blogging at 10,000 feet

As it turns out, on my flight back to SLC the wireless access was free. I never really thought I would pay for internet access on a plane, but since it was free I thought I would go ahead and check the scores and my email. But the really interesting thing is that the internet access up here is much better than it was in my hotel room. There, it was worse that a 28K modem. But here it is pretty fast. I guess the thing it makes me remember is the importance of making web sites accessible to people with disabilities of course but also to people with slow connection speeds. Blackboard, for example, does not work well at all when the internet access speeds are slow. Everything takes several minutes to load. So I am a little behind on helping my TA out with his portion ogf the grading, which he cannot do since the internet access where he is is even slower. So with case-based learning, since that is what my students will be learning about next week, videos can be crucially important to help describe cases. But videos can take up a lot of bandwidth. One way to get around that is to use really good compression technologies, and it have multiple options of people who can download lower quality versions if they have slow internet. Now if we could just get blackboard to create a low-bandwidth alternative....