We are in the process of setting up a virtual classroom for high school
music. And the question has come up regarding storage and bandwidth.
The variables we need to think about are disk space, number of
students, frequency of uploading and downloading, number and size of
music files created during the course. For example; lets say each
student created 40 minutes of music files per week, and lets consider
the school year is 44 weeks. Given each minute of music is 1 megabyte
(MB) that would mean each student would create 1,760 MB or 1.7
Gigabytes (GB) of music during the school year or approximately 200 MB
per month. Now consider we have 50 students, that means we will require
88 GB of disk space by the end of the year. And if all students are
expected to be listening to half of the students work we will need 5 GB
of monthly bandwidth. Now 5 GB is a low number for monthly bandwidth
and we shouldn’t expect extra bandwidth fees for this low level of
traffic. But what happens if the site becomes popular and its
popularity spreads like wildfire (which happens within the social web
2.0). We get hit with 10,000 visitors (a potentially low number)
downloading a full months worth of music, that would be 100,000,000 MB
of bandwidth or a 100 Terrabytes. Now our bandwidth fees shoot off the
scale. I think we should limit access to just the students…
As far as I am concerned, Quentin D’Souza has it right. This is iLearn 2.0.
I’ve been put back into a focus upon technology and education. I’ve been so busy blogging about my critical technology that I haven’t had much time to blog on the subject of technology and education. I have been asked to be a reseach associate for a project where we are looking at teaching music (the fiddle to be precise) online. A very interesting project where we have a very active and innovative high school teacher who loves to use technology to teach. He really doesn’t have much choice as his students are spread all around the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. I’ll be watching what he does and make suggestions to the lead researchers and they will make the call if they introduce my ideas to him, as they don’t wan’t to disrupt his processes.
So here are my thoughts after leaving his talk from Wednesday 25th of November;