Today is Inauguration Day in the States and here in our little Canadian school we have the ceremonies being streamed over the Net in two different locations. This has really taxed our connection.
Tweets are coming in from my Twitter list from people whose school connections are also strained. People are unable to access overtaxed news sites. Many of these people are resorting to (horrors!) plain old network T.V.
The Internet has so much potential to connect people. The Net makes it so easy to give resources to people who couldn’t normally access them.
I guess our infrastructure needs to expand as today has demonstrated. The Internet is only as strong as its weakest link. None the less, the potential is pretty exciting. We can bring an event, a message, an idea to the farthest corners of the world. As I like to tell my students, we, as individuals, have a greater ability to communicate a message than anyone before us in the history of the planet.
Seeing the system fail today is not a reason to give up on the power of the Internet, but to expand it.
Hi Linus!
Our school also attempted to stream the Inauguration Day ceremony, with no luck. Only one teacher managed to get things to work on his own classroom computer. I have also had this same problem with another major event outside of school. You are right, the system failure is not a reason to give. I also had problems with Firefox over the past few days at school but I haven’t shut down my virtual classroom over it, I adapt – I have a backup written lesson ready in case of tech problems!
Like your blog, good post. Added you to my feed reader.
Cindy
Thanks for the feedback, Cindy. It’s nice to know that I”m not alone out there in the Web 2.0 wilderness.