Wireless Learning Environments
Wireless Learning EnvironmentsProposal - Wireless Computerized Learning Environments -- ThinkingOutLoud DonaldNoyes 20060829
... that all new schools consider wireless first. Getting into the actual technology solutions for a minute, let us take a hallway in an old school with eight classrooms in a double-loaded corridor. One option is to fully wire two of these classrooms and equip them each with 30 computers. Under this scenario, the remaining six classrooms will not be computer enabled. In New York City, it would cost about $150,000 to bring electric and network cabling to each desk within these two classrooms. The cost of the computers is extra. With this solution, you would essentially have two very inflexible computer labs within every eight-room segment of the school. On the plus side, you would have a very generous bandwidth for your heavy multi-media applications that must travel through the LAN. However, this arrangement will not necessarily speed up Internet communications, which will continue to trickle in at about 1.5 mbps.
Assuming that this same corridor has four wireless hubs installed with overlapping coverage, any two unwired classrooms equipped with wireless cards can be simultaneously on the wireless LAN, each receiving 20 mbps of data. Since the LAN itself is only used to communicate with the Internet or send messages to others on the network, this data-transfer rate or bandwidth is more than adequate.
... the economics for wireless computing works in new buildings as well. I am a proponent of wireless computing not simply because of the economics, but because it provides the least intrusive and most flexible method for bringing computers into classrooms and into school. For example, a child working on a research assignment in the library could continue that research in the classroom, lunchroom or even in a shady corner of the courtyard.
Related:
With Television going Digital in the next few years and the auctioning of Frequencies formerly occupied by it, the Wireless Environment is most certainly going to explode into usefulness, in ways we do not now even imagine. -- DonaldNoyes 20071010
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