.”
To find out what employers think, four national organizations—the Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management—are working together to conduct an in-depth survey of corporate views on the readiness of new entrants to the U.S. workforce. Those entrants include recently hired graduates from high schools, two-year colleges or technical schools, and four-year colleges.
The survey, sent to some 10,000 human-resource and training executives last month, asks them to rate the knowledge and skill levels of recent job entrants in areas ranging from reading comprehension to creativity; to rate how important each of those skills is to performing successfully; and to predict whether their importance will increase or decrease over the next five years.
“Skills needs are changing so rapidly that we felt it was more realistic to take a five-year outlook on this,” said Jill Casner-Lotto, the project’s research director. “The purpose is for the businesses to clearly articulate their needs to educators, to community groups.”
The project also will include case studies of organizations that are addressing issues of workforce readiness, she said, and panel discussions involving business people, educators, policymakers, and community members.
One structural problem rarely attended to, according to Mr. Barton of the ETS, is that many employers don’t like to hire high school graduates until they are well into their 20s, irrespective of how well they do in high school. Mr. Handel of Northeastern University said that suggests the problem may be one of maturity, not a more general lack of skills.
When it comes to reliable data on workforce competencies and job demands, said Mr. Handel of Northeastern, “there isn’t a lot of hard data on most of these issues.”
The author of a 2005 book, Worker Skills and Job Requirements: Is There a Mismatch?, Mr. Handel just completed a nationally representative survey of wage and salary workers to find out what types of reading, writing, math, problem-solving, technology, and interpersonal skills they actually use on the job.
His goal: to “get some real hard data and numbers on what has really been a very soft debate.”
Monday, May 22, 2006
Lights, Camera, Action! Studio Production Zone!
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 22, 2006
Live From the Quad,Student TV on the Web
By BROOKS BARNESMay 22, 2006
Harvard University students have produced a TV soap opera called "Ivory Tower" on and off since 1994, but hardly anyone has ever seen it.
That is because Harvard, like most schools, has no distribution system for the shows its students produce. From time to time, "Ivory Tower" has aired on a local public-access channel, but usually the budding producers have to settle for screenings in common rooms. "It's not a very good situation," says Stevie DeGroff, a junior who is the Harvard-centric soap's marketing director.
Scenes from "Elected," a Brown University Web TV program.
Now "Ivory Tower" and student-produced shows across the country may have gotten their big break thanks to a new, Internet-based TV network. The Open Student Television Network launched in April 2005, and it has signed up a wide array of schools in the past few months -- it claims 30 member schools with access at 208 institutions. Shows range from comedies such as "Elected," a five-episode satire on student government from Brown University, to news programs and documentaries such as "Froshlife" from Duke University.
OSTN is part of a burst of TV channels targeting college students, mostly over the Internet.
There is also mtvU Uber, a slick, seven-month-old broadband channel from Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks that boasts a variety of content, from music videos to student-produced short films. Cdigix Inc., a Seattle company run by a former News Corp. executive, aims to deliver music and on-demand movies and TV to students through the Web. So far, the company has signed up 50 schools, including the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale University.
Thus, even as big TV companies like Walt Disney Co.'s ABC and General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal strive to create broadband channels, there are already several streaming into dorm rooms across the country. "These Web-based channels for college students -- so far pretty under the radar to the general population -- will undoubtedly help shape how the networks move content online," says Brad Adgate, an executive vice president at Horizon Media, a New York consulting firm.
Scenes from "Elected." Similar student shows at other schools across the country are running on a new, Internet-based TV network. The Open Student Television Network launched in April 2005, and it has signed up a wide array of schools.
The college channels may also become incubators for future TV shows. Ross Martin, director of programming for mtvU, MTV's 24-hour college channel, says part of the mission of the online channel is to uncover bits of content that could flower into full-blown series on its mtv2 and MTV channels. Every Friday, Mr. Martin's team posts new student-filmed short movies. There is also a broadband show called "Fresh Produce" that offers weekly episodes of kids filming each other "doing wacky stuff," Mr. Martin says.
The launch of these broadband channels parallels an explosion of amateur TV and film content on the Web, fueled by the ever-dropping cost of producing a professional-looking product.
Popular video-sharing sites such as YouTube.com have also led more students to pull out video cameras and post their work. Students at Boston College this past winter created a Web-based spoof of Fox's teen soap "The O.C." and have drawn an audience of about 400,000 people.
OSTN, a nonprofit linked to Case Western Reserve University, solves a big problem confronting campus television curriculums: Students are making more and more shows, but individual colleges don't have enough programs to build true TV schedules. That makes it hard to develop much of a regular audience even if campuses do have a distribution system.
By aggregating offerings from different schools -- in essence syndicating college shows -- there is more than enough content to fill a network. Says Rich Griffin, vice president of technology for OSTN: "Not every student has the same drive or talent, so maintaining momentum at a campus TV station can be difficult as people graduate. We try to fill that gap."
The student shows can be very high quality, which isn't surprising considering that many Hollywood shows are created by fresh-out-of-college 20-somethings. "These kids are very serious," says Shane Walker, OSTN's vice president of programming.
Brown University juniors Matt Vascellaro and Kent Haines decided last spring to produce a five-episode mockumentary about student government. Called "Elected," the miniseries skewers the leadership of Brown's Undergraduate Council of Students. (One ditzy character is obsessed with making posters with glitter lettering; the executive council nixes a new candidate on grounds that she is "too pretty.")
Brown doesn't have a television-production program or station, so the two producers relied on a couple of friends to help them write each 30-minute episode, cast dozens of students, build sets and gather filming equipment. It took the pair about eight months to finish the project. Mr. Vascellaro says he edited the entire show on a laptop computer in his dorm room.
Many producers in Hollywood use some of the tricks Mr. Vascellaro discovered while putting the show together. For instance, he says, he found that if you put a good song in a scene that doesn't look very good, "nobody will notice."
Like most students working on campus shows, Mr. Vascellaro intends to pursue a career in entertainment, and that is one reason OSTN is valuable, says Don Tillman, executive director of Trojan Vision, the student TV station at the University of Southern California. "This allows students to review each other's work and get noticed," he says. Trojan Vision, whose 300 student participants make it one of the largest student TV operations, delivers six of OSTN's 29 programs.
There is a catch in terms of actually breaking out via OSTN, though. The network operates only on Internet2, an ultrafast, separate version of the Web designed for academic researchers. As a result, only students and faculty can view it, though most colleges and universities are hooked up. As a result, in addition to OSTN, some producers have developed Web sites to screen their shows. "Elected," for example, can be viewed at www.electedtv.com1.
The mtvU Uber site is in its infancy -- the site received only 92,000 unique visitors during March, according to comScore Media Metrix Inc. -- but it is available to anyone with an Internet connection.
"Every college student in America has a camera or knows somebody who does, and they play with them all day long," says Mr. Martin, the mtvU Uber programming director. "These students increasingly want to see content that they have a hand in making."
Write to Brooks Barnes at brooks.barnes@wsj.com2
Corrections & Amplifications: Ross Martin is head of programming for mtvU, MTV's 24-hour college channel. An earlier version of this article described him as head of programming for mtvU Uber, a broadband channel run by mtvU.
Wayne State University Leads Detroit Wireless Initiative
NEWUpdate:
Wireless Oakland Project Moving Forward, Official SaysPhil Bertolini, chief information officer of Oakland County last week said the county's Wireless Oakland project - which aims to provide free wireless Internet access county-wide - is on track for completion next year. Matt Roush, editor of our sister publication, the Great Lakes IT Report recorded an interview with Bertolini at the Michigan Technology Leaders 2006 Conference, held in Rochester. To listen to or download a podcast of the interview, click here.
Schools Could Be The First In U.S. To Use WiMax
The Federal Communications Commission has set a 2008 deadline for schools to either use or auction their portions of the spectrum. Some plan to use it for WiMax.
By Elena Malykhina
April 24, 2006
A cash-strapped school district seems an unlikely candidate to embrace bleeding-edge technology. But facing a use-it-or-lose-it choice on its allocated radio spectrum, Milwaukee Public Schools is among several schools and universities ready to take a chance on WiMax wireless broadband, which would make them among the first major U.S. implementers of the emerging tech.
Decades ago, the government allocated a portion of the 2.5-GHz spectrum to schools nationwide for educational television programming, but much of it hasn't been used. In 2004, the FCC issued a proposal: Any portions of the spectrum not in use or leased by 2008 could be auctioned.
Milwaukee Public Schools--where three out of four kids get the free lunch program for low-income students--hopes to build a WiMax network by next summer to give students free Internet access. "We don't want to lose precious bandwidth that can be used to benefit our low-income students," says James Davis, the Milwaukee school district's director of technology.
The district is treading into uncharted territory. A dozen or so municipalities nationwide are setting up free and low-cost wireless broadband networks, but they're using well-established Wi-Fi on the unlicensed 5.4- to 5.8-GHz spectrum. The Milwaukee school district says it's talking to several WiMax vendors with equipment that works with its 2.5-GHz spectrum, but none of it is certified by the WiMax Forum, an industry standards group. Certified equipment is just now becoming available, and it's initially only for 3.5 GHz, a spectrum used in Europe, Asia, and other places where WiMax is gaining momentum, but one that's not yet approved by the FCC for wireless broadband.
In its current state, WiMax wouldn't offer Milwaukee students much mobility. In the first phase, planned for completion by August 2007, the school district plans to place a WiMax antenna on its headquarters to serve a five-mile perimeter. It's applying for a federal grant for laptops equipped with a WiMax chip, expected to hit the market this year. Eligible students would get devices for their homes to receive the antenna's signal. But to stay connected, students couldn't venture far from the device.
Still, the project could test some of the claims WiMax proponents have made about the technology's breadth and speed compared with Wi-Fi, which requires dozens of access points to service a community.
The school district has allocated $240,000 for the first phase and expects to get a grant of around $200,000 from the Department of Commerce, but it's still discussing how to cover the costs of ongoing management and maintenance. It's considering approaching a telecom provider about building the network and giving it any excess spectrum capacity as reimbursement.
WiMax Deals
George Mason University has leased 75% of its spectrum to Nextel and wireless Internet service provider Clearwire, and hopes to work with those companies to use it for WiMax services in Washington, D.C., says Michael Kelley, the university's program director of telecommunications.
Last fall, Wayne State University in Detroit and neighboring school districts sought bids from service providers to lease most of their spectrum to build a high-speed wireless broadband network and offer low-cost services to students and areas without broadband. It's in negotiations with finalists. It's likely going to be mobile WiMax, says Patrick Gossman, director of academic technologies and customer services at the university. "Our students are always on the go and want to stay connected."
But vendors still are working on standards and equipment to enable mobile WiMax, which would allow the kind of roaming Internet use many people imagine. Only if that happens will WiMax make Wi-Fi start to look like yesterday's wireless broadband.
Wireless Oakland Project Moving Forward, Official SaysPhil Bertolini, chief information officer of Oakland County last week said the county's Wireless Oakland project - which aims to provide free wireless Internet access county-wide - is on track for completion next year. Matt Roush, editor of our sister publication, the Great Lakes IT Report recorded an interview with Bertolini at the Michigan Technology Leaders 2006 Conference, held in Rochester. To listen to or download a podcast of the interview, click here.
Schools Could Be The First In U.S. To Use WiMax
The Federal Communications Commission has set a 2008 deadline for schools to either use or auction their portions of the spectrum. Some plan to use it for WiMax.
By Elena Malykhina
April 24, 2006
A cash-strapped school district seems an unlikely candidate to embrace bleeding-edge technology. But facing a use-it-or-lose-it choice on its allocated radio spectrum, Milwaukee Public Schools is among several schools and universities ready to take a chance on WiMax wireless broadband, which would make them among the first major U.S. implementers of the emerging tech.
Decades ago, the government allocated a portion of the 2.5-GHz spectrum to schools nationwide for educational television programming, but much of it hasn't been used. In 2004, the FCC issued a proposal: Any portions of the spectrum not in use or leased by 2008 could be auctioned.
Milwaukee Public Schools--where three out of four kids get the free lunch program for low-income students--hopes to build a WiMax network by next summer to give students free Internet access. "We don't want to lose precious bandwidth that can be used to benefit our low-income students," says James Davis, the Milwaukee school district's director of technology.
The district is treading into uncharted territory. A dozen or so municipalities nationwide are setting up free and low-cost wireless broadband networks, but they're using well-established Wi-Fi on the unlicensed 5.4- to 5.8-GHz spectrum. The Milwaukee school district says it's talking to several WiMax vendors with equipment that works with its 2.5-GHz spectrum, but none of it is certified by the WiMax Forum, an industry standards group. Certified equipment is just now becoming available, and it's initially only for 3.5 GHz, a spectrum used in Europe, Asia, and other places where WiMax is gaining momentum, but one that's not yet approved by the FCC for wireless broadband.
In its current state, WiMax wouldn't offer Milwaukee students much mobility. In the first phase, planned for completion by August 2007, the school district plans to place a WiMax antenna on its headquarters to serve a five-mile perimeter. It's applying for a federal grant for laptops equipped with a WiMax chip, expected to hit the market this year. Eligible students would get devices for their homes to receive the antenna's signal. But to stay connected, students couldn't venture far from the device.
Still, the project could test some of the claims WiMax proponents have made about the technology's breadth and speed compared with Wi-Fi, which requires dozens of access points to service a community.
The school district has allocated $240,000 for the first phase and expects to get a grant of around $200,000 from the Department of Commerce, but it's still discussing how to cover the costs of ongoing management and maintenance. It's considering approaching a telecom provider about building the network and giving it any excess spectrum capacity as reimbursement.
WiMax Deals
George Mason University has leased 75% of its spectrum to Nextel and wireless Internet service provider Clearwire, and hopes to work with those companies to use it for WiMax services in Washington, D.C., says Michael Kelley, the university's program director of telecommunications.
Last fall, Wayne State University in Detroit and neighboring school districts sought bids from service providers to lease most of their spectrum to build a high-speed wireless broadband network and offer low-cost services to students and areas without broadband. It's in negotiations with finalists. It's likely going to be mobile WiMax, says Patrick Gossman, director of academic technologies and customer services at the university. "Our students are always on the go and want to stay connected."
But vendors still are working on standards and equipment to enable mobile WiMax, which would allow the kind of roaming Internet use many people imagine. Only if that happens will WiMax make Wi-Fi start to look like yesterday's wireless broadband.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
21st Century DIGITAL Learning Environments
May 18, 2006
New eSN Resource Center provides insights into how the latest technologies engage the varied learning styles of all students
21st Century Learning Environments
In this brand-new FREE Resource Center from eSchool News, you'll...
See how technology helps special-needs kids pass key tests
Learn how a 'virtual cafeteria' teaches good eating habits
Discover that 'interactive teaching' engages learners
We're living in the 21st century. Unfortunately, the flying cars are still years away. What we do have is an exciting world of new technology that educators can apply to their efforts in the classroom. One might think that all of the great new technologies would have been adopted by now and that the nation’s classrooms would have been updated for the 21st century, but this still is not the case.
For some schools, the biggest challenge is understanding the true nature of 21st-century learning. For others, it’s transforming their clear understanding into a functional reality.For either, the core mission is to provide differentiated instruction tailored to the needs of individual students.
In this new learning environment, all students are able to learn because technology makes individualized instruction a practical possibility. Differentiated instruction enables teachers to address the broad array of learning styles they encounter in the contemporary classroom.
In the 21st-century classroom, educators are empowered to be proactive in their quest for the "teachable moment." As the latest entry in our Educator’s Resource Center, the content in "21st Century Learning Environments" is packed with information, guidance, and ideas that will both help you update your classroom and help you apply this new technology in an effective manner.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Relevance: Student as Partnered Digital Strategist?
Self-fulfilling prophecy for success.....
Eyes Closed Tight
By Gordon Freedman
May 15, 2006
URL: http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187002845
Why does the digital revolution stop at the schoolhouse door?
A decade ago, education leaders raced to get computers into schools. Macs squared off with PCs. Cisco faced off against Novell. The Internet came to life. Why is it, then, that educators who wouldn't dream of buying their airline tickets or banking anyplace but online have not been able to transform education with technology? What happened?
One problem is that schools don't look to other schools to find solutions to common problems. This phenomenon is pervasive. If schools don't consider outside models for ideas to modernize with technology, they can't move forward. It's not just a matter of money, either. Turn loose a tenth grade class on the Web to investigate what works in education and technology and answers will emerge overnight. Maybe educators should take a hint from their students, who are inquisitive and not afraid to take risks.
There's also the issue of internal communication. Typically the technology and instructional departments do not sit down at the same table and ask, how can we work together to improve school performance with technology or help students learn? And too often, administrators don't encourage either group to explore innovative solutions.
The first step is openness and awareness. Every state has its success stories, examples of how technology transformed education. In California, for instance, the state department of education held a High School Summit in 2004 that explored best technology practices and raising expectations for students. The atmosphere at the summit was electric, as you might expect when 3,700 educators see what their peers are doing for the first time.
The next step is to be bold. Let students research how technology could assist them and their teachers. Put them to work looking for homework and test prep solutions, for example, and have them report their findings to the school board. In the words of the education blogger Ms. Frizzle, let's learn how to take chances from our students.
There are several practical ways school boards can attack this problem. If a school's IT department isn't working alongside those who develop curriculum, maybe it's time to establish a position that serves as a bridge between the two. The person in this role (called an "assistant superintendent" or "principal" for performance and accountability) works to ensure the development of joint strategies for higher student performance and better-trained teachers.
Another possibility is to create a new school designation. In the vein of magnet and High Tech High Schools, why not create Schools for the Information Age, modern institutions dedicated to learning as much about themselves, and what's possible with emerging technologies, as they are to delivering curriculum?
Finally, school boards might consider taking a page from the business world. Unlike most school districts, corporations embrace business plans with return on investment components, reinvention exercises, and other tools that demand clearly defined actions and measurable results, as opposed to dust-collecting strategic plans. In adopting these practices, districts will grasp a new and powerful understanding of what works and what doesn't. They will also make what they are learning visible to others.
Gordon Freedman is vice president of education strategy for Blackboard.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
A Formative Check of 21st Century Relevance
Redefining 'Rigor'
In their Education Week Commentary, Ken Kay and G. Thomas Houlihan argue that most high school reform initiatives focus on traditional metrics, which are no longer sufficient indicators of student preparedness.
A more meaningful, ambitious high school reform agenda, they write, can only be reached when high schools succeed in preparing every student for today's global challenges by aligning their improvement efforts with all the results that matter—mastery of core subjects and 21st-century skills.
Are U.S. schools teaching the skills necessary to compete in a global economy? What skills should be emphasized more?
Join our discussion forum, and tell us what you think.
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills Report
http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/documents/RTM2006.pdf
Monday, May 15, 2006
Sunday, May 14, 2006
The URGENCY of the DIGITAL EMERGENCY!
INFROMATION WEEK
Down To Business: Job 1 For The U.S. Economy: Build A Tech Workforce
That's the unanimous answer from five industry CEOs. Are they on the mark, or just motivated by self-interest?
By Rob PrestonMay 8, 2006
What's the single biggest economic challenge facing the United States today? I posed that question to five technology industry CEOs in separate interviews at last week's Interop trade show. Their answers were surprising only in their consistency. All five said the biggest obstacle to our continued economic prosperity is our ability to produce enough skilled workers to meet the tech demands of the coming decades.
Cisco's John Chambers, Avaya's Donald Peterson, Internet Security Systems' Thomas Noonan, Riverbed's Jerry Kennelly, and Silver Peak's Rick Tinsley worry that inadequate schooling, demographic trends, politically correct immigration policies, and American society's underappreciation of the hard sciences will force U.S. companies to fan out abroad--far more than they do today--to find the tech talent they need.
That may sound like posturing in order to create a more abundant--and cheap--labor supply for their companies, but they cite plenty of evidence to back up their concerns. Chambers, who wants to see American kids in kindergarten through third grade get a better grounding in math and science, notes that by the time they reach their teens they consistently score near the bottom in those subjects in tests among the industrialized countries. For example, in the most recent OECD tests of math and science skills of 15-year-olds, the United States ranked 28th and 22nd, respectively, out of 40 countries. In problem-solving skills, American students ranked 29th. Finland, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan were among the leaders in all three categories.
If we don't fix the primary education system in this country--reward the best teachers with higher pay, improve school infrastructure and teaching methods--"we'll leave behind 40% to 50% of our children," Chambers maintains. Noonan, the ISS chief, is ready to go radical: Privatize the entire U.S. education system to make teachers and administrators more competitive and accountable.
Meantime, developing countries are priming their tech workforces. Noonan says he recently spoke to an audience of 700 information security doctoral and master's degree candidates at Beijing University. By comparison, he says, the entire United States has only about 250 such candidates. "When you're putting that kind of horsepower against problems, stuff will happen," says Noonan, who notes that China has more English speakers than the United States.
Kennelly, the Riverbed CEO, notes that technical innovation drives productivity gains, which in any country is the source of wealth creation. Therefore, if U.S. companies don't have ready access to that ingenuity, the domestic economy will stagnate. Another key source of wealth, population growth, is near stagnant in the industrialized world, so Kennelly rails against policies that keep bright foreign managers, inventors, engineers, programmers, and other professionals from emigrating to and working in the United States. "Countries losing their people to other countries should be complaining," he says, "not the other way around."
Silver Peak's Tinsley sees a deeper cultural weakness: From the baby boomers to the current generation, technical education has been viewed as less and less important. Many a reader will argue that fewer American students are gravitating to the hard sciences because they see U.S. companies exporting those related jobs. But with U.S. tech employment and salaries at all-time highs, it's clear that this isn't a zero-sum game.
What's your take? Should we be worrying more about $70-a-barrel oil, our underfunded Social Security system, our mounting national debt, or some other pressing economic challenge than about giving these fat cat CEOs their pick of a plentiful labor litter? Or is this country in for bigger trouble if we don't pay more attention to the tech workforce of the future?
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Cool Stuff and "Obviously Brilliant!"
From our friends up at MSU (Communications Arts Program)
The Tech Tour continued with two stops at Michigan State University.
The first visit was with Yong Zhao, a professor at MSU's College of Education and an expert on the use of technology in education. Zhao has some real problems with the way schools are using technology these days. "Most schools are trying to solve the problems of the past," he said. "They are so worried about low test scores and dropout rates. Those are symptoms, not the real problem. Maybe the real problem is that school is irrelevant to students' lives."
The heart of that problem is a technological one, Zhao argues. "We ban them from MySpace, from blogging, from practically everything on the Internet," he said, when the Web is the very foundation of students' lives today. "All the billions spent connecting schools has been wasted, really more than wasted," Zhao said. "My kids get more experience with technology at Best Buy than they do at school." Zhao said students should be encouraged to use the Web however they please in learning. He also said the Web creates a digital farmer's market, in which people -- no matter what their age or education -- can offer products and services.
Students can quickly move from being digital consumers to being digital producers in everything from design to writing. "It's time to change not only what we teach but how we teach," Zhao said. Zhao is also involved in an effort between MSU and the Chinese government to create the Confucius Institute, which will offer online language courses in Mandarin Chinese. Working with the China Central Radio and Television University in Beijing, MSU officials are creating an immersive video game to help students learn Chinese language and culture. The game will be played by large numbers online; the more Chinese you learn, the more spiffs you earn in the game. It's cool stuff. More here.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Our Voices, Our Futures
Net Day Survey 2005 / Published April 2006
Student and Teachers Views on Science, Technology and Education
"NOT if WE build it they will come BUT when THEY build it THEY will come."
http://www.netday.org/downloads/SpeakUpReport_05.pdf
Student and Teachers Views on Science, Technology and Education
"NOT if WE build it they will come BUT when THEY build it THEY will come."
http://www.netday.org/downloads/SpeakUpReport_05.pdf
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Some industry "view-points" regarding Shifting Digital Video Exectuions
US incumbent telco, Verizon, says that it is developing a pilot VOD service, dubbed "Community Studio," for its Microsoft-powered FiOS TV service
(note: FiOS TV is now available in parts of California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Texas and Virginia), which will feature public interest and civil rights content targeted at ethnic minorities and other groups historically underserved by traditional television.
The telco says that the concept for the new service, which is scheduled to launch later this quarter, emerged in discussions with over 35 civil rights leaders. "FiOS TV's amazing capacity enables us to offer a wide variety of programming, including diverse content featuring voices from the public interest community," Kathryn C. Brown, Verizon's SVP of public policy development and corporate responsibility, said in a prepared statement. "Our viewers will benefit from additional content choices, and the organizations will gain the opportunity to reach our diverse and growing subscriber base nationwide."
Verizon's initial partners in developing programming for the new service are the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the American Association for People with Disabilities, the Black Leadership Forum and the Distance Learning Association. While these organizations will be able to offer programming on the service free of charge, Verizon says that it will accept that programming at its own discretion. As part of the Community Studio project, Verizon's existing VOD service provider, TVN Entertainment (provides, among other things, backend support, transport and element management tools for Verizon's VOD offering), will provide the organizations with an unspecified number of hours of encoding, asset management and distribution services.
DAVE.TV Lets Consumers Create their own Broadband TV Channels
Broadband video distribution company, DAVE.TV (the company's name is an acronym for "Distributed Audio Video Entertainment Television"), has launched a service it is calling the "Social Broadcast Network" (SBN), which allows end-users not only to upload and broadcast their own videos, but to create their own TV channels (which DAVE.TV is calling "MyChannels") featuring their own content, content from other DAVE.TV users, and ad-supported content from DAVE.TV's network of content partners. The service thus enables end-users to create playlists showcasing their own creations and their tastes in media, and share them with their family and friends.
According to the company, SBN is designed to capitalize on the success of user-generated content services, such as YouTube, and of social networking sites, such as MySpace.
Among other things, SBN allows end-users to embed a DAVE.TV MyChannels Player into their own MySpace page, blog or Web site, so that the content lives on their site rather than on a central portal site. DAVE.TV is touting this feature as changing the paradigm of media distribution from the current "one-to-many" model, where users go to a central portal to explore and acquire content, to a "many-to-many more" model, where users can explore and acquire content from their peers. As an incentive for end-users to embed the MyChannels Player, DAVE.TV plans to share advertising revenues for any ads viewed via the Player on end-users' sites. "With DAVE.TV's new Social Broadcast Network, we are empowering a whole new generation of consumers by enabling them to create, share and broadcast content," DAVE.TV CEO, Rex Wong, said in a prepared statement. "We are revolutionizing media distribution by de-centralizing distribution while leveraging viral distribution and word-of-mouth marketing."
DAVE.TV says that it is working with various studios and record labels to create applications that will allow end-users to adapt those studios' and labels' content. According to the company, the first such application will launch in the coming months, and will allow end-users to make their own music videos.
Sci Fi Channel Launches Broadband TV Service, "Sci Fi Pulse"
NBC Universal's Sci Fi Channel has launched a broadband TV service, called "Sci Fi Pulse."
The service currently features complete episodes of select Sci Fi Channel original series, full-length uncut Sci Fi Channel original movies, behind-the-scenes footage, deleted scenes and more. During the summer, it will start rolling out exclusive original content, including a weekly news show, Webisode spin-offs of Sci Fi Channel shows, and user-generated video. It will also host the return of the channel's "Exposure" online film festival. "'Sci Fi Pulse' delivers on our commitment to exploit new digital opportunities for our audience to enjoy and get involved in our programming," Sci Fi Channel general manager, Dave Howe, said in a prepared statement. "Our broadband channel is primed to be the category-killer destination for genre content on the Web, and will further strengthen our relationship with our viewers, building an even bigger online community."
The new service's Webisode offerings are part of NBC Universal's "TV 360" multiplatform content strategy (note: for more on the strategy, see [itvt]'s recent interview with NBC Universal's director of interactive TV product development, Jonathan Dakss, in Issue 6.71). The Sci Fi Channel's participation in the initiative will see it offering original Webisodes of "Battlestar Galactica," and of its forthcoming shows, "Eureka" and "Motel Man" (note: the latter is a working title). It will also see every Sci Fi Channel show currently in development offering some kind of unique broadband component.
Sci Fi Pulse will also feature a fair amount of interactivity in addition to providing content on-demand. The Sci Fi Channel plans to post several potential series pilots on the service for viewer feedback, and says that the fate of the pilots will be "determined in large part" by their reception by Sci Fi Pulse viewers. The Exposure festival, meanwhile, will present Sci Fi Pulse viewers with a series of short films and invite them to vote for their favorites. The films with the most votes will be featured in a two-hour special that will air on the Sci Fi Channel and, possibly, on other NBC Universal linear channels, and viewers will then vote for the best film from the special. The filmmakers with the most votes will have the opportunity to be involved in creating one of the Sci Fi Channel's Saturday night action movies.
MSN in Broadband Programming Deals with Reveille, Be Jane
--Deals are Part of a Microsoft Initiative, Called "MSN Originals"
Microsoft's MSN service has launched an initiative, called "MSN Originals," which it says will allow "top brands [to] tell their stories beyond standard media through in-content integration." As part of the initiative, MSN has signed content partnerships with independent Hollywood production and distribution company, Reveille (note: programs produced by the latter include NBC's "The Office" and "The Biggest Loser," FX's "30 Days," and MTV's "Date My Mom"), and with Be Jane, Inc., a company that produces multimedia content and operates a Web community focused on encouraging women to involve themselves in the traditionally male sphere of home improvement. MSN says that MSN originals will draw on content and services provided by these and other partners to provide consumers with video, interactive community features and multimedia-rich editorial.
MSN's deal with Reveille will see the latter creating and producing original online programming for its service: MSN is creating a production fund that Reveille will use to recruit writing, producing and performing talent, in order to produce pilots and other entertainment programming designed specifically for the Internet.
According to the New York Times, the deal with Reveille has a one-year term and will see the production company creating 10 pilots for MSN; to date, the newspaper reports, four shows have been greenlit, including 1) a comedy about an airline pilot that will likely star Tom Arnold and that will be divided into two-and-a-half minute episodes; 2) a show called "Under the Influence," which will pair musicians with one of the people who inspired them; 3) "Face Off," which the Times describes as "an interactive 'Crossfire' with a pop-culture slant"; and a show with the working title, "Chef to the Rescue," in which chefs will provide advice to people preparing meals. Microsoft and Reveille say that programming created under their partnership will be offered in both linear and non-linear formats and will feature audience participation. Shows that prove successful on MSN may subsequently be launched on traditional television, mobile and other platforms, the companies say.
"The digital future has arrived, and in collaboration with MSN we will be creating new forms of content without boundaries," Reveille CEO, Ben Silverman, said in a prepared statement.
"We believe in a multiplatform world where the best elements of an idea can be tailored to the attributes of the specific media, enabling the audience to have more enriched experiences and advertisers to contextualize themselves in a more profound way."
MSN's deal with Be Jane, meanwhile, will see the latter creating an original online series on home improvement, targeted at women. The series, which will be hosted by Heidi Baker and Eden Jarrin, will provide project suggestions and tips, and will feature the stories of women across the country who have undertaken major home-improvement projects. According to MSN, the series will be "deeply integrated" into the MSN portal's MSN Lifestyle, MSN Spaces and MSN Video areas.
MSN says that it will offer multiple advertising and sponsorship opportunities in conjunction with the new MSN Originals broadband video content: in addition to traditional display and streaming video advertising, it will offer advertisers product-placement opportunities in the content, as well as the opportunity to "be deeply involved in the early stages of content creation and production": Reveille is noted for having funded the NBC reality TV series, "The Restaurant," entirely via product placements.
Narrowstep Powering Golf, Martial Arts Broadband TV Channels
Broadband TV infrastructure company, Narrowstep
(note: the company--whose flagship TelVOS platform powers a number of high-profile broadband TV services, including the ITV Local service of UK commercial terrestrial broadcaster, the Independent Television Network--has reported a significant increase in revenue for its recently concluded fiscal fourth quarter--see article in this issue), has teamed with Brand Live TV to launch a broadband TV channel called GolfBug.tv.
The channel, as its name suggests, is devoted to golf, and provides a daily schedule of programming targeted at players of all levels. "The channel combines news from the pro tours, expert tuition, information on the world's best courses and resorts, interviews with leading golf figures, as well as reviews of the latest equipment," GolfBug.tv's managing director, Andrew Cooke, said in a prepared statement. "There are also live and on-demand broadcasts of great action from events, old and new, and GolfBug.tv will look to carry on the fun and humor that golfers share at the weekend. Using telvOS, Narrowstep's dynamic server technology, we have found that television over Internet Protocol combines the best of traditional broadcasting with the user-control and interaction expected from a Web site. Therefore, our viewers will be able to watch a daily schedule of programming, but also view video content, live as well as on-demand, when and where they wish: at home, at work or while traveling."
In other Narrowstep news: the company's telvOS platform is also powering a new broadband TV channel devoted to martial arts. Dubbed Martial Arts TV and available free of charge to consumers in the UK, the channel features a line-up of content at launch that includes coverage of Thai kickboxing, independent movies, original animation, music videos, and exercise and training videos. According to Narrowstep, the channel--whose management team includes a number of former executives of Paramount, Universal, MTV, EMI, HMV, PolyGram, and UPC--has several large-scale programming deals in the works. The channel also provides various interactive features, including forums, blogs and event and club listings. Like other telvOS channels, it provides consumers with the option of watching scheduled live and recorded programming and VOD, and supports viewing speeds of between 56Kb and 1800Kb (telvOS automatically detects each viewer's Internet speed on log-in). According to Narrowstep, Martial Arts TV plans to expand its broadband service internationally and eventually to launch on digital TV platforms.
(note: FiOS TV is now available in parts of California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Texas and Virginia), which will feature public interest and civil rights content targeted at ethnic minorities and other groups historically underserved by traditional television.
The telco says that the concept for the new service, which is scheduled to launch later this quarter, emerged in discussions with over 35 civil rights leaders. "FiOS TV's amazing capacity enables us to offer a wide variety of programming, including diverse content featuring voices from the public interest community," Kathryn C. Brown, Verizon's SVP of public policy development and corporate responsibility, said in a prepared statement. "Our viewers will benefit from additional content choices, and the organizations will gain the opportunity to reach our diverse and growing subscriber base nationwide."
Verizon's initial partners in developing programming for the new service are the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the American Association for People with Disabilities, the Black Leadership Forum and the Distance Learning Association. While these organizations will be able to offer programming on the service free of charge, Verizon says that it will accept that programming at its own discretion. As part of the Community Studio project, Verizon's existing VOD service provider, TVN Entertainment (provides, among other things, backend support, transport and element management tools for Verizon's VOD offering), will provide the organizations with an unspecified number of hours of encoding, asset management and distribution services.
DAVE.TV Lets Consumers Create their own Broadband TV Channels
Broadband video distribution company, DAVE.TV (the company's name is an acronym for "Distributed Audio Video Entertainment Television"), has launched a service it is calling the "Social Broadcast Network" (SBN), which allows end-users not only to upload and broadcast their own videos, but to create their own TV channels (which DAVE.TV is calling "MyChannels") featuring their own content, content from other DAVE.TV users, and ad-supported content from DAVE.TV's network of content partners. The service thus enables end-users to create playlists showcasing their own creations and their tastes in media, and share them with their family and friends.
According to the company, SBN is designed to capitalize on the success of user-generated content services, such as YouTube, and of social networking sites, such as MySpace.
Among other things, SBN allows end-users to embed a DAVE.TV MyChannels Player into their own MySpace page, blog or Web site, so that the content lives on their site rather than on a central portal site. DAVE.TV is touting this feature as changing the paradigm of media distribution from the current "one-to-many" model, where users go to a central portal to explore and acquire content, to a "many-to-many more" model, where users can explore and acquire content from their peers. As an incentive for end-users to embed the MyChannels Player, DAVE.TV plans to share advertising revenues for any ads viewed via the Player on end-users' sites. "With DAVE.TV's new Social Broadcast Network, we are empowering a whole new generation of consumers by enabling them to create, share and broadcast content," DAVE.TV CEO, Rex Wong, said in a prepared statement. "We are revolutionizing media distribution by de-centralizing distribution while leveraging viral distribution and word-of-mouth marketing."
DAVE.TV says that it is working with various studios and record labels to create applications that will allow end-users to adapt those studios' and labels' content. According to the company, the first such application will launch in the coming months, and will allow end-users to make their own music videos.
Sci Fi Channel Launches Broadband TV Service, "Sci Fi Pulse"
NBC Universal's Sci Fi Channel has launched a broadband TV service, called "Sci Fi Pulse."
The service currently features complete episodes of select Sci Fi Channel original series, full-length uncut Sci Fi Channel original movies, behind-the-scenes footage, deleted scenes and more. During the summer, it will start rolling out exclusive original content, including a weekly news show, Webisode spin-offs of Sci Fi Channel shows, and user-generated video. It will also host the return of the channel's "Exposure" online film festival. "'Sci Fi Pulse' delivers on our commitment to exploit new digital opportunities for our audience to enjoy and get involved in our programming," Sci Fi Channel general manager, Dave Howe, said in a prepared statement. "Our broadband channel is primed to be the category-killer destination for genre content on the Web, and will further strengthen our relationship with our viewers, building an even bigger online community."
The new service's Webisode offerings are part of NBC Universal's "TV 360" multiplatform content strategy (note: for more on the strategy, see [itvt]'s recent interview with NBC Universal's director of interactive TV product development, Jonathan Dakss, in Issue 6.71). The Sci Fi Channel's participation in the initiative will see it offering original Webisodes of "Battlestar Galactica," and of its forthcoming shows, "Eureka" and "Motel Man" (note: the latter is a working title). It will also see every Sci Fi Channel show currently in development offering some kind of unique broadband component.
Sci Fi Pulse will also feature a fair amount of interactivity in addition to providing content on-demand. The Sci Fi Channel plans to post several potential series pilots on the service for viewer feedback, and says that the fate of the pilots will be "determined in large part" by their reception by Sci Fi Pulse viewers. The Exposure festival, meanwhile, will present Sci Fi Pulse viewers with a series of short films and invite them to vote for their favorites. The films with the most votes will be featured in a two-hour special that will air on the Sci Fi Channel and, possibly, on other NBC Universal linear channels, and viewers will then vote for the best film from the special. The filmmakers with the most votes will have the opportunity to be involved in creating one of the Sci Fi Channel's Saturday night action movies.
MSN in Broadband Programming Deals with Reveille, Be Jane
--Deals are Part of a Microsoft Initiative, Called "MSN Originals"
Microsoft's MSN service has launched an initiative, called "MSN Originals," which it says will allow "top brands [to] tell their stories beyond standard media through in-content integration." As part of the initiative, MSN has signed content partnerships with independent Hollywood production and distribution company, Reveille (note: programs produced by the latter include NBC's "The Office" and "The Biggest Loser," FX's "30 Days," and MTV's "Date My Mom"), and with Be Jane, Inc., a company that produces multimedia content and operates a Web community focused on encouraging women to involve themselves in the traditionally male sphere of home improvement. MSN says that MSN originals will draw on content and services provided by these and other partners to provide consumers with video, interactive community features and multimedia-rich editorial.
MSN's deal with Reveille will see the latter creating and producing original online programming for its service: MSN is creating a production fund that Reveille will use to recruit writing, producing and performing talent, in order to produce pilots and other entertainment programming designed specifically for the Internet.
According to the New York Times, the deal with Reveille has a one-year term and will see the production company creating 10 pilots for MSN; to date, the newspaper reports, four shows have been greenlit, including 1) a comedy about an airline pilot that will likely star Tom Arnold and that will be divided into two-and-a-half minute episodes; 2) a show called "Under the Influence," which will pair musicians with one of the people who inspired them; 3) "Face Off," which the Times describes as "an interactive 'Crossfire' with a pop-culture slant"; and a show with the working title, "Chef to the Rescue," in which chefs will provide advice to people preparing meals. Microsoft and Reveille say that programming created under their partnership will be offered in both linear and non-linear formats and will feature audience participation. Shows that prove successful on MSN may subsequently be launched on traditional television, mobile and other platforms, the companies say.
"The digital future has arrived, and in collaboration with MSN we will be creating new forms of content without boundaries," Reveille CEO, Ben Silverman, said in a prepared statement.
"We believe in a multiplatform world where the best elements of an idea can be tailored to the attributes of the specific media, enabling the audience to have more enriched experiences and advertisers to contextualize themselves in a more profound way."
MSN's deal with Be Jane, meanwhile, will see the latter creating an original online series on home improvement, targeted at women. The series, which will be hosted by Heidi Baker and Eden Jarrin, will provide project suggestions and tips, and will feature the stories of women across the country who have undertaken major home-improvement projects. According to MSN, the series will be "deeply integrated" into the MSN portal's MSN Lifestyle, MSN Spaces and MSN Video areas.
MSN says that it will offer multiple advertising and sponsorship opportunities in conjunction with the new MSN Originals broadband video content: in addition to traditional display and streaming video advertising, it will offer advertisers product-placement opportunities in the content, as well as the opportunity to "be deeply involved in the early stages of content creation and production": Reveille is noted for having funded the NBC reality TV series, "The Restaurant," entirely via product placements.
Narrowstep Powering Golf, Martial Arts Broadband TV Channels
Broadband TV infrastructure company, Narrowstep
(note: the company--whose flagship TelVOS platform powers a number of high-profile broadband TV services, including the ITV Local service of UK commercial terrestrial broadcaster, the Independent Television Network--has reported a significant increase in revenue for its recently concluded fiscal fourth quarter--see article in this issue), has teamed with Brand Live TV to launch a broadband TV channel called GolfBug.tv.
The channel, as its name suggests, is devoted to golf, and provides a daily schedule of programming targeted at players of all levels. "The channel combines news from the pro tours, expert tuition, information on the world's best courses and resorts, interviews with leading golf figures, as well as reviews of the latest equipment," GolfBug.tv's managing director, Andrew Cooke, said in a prepared statement. "There are also live and on-demand broadcasts of great action from events, old and new, and GolfBug.tv will look to carry on the fun and humor that golfers share at the weekend. Using telvOS, Narrowstep's dynamic server technology, we have found that television over Internet Protocol combines the best of traditional broadcasting with the user-control and interaction expected from a Web site. Therefore, our viewers will be able to watch a daily schedule of programming, but also view video content, live as well as on-demand, when and where they wish: at home, at work or while traveling."
In other Narrowstep news: the company's telvOS platform is also powering a new broadband TV channel devoted to martial arts. Dubbed Martial Arts TV and available free of charge to consumers in the UK, the channel features a line-up of content at launch that includes coverage of Thai kickboxing, independent movies, original animation, music videos, and exercise and training videos. According to Narrowstep, the channel--whose management team includes a number of former executives of Paramount, Universal, MTV, EMI, HMV, PolyGram, and UPC--has several large-scale programming deals in the works. The channel also provides various interactive features, including forums, blogs and event and club listings. Like other telvOS channels, it provides consumers with the option of watching scheduled live and recorded programming and VOD, and supports viewing speeds of between 56Kb and 1800Kb (telvOS automatically detects each viewer's Internet speed on log-in). According to Narrowstep, Martial Arts TV plans to expand its broadband service internationally and eventually to launch on digital TV platforms.
Keep America Beautiful Detroit Community Clean-up Event
Although off-subject for this blog-site........some may find it interesting.
http://www.keep-it-moving.blogspot.com
http://www.keep-it-moving.blogspot.com
Friday, May 05, 2006
Microsoft Software / Discounted for Education
Michigan students, teachers get Microsoft at a discount:
Students, teachers and school staff members at K-12 public schools throughout the state of Michigan may now purchase personal copies of popular Microsoft software packages at significant savings through the Microsoft Student Select Program. The program, announced Friday, is the product of a licensing agreement between Microsoft and the REMC Statewide Cooperative Acquisitions Project and administered through Journey Education Marketing Inc. and Educational Resources.
REMC provides school districts opportunities for greater efficiency and economy in acquiring goods and services. The Student Select program enables grades K through 12 teachers, students and their parents to buy single Microsoft products for home use at a discount of up to 85 percent. The program makes it easy, accessible and affordable for teachers and students to work on school projects at home on the computer, using the same Microsoft programs used at their schools. The program pricing ranges from $79.98 for the productivity suite Microsoft Office 2003 Professional to $34.98 for the note taking software Microsoft OneNote 2003. K-12 students, parents and teachers can place orders online at www.journeyed.com/ER. JourneyEd processes the academic verification that is required by Microsoft, to ensure that only qualified Michigan K-12 students, teachers and staff are ordering the specially priced software.
Students, teachers and school staff members at K-12 public schools throughout the state of Michigan may now purchase personal copies of popular Microsoft software packages at significant savings through the Microsoft Student Select Program. The program, announced Friday, is the product of a licensing agreement between Microsoft and the REMC Statewide Cooperative Acquisitions Project and administered through Journey Education Marketing Inc. and Educational Resources.
REMC provides school districts opportunities for greater efficiency and economy in acquiring goods and services. The Student Select program enables grades K through 12 teachers, students and their parents to buy single Microsoft products for home use at a discount of up to 85 percent. The program makes it easy, accessible and affordable for teachers and students to work on school projects at home on the computer, using the same Microsoft programs used at their schools. The program pricing ranges from $79.98 for the productivity suite Microsoft Office 2003 Professional to $34.98 for the note taking software Microsoft OneNote 2003. K-12 students, parents and teachers can place orders online at www.journeyed.com/ER. JourneyEd processes the academic verification that is required by Microsoft, to ensure that only qualified Michigan K-12 students, teachers and staff are ordering the specially priced software.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Knowledge at the speed of light requires agile, adaptable and innovative strategic thinkers
The Future of the Future: Learning fast to stay relevant in a flat world
Posted Apr 26, 2006 / Knowledge Management
This is the first entry to our new column that will present ideas and challenges from leading thinkers and practitioners on "the future of the future." The intent is to raise awareness and attention on this important and timely topic. If we are successful, we will prompt and provoke our readers to participate in a manner that leverages our collective intellect and creates some new knowledge in the process.
If you've read The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, you are acutely aware of the impact globalization is already having on the world economy. Markets are constantly changing. In a world where a new entrant can leap-frog market leaders in a single bound, people need to learn fast from everything they do to stay relevant and ahead of the competition. U.S. Army company commanders are beginning to do just that, performing successfully on missions they have never been trained for and where the enemy changes its tactics on a daily basis.
Just as those leaders are learning to adapt and innovate at the speed of change to succeed on the battlefield, so must business leaders and knowledge workers of the future learn to innovate and adapt if they are to succeed in the global marketplace. Observations gleaned from the Army company commanders community of practice provide us with some insights on what is required to effectively "lead on the edge": increased self-awareness, adaptive leaders, fast learning processes and leveraging global know-how through communities of practice and passion.
Increased self-awareness--Admitting to yourself and others what you don't know is not easy. Attempting this in many organizations is a sure-fire way to limit your upward mobility. However, when you do understand what you know, admit what you don't know and realize you don't know what you don't know, you open up the floodgates for new knowledge to flow to you from others. You begin asking questions you were afraid to ask and challenge assumptions that never seemed right in the first place. "What if" and "Why" become a routine part of your language.
Adaptive leaders--The ability to adapt quickly to new situations is part science and part art. The science part involves tapping what's already known about a particular environment, training, deliberate planning and preparation. The art part is about considering new possibilities, walking through new scenarios and asking fellow team members "what they would do if." That gets everyone thinking, generating ideas and options to put in their back pockets if and when the need arises.
Equally important, these mini-rehearsals provide a leader with clues on how his or her people will think and act in different situations. Plus, the leader is modeling the behavior that he or she wants others to emulate. Let's face it, most of us only embrace what we see the leader do, not what we hear the leader say. Leaders on the edge also develop an appreciation for shared leadership. Leadership by a single person is not sufficient when faced with a complex, rapidly shifting environment. Leadership that is shared enables a team to swarm and adapt at the speed of change demanded from a level playing field.
Fast learning--Learning before, during and after everything you do must become routine. With routine comes speed, and learning with speed delivers high performance. The results of methods such as peer assists (learning before doing), action reviews (learning while doing), and after action reviews (learning after doing) are well-known. If you are not applying those techniques in your projects and teams, now is a good time to start. But fast learning is not just something you do with your team. You can apply those tools to yourself every day to accelerate your own pace of learning and performing.
Here is a checklist of simple questions to guide you for fast, individual learning:
To "learn before doing" at the start of your day or any activity:
- What is supposed to happen today?
- How will I know if I'm successful?
- What knowledge do I need to get what I want done, and where can I get it?
- What help do I need?
To "learn while doing" in the middle of a task or activity:
- What was supposed to happen up until now?
- What has actually happened?
- Why are 1 and 2 different?
- What can I learn and do about it right now?
To "learn after doing" at the end of the day or a task:
- What stands out for me that is new or different?
- What should I repeat next time I do this, and why?
- What should I do different next time, and why?
- Who else may be facing similar challenges and might find this useful?
Communities of practice and passion--A lot has been studied and said about communities of practice. In companies where they are making a difference (and there are a lot less of these than we are lead to believe), results are being measured by incremental performance improvements (good thing) and number of hits on a community Web site (unsure thing). Where a community has developed a powerful identity and passion exists for the profession or practice, a step-change in performance results. In those communities, people develop courage to become more self-aware.
The Army company commanders community is one of those. It is comprised of members who care as much for each other's success as their own. It is a virtual place for leaders on the front line to ask for help, challenge their relevancy, learn and test out ideas. Communities of passion are rapidly institutionalizing new knowledge across the Army institution in ways never before possible. They are helping build self-aware, adaptive leaders who learn quickly from each other's latest experience.
Learning and performing at a rate equal to the speed of change in the battlefield is a requirement for survival today. For business leaders and knowledge workers, global marketplaces are the battlefields of the future. Learning fast to stay relevant needs to start now. Try one of the tools from the checklist above and let me know what happens!
New Hardware Technology
Gentlemen:
Review this link when you have time, Intel is investing a billion dollars in this project
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060504/ap_on_hi_te/tech_congress;_ylt=A9G_Rw9sTllErUsB8AFj24cA;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--
Walt
Review this link when you have time, Intel is investing a billion dollars in this project
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060504/ap_on_hi_te/tech_congress;_ylt=A9G_Rw9sTllErUsB8AFj24cA;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--
Walt
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Detroit Digital!
A Guide to the Online Video Explosion
Feature:
A Guide to the Online Video Explosion
Plus:
The New Networks
Watch This way
My Favorite Vlogs
Lights! Camera! Vodcast!
Are you Ready for Googlevision?
What do you want to watch?The answer used to depend on limits - what day it was, what time it was, what channels you got. A handy little thing called TV Guide laid it all out. Television was a one-way medium - big broadcasters pushing content into our living rooms at a specific time and place.
Not anymore. Online video has arrived, unleashed from the networks, cable companies, and media giants. Thanks to growing bandwidth, easy access to the means of production, and cheap storage, it's exploding all around us and becoming a very real, very different way to experience news and entertainment.
Even the old guard gets it (sort of). From Desperate Housewives on your iPod to MTV Overdrive, the networks are racing one another to get their broadcast programs online, while also creating Web-only content.
But don't let them fool you. What's happening here isn't just TV online. Gone are the rigid 30- and 60-minute blocks; now the clip is it - be it 30 seconds or eight minutes, we're watching only the money shots. Gone is top-down broadcasting; instead, the network has been, well, networked, with thousands of creators and places to watch, from single-serving sites like Rocketboom to slick aggregators like iTunes and blinx.
And gone, too, is the at-this-time, at-this-channel programming; now we're not only time-shifting with DVRs, we're space-shifting as well, watching stuff on our laptops, iPods, and cell phones - even loading it back onto our TVs.
Missed Oprah squashing James Frey? No matter - you could catch the choice bits of the gotcha episode on YouTube later that afternoon. Want to see the best shorts by SNL's "Lazy Sunday" guys? You won't find them on NBC - try The 'Bu on channel101.com. Still watching Must See TV on Thursday nights? How quaint.
Sure, a lot of the material is junk: dorm pranks, nip slips, America's silliest home videos. But some of it is brilliant: House of Cosbys, Kevin Sites's hot zone at Yahoo! News, archives of cold war propaganda films. Some people look at the sheer amount of material and see a mess. But we see, amid the flood of content and competing delivery services, a new medium emerging, one with fewer gatekeepers, more producers, and - somewhere - something for everyone. And that's the point: The mess is the message.
That doesn't make it easy to sample. So we've created a Me-Vee Guide - a way for you to understand, navigate, and participate in the online video explosion.
What's on? Whatever you want.
Feature:
A Guide to the Online Video Explosion
Plus:
The New Networks
Watch This way
My Favorite Vlogs
Lights! Camera! Vodcast!
Are you Ready for Googlevision?
What do you want to watch?The answer used to depend on limits - what day it was, what time it was, what channels you got. A handy little thing called TV Guide laid it all out. Television was a one-way medium - big broadcasters pushing content into our living rooms at a specific time and place.
Not anymore. Online video has arrived, unleashed from the networks, cable companies, and media giants. Thanks to growing bandwidth, easy access to the means of production, and cheap storage, it's exploding all around us and becoming a very real, very different way to experience news and entertainment.
Even the old guard gets it (sort of). From Desperate Housewives on your iPod to MTV Overdrive, the networks are racing one another to get their broadcast programs online, while also creating Web-only content.
But don't let them fool you. What's happening here isn't just TV online. Gone are the rigid 30- and 60-minute blocks; now the clip is it - be it 30 seconds or eight minutes, we're watching only the money shots. Gone is top-down broadcasting; instead, the network has been, well, networked, with thousands of creators and places to watch, from single-serving sites like Rocketboom to slick aggregators like iTunes and blinx.
And gone, too, is the at-this-time, at-this-channel programming; now we're not only time-shifting with DVRs, we're space-shifting as well, watching stuff on our laptops, iPods, and cell phones - even loading it back onto our TVs.
Missed Oprah squashing James Frey? No matter - you could catch the choice bits of the gotcha episode on YouTube later that afternoon. Want to see the best shorts by SNL's "Lazy Sunday" guys? You won't find them on NBC - try The 'Bu on channel101.com. Still watching Must See TV on Thursday nights? How quaint.
Sure, a lot of the material is junk: dorm pranks, nip slips, America's silliest home videos. But some of it is brilliant: House of Cosbys, Kevin Sites's hot zone at Yahoo! News, archives of cold war propaganda films. Some people look at the sheer amount of material and see a mess. But we see, amid the flood of content and competing delivery services, a new medium emerging, one with fewer gatekeepers, more producers, and - somewhere - something for everyone. And that's the point: The mess is the message.
That doesn't make it easy to sample. So we've created a Me-Vee Guide - a way for you to understand, navigate, and participate in the online video explosion.
What's on? Whatever you want.
A Sense of the IMPENDING!
Two-Way Internet TV Coming of Age?
April 2006 
The jury is still out on whether Internet television is the next best thing in cyberspace or simply a buzzword that will fizzle out. One project that has made full use of Internet Protocol TV technology was conducted on the eve of Earth Day by Chantilly, Va.-based Communication Technologies. Otherwise known as COMTek, the company claimed that it had succeeded in hosting the single biggest simultaneous application of two-way IPTV technology ever attempted.
The initiative linked up more than 16,000 high school and college students across the United States to see and chat simultaneously with nine scientific and religious experts through the Earth Day Network to discuss climate change and global warming.
"COMTek has the ideal global network consisting of our own private IP, fiber, wireless, broadband over power lines and satellite links, and the right background in managed network services to make an event possible on this unprecedented scale." said Joseph Fergus, chief executive of the company. "This will be the first, true broadcast of real scope featuring IPTV service with full interactive capability. COMTek IPTV is a revolutionary new way to communicate that holds great promise for the Internet user community. The COMTek Network Services Team brings together nationally recognized media and technology leaders who have applied their skills and talents to create our innovative and patent-pending 'PowerTV' IPTV platform, which is truly unlike any other out there today."
And discussing the science of climate change from both a political and religious perspective is certainly a topic that could benefit from the technology that allows users not only to communicate with each other by voice, but visually as well. Earth Day Network was itself founded by the organizers of the first Earth Day in 1970 and now reaches more than 12,000 organizations in 174 countries, with 3,000 groups engaged with the network in the United States alone.
Taking questions live from students and being able to interact with them is a "major leap forward in our education efforts that means we will be able to reach literally hundreds of thousands of young minds at the same time -- and to get feedback from many of them as well," said Jeff Nesbit, vice president of communications at Earth Day Network.
To be sure, Internet television has the potential to engage users and make it even easier for two-way conversations than ever before in cyberspace. Indeed, business executives including former Walt Disney Group chief Michael Eisner have been putting their own money into Internet broadcasting ventures.
Earlier this week Eisner announced that his venture-capital group, the Tornante Company, would invest in a San Diego-based start-up called Veoh Networks. Founded in 2004, Veoh specializes in using the Internet as well as peer-to-peer technology as a broadcast system that is open and will allow anyone to broadcast videos directly.
"Cable and satellite fundamentally changed the way television was distributed by creating the capacity for greater choice in programming. Veoh revolutionizes television again by leveraging the Internet to expand broadcast capacity to the point that every single user, whether an individual or a media company, can create their own 'channel' and every 'channel' can be supported by its own business model," Eisner said. "In the past, distributing television programming required an enormous broadcast infrastructure. Veoh enables anyone with an Internet connection to distribute and receive programming in the highest quality," he added.
Certainly, Eisner is bullish about the prospect of the Internet television industry and Veoh in particular, as are many analysts following the technology. Indeed, some argue that unless major telecommunications carriers too join the IPTV bandwagon, they will be jeopardizing their future.
"In the mid-1990s, when (telecommunications companies) were considering TV services over their networks, the business case pivoted on the question, 'Can we afford to do this?' Ten years on, in the face of an intensely competitive broadband market, the question has changed. Now it's, 'Can we afford not to do this?'" argued John Delaney, an analyst with London-based research group Ovum.
Indeed, last month German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom announced it would tie up with Microsoft to provide television viewing on its broadband network amid a host of other European companies announcing similar initiatives to provide online TV services that will allow interactivity and other features that are currently being provided by cable and satellite networks.
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