In the 80s, when most people didn’t even know what email was, the closest thing most nerds came to the internet was through things called BBSs. Esoteric text-based systems such as Wildcat were called up by people using their phones and 300 baud modems. Strange, beardy characters who gave themselves names such as Plembo and who knew what the Hayes command “ATD” did. It was a world of High Nerd and very few people knew much about it. They played games such as nethack (and still do), and thought graphical user interfaces were for weaklings. Some, gloriously, still do.

I remember seeing my first fast modem later in that period. It was a Netcomm Trailblazer. I stood in an office marvelling at how quickly the text appeared on the screen. It was a joy to behold. There were jealous oohs and aahs, but no thoughts of watching videos, listening to music or doing anything like that. It was only 14400 bps from memory. It was s.l.o.w. Almost one quarter the speed of, say, the average 56k modem that comes with a squealing aeroplane-fanned doorstop PC from KMart.

It really only started to be interesting to most when the world wide web appeared. And things started to feature pictures and text (courtesy of NCSA Mosaic amongst other things). Sure, email and other cool things might have had something to do with it too, but they’d been around sometime previously (email had existed since 1972). No, pictures and the www did a lot popularise the internet; in 1996, 56k modems started to make things look good by making pictures download slightly faster than watching a hard drive defragment itself beside a wall of drying paint. Most people didn’t want to ring up BBSs and type messages to other people who also rang up BBSs to talk about … ringing up BBSs, the computer subculture and miscellaneous topics on Usenet about odd things. They wanted to read news stories with pictures. Read about celebs. With pictures. And there was something else that involved pictures that we won’t go into. And they wanted to see lots of content from all over the place. So old fashioned BBSs all but died, and people began ringing ISPs to get on to the internet.

Next came the next smallest media type - music. And that only became viable when it was compressed into, amongst other things, the famous mp3 format. Small enough to download. And then there was the Napster phenomenon and all that legal malarkey as an entire industry realised it could be being visited by the grim reaper in the form of a cheeky, pimply teen in a Metallica t-shirt.

And then … moving pictures, in really small boxes that you squint at and then go for a coffee or herb tea or massage while you wait for the “buffering …” or “loading …” message to disappear. But even video of this kind has turned into something of a phenomenon. Youtube, the biggest of the video sites may not make much money, but it could be on to a good thing, or it may not.

According to The Age newspaper, quoting from an Accenture report:

Accenture said that, although predominantly younger consumers were driving changes in consumer behaviour, the trend could not be written off as a temporary fad.

“Change will only accelerate over the next 10 years as today’s youth gain purchasing power,” it said.

To address the trend, media companies would have to consider overhauling existing business models to offer more flexible ways of accessing content, Accenture warned.

“They must experiment with new channels of content distribution and new business models. In addition, they must provide the consumer with more of an editorial role in selecting, modifying and sharing the content.”

Of course, this is all predicated on people having fast enough connections to do all this. Once it’s cheap enough for the average punter to download and upload a given type of media easily, you see riots and ructions. Text and pictures changed the newspaper industry, the classifieds industry, and changed the culture of journalism, amongst other things. Mp3s changed the way music was promulgated, it changed the music industry forever. Video is in the process of changing the nature of TV, movie distribution and so on. Education will be shaken up by this sort of change, too; it is, in some respects, just a purveyor of various types of media too; classes can be delivered via video, scholarly articles can be distributed via services such as JSTOR, academics can write blogs, lectures can be recorded on video and streamed online, tutorials and classes can be conducted by video conference, and so on.

As E-learning develops, and as internet capacity increases, online education stops being just about fairly boring static content; it starts replacing some tutorial rooms and class rooms for some courses. The young people, who comprise a great many students, will be used to the new technology and happy to use it. The interesting question is: how long before this happens on a wide enough scale to start changing education a lot? And how long before it is much more fun and informative than going to, say, a stuffy old lecture or another boring tutorial? Or boring old high school? Or an an uninspiring tech college’s theory classes?

How long before the local University is also competing for students with the greatest and best from all over the world? Why attend a lecture about a topic by some lesser academic when you could watch the lady who wrote the book, so to speak, over the internet? And perhaps, attend, a video conference tutorial with her as a tutor with other students from all over the world? What if you could put together a load of different subjects and classes from different Universities to create courses? What if teachers start going freelance and offering their own courses from their own web sites?

It depends on the ubiquity of fast internet connections amongst students. It took from 1962, when the first widely available 300 baud Bell 103 was made by AT&T, to 1996 when the 56k modem was released, to go from 300 bits per second to 56,000. Now over 2 million people in Australia usually get between 256k and 1.5 mps using what is optimistically referred to as “broadband”, mostly using DSL. It is still relatively expensive, and most punters are limited by the amount of data they can download, but it’s getting cheaper.

So it seems likely bandwidth will increase over the next 5-10 years. ADSL2+ being the next big change-over. It gives much increased speeds: early adopters are seeing speeds of up to 24 Megabits per second. Good quality live e-Learning, voice over IP telephony, video on demand, and all sorts other multimedia will be possible at that sort of speed. But it’s some way off as a commonly used technology; in Australia it depends in many hard-to-assess factors, not least of which is the current debacle of Telstra. Just keep an eye on those “average punter” broadband uptake stats and the costs of serving content; the changes in education will follow.

But there is something else to consider, too. With all this bandwidth being downloaded in the future, someone has to serve it. It is a massive leap from providing some static files, some course notes, some pictures, some pdfs and the occasional mpeg to providing video conferencing, video on demand, and other services to students. The costs of bandwidth increase considerably. A University may have to serve, say, 8, or 20, or 100 feeds for a class. And receive a feed from each of those students too. Things can get out of hand quickly! It is as if you stopped driving around a scooter and suddenly started paying to fill a v8’s tank. So bandwidth costs for educational institutions will have to come a down a bit, too, before the new technology starts to be commonly used.

And as an aside, those who are the best (and cheapest) providers of the type of IT infrastructure required to cater for these students with broadband are not educational institutions. They’re people such as Amazon with its S3 service and its eccentricly named Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2), or possibly Google or other data centre specialists. As an aside, Google already have some great lectures online. People such as Amazon and Google can scale effectively to meet demand, Google can implement clever programming such as MapReduce. Organisations of their ilk can do things a typical educational institution’s IT department can’t.

Indeed, a great deal of educational institution IT infrastructure is unwieldly. It can’t just be moved to new systems such as EC2 easily to reduce costs. It has horrors such as Peoplesoft installations that eat small children instead. But as I wrote in another post, the same technical and social changes that are making e-Learning more important are also providing alternative ways of garnering qualifications. Those alternative ways of garnering qualifications will make the most of cheap IT infrastructure such as Amazon’s EC2. Traditional educational institutions will have to do the same, otherwise they will (technically) be less useful to students, and (price-wise) be relatively expensive.