We got back from the holiday yesterday and then proceeded to spend yesterday catching up with the washing and, for some inexplicable reading, building a raised herb garden. After almost getting on top of those two tasks I hit some other stuff.

Quote from Nicholas Negroponte:

“In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint,” Negroponte wrote in an e-mail interview. “I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools.”

From MSNBC. It’s not just happening in the developing world and it’s not just happening in the labs. The approach that starts with the tool / toy / application will always end up just teaching the mechanics of machine usage.

Rachel at Bard Wired tagged me with a Five Things meme. I’ll look at that one later.

The BBC are saying that people will soon be watching up to 10% of their TV viewing on their PC.

Early trials of the BBC’s on-demand service showed that users spent 10 per cent of their video-viewing hours online, and Highfield expects this to hold true when the iPlayer is launched. The figure includes internet video watched on the television or home computers, as opposed to TV services broadcast by more traditional means such as analogue and digital terrestrial or satellite.

TVNZ have some plans to do this next this year, although I did find these two links recently: TVOne and TV2. The quality isn’t great (come to think of it, neither is the content usually) but it could be a useful way to keep an eye on a programme. I’ve found it to be a useful way to listen to BBC World in the middle of the night while cruising through other web sites.

So is it going to be useful? I’m not too sure. I think that bandwidth with be a killer. Afterall, recently even my ISP of choice decided that while I could have as much data as I wanted, I couldn’t have it at peak time. Yes I can get 7 hours of streaming video. But if the other members of the household want some of it or want to do something else then I might be down to dialup speed halfway through something. Another drawback is the stuff that’s available. The BBC won’t let me watch their online material because I’m not in the UK IP range. Sure there is YouTube and Google Video. Perhaps Venice will be the answer. Democracy is starting to show some promise – although there’s still a lot of rubbish.

EDIT: Just found TVU Networks too – could be worth a spin.