Bandwidth and community platforms
John Smith has posted a useful post about Bandwidth and community platforms. I am snipping good portions of it here because it is relevant not only to some current work we're doing with some fantastic education leaders in Colombia, but is always part of my international work. John had heard feedback about X or Y tool taking more bandwidth than other tools. He decided to do some research. In the conversation there seemed to be several leading proposals about what to do: I kept arguing that there was more concurrent stuff to be done than waiting for these, which sounded like somebody else’s job. Ideas that came up: What else?"I decided to compare the size of several arbitrary pages. I chose 5 platforms: ClearSpace, two tools that participants in the Foundations of Communities of Practice are currently comparing to each other, Moodle (because I’m doing a project on it) and Web Crossing (which is where the Foundations workshop is held). I saved 5 pages and added up the bytes according to the several different types of files that made up a page. A quick and dirty way of making the comparison:"
The first thing is that communities can't ignore the problem. It is so easy to say "we tried our best and if you can't make it work for you, I'm sorry." We cut out participation by a) those less technically confident and b) those with real technical constraints (bandwidth, firewall, etc.)
But it is so frustrating to solve the problem, often I find myself and others I'm with giving up, because the more we try, the more people we lose as we simplify things down to the common denominator: email.
How do we set up expectations with each other so we can wade through the technological challenges so we are inclusive, so we don't spend too much attention on technology and forget the reason we come together and which does not "give up" when things get difficult?
posted by Nancy White at 12:12 PM
2 Comments:
Here are some resources related to this issue that I came upon today
Web Design Guidelines for Low Bandwith
http://ictkm.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/web-design-guidelines-for-low-bandwith/
From David Warlick: "One of the many things that impressed me about the chat occurred early on, when much of the conversation was about the slowness of the download. I deleted much of that conversation from the chat transcript, because it did not really contribute to the topics at hand. But several folks started brainstorming ways to produce mirror sites for the keynote. I know of two additional links that were produced, and read in a blog yesterday that someone put it on Google Video.
The resourcefulness and collaboration impressed me. We were watching learners overcome a boundary. Perhaps this is one of types of boundaries that we should consider inventing, boundaries that are created to be overcome. It’s another edu concept in Ender’s Game, that the students were encouraged to play video games, and Ender and other students learned to hack the games, and the teachers were able to discretely observer and assess the future commanders as they accomplished goals by changing the rules."
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2007/10/14/k12-online-preconference-chat-is-complete/
Bandwidth and community platforms divide many of us. No matter how effective we believe our collaborative processes are, they usually aren't.
Somewhere in the race of first adopters, folks may benefit by stepping back a pace or 10.
To become the least among OTHERS we interact with helps us experience problems and understand the answers those OTHERS are trying to use.
So to recap: I would like to focus on these two take away concepts for improving Community Platforms through and around the Bandwidth issue.
Periodically, each bandwidth King or Queen:
1. Use a dial-up network supported by an small independent company. NO DSL. Surf an hour on the dial-up. That is a real eye-opener.
2. Work with others of like mind to develop work arounds. There is always a way to solve a problem, I just don't know it YET, because WE haven't tackled it.
I appreciated your good ideas about this low bandwidth and community platform issue.
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