Wild west show

I learn a lot from taking part in international projects, and I am currently involved in several which are occupying my mind. By far the largest project I was involved in though, was a $90 million Star Schools Project in South Dakota - the Digital Dakota Network - in 2001-2003. It all started when I was invited in July 2000, all expenses paid, to make a trip across the pond as a guest of the then Governor of South Dakota, the Hon. Bill Janklow. I arrived in the small sleepy, state capital of Pierre (pronounced peer) and booked into the local Ramada Hotel. Pierre sits straddling the Missouri river, and is therefore in two time zones. When the bars shut east of the river, you walk over the bridge and into a bar on the west of the river, and get an extra hours drinking in (if you like that sort of thing, that is).

I was driven by my hosts to the Capitol building and ushered into the Governor's conclave where I gave a speech to a gathering of around 100 guests, many of whom were either working in the government or were school superintendents. My talk, about the current state of distance education, was well received because the entire Star Schools Project the state was about to embark upon was premised on distance learning. Every school in the state (and their libraries, colleges and universities too) were being cabled up with broadband, and equipped with full motion video conferencing, digital satellite reception - the whole nine yards. I later met up again with Bill Janklow over breakfast in Washington D.C. in April 2001. He was just about to go off to the White House to meet up with President George 'Dubya' Bush, but said he needed a few minutes with me to talk over a proposition. He offered me a job as his 'Digital Network' Ambassador, along with a house, schooling for my 3 kids and a job for my wife, if I would up sticks for two years and join him. It was a tempting offer, but I had to refuse due to a number of intractible issues. We compromised, and I later joined his team as the part-time lead evaluator for the project. Over the next two years I jetted back and forth across the Atlantic, gathering data, meeting and working with my team of researchers (pictured above), conducting interviews, collating data and generally trying to make sense of all that we were learning about this vast, sweeping, state-wide project. At the time the Digital Dakota Network was the largest distance education project of its kind, and we had a great opportunuty to discover how learning would be affected by the new technology. However, it was often the anecdotes rather than the hard data that were the most illuminating...

I heard one story that I would like to share here. It says a lot about the human condition, and a lot more about the impact of teachers on the young mind. In fact it follows on from yesterday's blog post. Janklow was a clever guy, and to cut costs, he enlisted the help of a number of residents of the state penitentiary, who he sent out in supervised road gangs to wire up the schools across the state. In one school, one of the convicts, dressed in the obligatory orange overalls, was up a step ladder, running cables through the ceiling of a classroom. A young lad walked in, saw the prisoner, and asked him. 'Mister, what did you do to be sent to prison?' The convict looked down as the little boy and with a straight face said: 'I didn't listen to my teacher...'

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Wild west show by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

1945 and all that

This is part 9 in my series on the history and impact of distance education. Yesterday in Part 8 we saw how the television was conceived and invented. However, before the introduction of geosynchronous satellite technology, global telecommunication was problematic, and global distance education continued at the pace of the snail mail whilst radio and audioconferencing the mainstay distance communication media.

1945 is a momentous year in the history of the development of distance education technology. It was not only the year we saw the back of the Second World War. It was in this year that a young English scientist published a seemingly outlandish article in the magazine Wireless World.

The article, entitled Extra-Terrestrial Relays speculated that if three radio transmitters were placed at equidistant points at a precise altitude above the Earth's equator, they would be able to achieve global communication coverage. This is a facsimile of the original article. The author of the article was none other than the now celebrated science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and other stories), and the article was instrumental in opening the debate about the feasibility of global communication satellites. Just 12 years later, on October 4th 1957, the USSR succeeded in launching the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit - and the Space Race began.

The most important aspect of Clarke's theory was the placement of the satellite at a precise orbit of 22,300 miles over the Equator. At this altitude, Clarke speculated, the satellite would have exactly the same velocity as the rotational speed of the Earth, and it would therefore appear to be stationary in the sky. This technique is now well established, enabling satellite users to dispense with expensive tracking devices. Communication satellites are placed into geosynchronous orbit, and this zone of optimum distance above the Equator is now referred to as the Clarke Belt. If you are in the Northern hemisphere, you will see that satellite dishes tend to point South toward the Equator. In the Southern hemisphere the opposite applies. In Equatorial regions, it's a common site to see satellite dishes pointing right up at the sky, and some have holes drilled in them to drain the rain water out! Queen Elizabeth II knighted Clarke for his services to science in 2000. Sir Arthur C. Clarke retired to the island of Sri Lanka where he died in 2008.

In 1965, Clarke's dream was realised when the first ever geosychronous communication satellite was positioned in orbit above the Atlantic Ocean by NASA. By 1969, three satellites had been linked to achieve the first fully global satellite coverage. For more on the uses of satellite technology in distance education visit here. Today, a lot of distance education provision is dependent upon geosynchronous communication satellites, and we take for granted the ability to talk to people on the other side of the world via telephone, video or other means. Watching live events from around the world on television is not something we think of as particularly special. We are so used to the idea that satellites are there, we give them no second thought. If they suddenly disappeared though, I think we would all know it.

On Monday: Part 10: University of the second chance

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Clarke's legacy

So farewell to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who has died at the age of 90. Born in Somerset, and the son of a postal worker, he was probably best known for his work as a science fiction writer, with books such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 - pictured) and Rendevous with Rama (1972). I enjoyed reading his books as a lad, and still recall the abstract beauty and surreality of the Stanley Kubrick film that was made based on his novel. I particularly recall the psychopathic supercomputer HAL, which reminds me a little of someone else...

But Arthur C. Clarke leaves a legacy of a different kind. Not everyone has read his books or seen the films, but everyone in the Western Industrialised world, and many more in the emerging nations make use of one of his ideas every day. Geosynchronous satellites. It was his idea originally - that's why communication satellites are now placed above the equator at around 23,000 miles high, in the 'Clarke Belt'.

We have a lot to thank him for, and I still keep a link to a facsimile of his 1945 Wireless World article about 'rocket ships' and 'extra terrestrial relays' on the satellite technology pages of my e-learning website. Take a read. It's well worth it just to see how far we have come, and to acknowledge the great man's prescience....

Petrol, passports and papaya

I'm not happy. I noticed this morning that my petrol gauge was low, so on my way into the office I visited our drive-in garage. The forecourt notice announced that the garage was 'closed due to a technical fault'.

OK. I decided to drive-out of the drive-in and drive back in to fill up later. When the 'technical fault' was resolved. During lunch break I walked into town to grab some passport application forms at our walk-in post-office. All eight (yes 8) shelves labelled 'Passport Application Forms' were empty. Would you believe it? Not a single form. Just a paperclip.

The final straw fluttered silently down onto my shoulder tonight. I was at my local supermarket (name withheld to protect the guASDAilty). I searched high and low. My favourite tinned papaya fruit was not on the shelves! 'Don't do them no more' muttered a spotty youth behind the information desk through a mouthful of bubble gum. He was probably suffering from a technical fault.

What is going on? Nothing I need is available. To cap it all, even my internet connection curled up its toes for a couple of hours earlier this evening, so this blog post has been delayed due to my computer taking leave of its line. No. Normal service will not be resumed as soon as possible. The wheels are coming off - and it's all because everything is becoming far too complicated I think. When I was born my father never had cause to complain to his Internet Service Provider. When I was at school in the 60s living in Gibraltar, we never had interrupted satellite transmissions due to torrential rain. And I only ever once suffered a spam attack when I was in college (and that was in the canteen). Things were so simple then, and they are so complicated now.

I've had enough. I'm off to bed - if it's still available....

October 4 and all that

Today is a momentous day. I was just a four month old baby at the time, but my cradle was rocked, I can tell you. You see, today is the 50th anniversary of the day the space race started. Some might cynically say it was at the expense of the human race. Maybe, but when the USSR (remember them - they did a world tour in the 1960's) launched the world's first artificial satellite - Sputnik - we entered into a new era of telecommunications which eventually evolved into a vast global network that now enables us to receive live television pictures from virtually anywhere in the world. Without satellites there would be no GPS, no iridium satellite mobile telephony and no whole host of other things we have since discovered we 'can't do without'. Google Earth is a classic example of satellite imagery in action.

I have dedicated an entire page of my eLearning @ Plymouth website to satellite communications if you care to take a look. I spent a considerable time in the 90's working on a project where we regularly used live digital satellite television to deliver distance education to a large reception area covering most of Western Europe. We still have a satellite research centre at the University of Plymouth. You could say that satellites have played a big part in my life.

October 4th is momentous for me for another reason. Today is my 21st wedding anniversary. I'm off now to buy some flowers....