From the American School Board Journal, September 2003, by Kathleen Vail:
Many schools already have high-speed, or broadband, access to the Internet. So the question isn't whether you have broadband, but what you are doing with it. Unfortunately, even if the connections are robust, the content and the applications are not. The possibilities seem limitless, but good-quality multimedia curricula and applications are in short supply.
Cable in the Classroom, a nonprofit education consortium of cable companies, attempted this spring to get the educational broadband ball rolling by creating a free Shakespeare unit, which uses live-streaming video so students can compare two performances of the "to be or not to be" soliloquy in Hamlet.
"This is meant to be a catalyst," says executive director Peggy O'Brien. "Teachers and schools in general would begin to insist on content available like this. It's a big order; it's reinventing a few things."
Milton Chen, executive director of the George Lucas Education Foundation, compares the state of multimedia education with educational television 30 years ago. He believes children's educational television never reached its full potential because it didn't have a consistent source of funding. Without private or public funding, he notes, content won't grow.
"What is needed are breakthroughs in content," says Chen. "We are on the brink of a new, multimedia world, and we need new forms of educational content."
Multimedia content on the Internet has the potential to alter how we think of education and schools. "The argument is when students and teachers have ability to access content from the greatest libraries, museums, that will change the nature of instructional materials and experiences," says Chen.