{"id":223,"date":"2015-03-23T07:00:41","date_gmt":"2015-03-23T14:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/gigabit\/?p=223"},"modified":"2015-03-22T14:40:04","modified_gmt":"2015-03-22T21:40:04","slug":"the-importance-of-the-gig-in-chattanooga-and-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/gigabit\/the-importance-of-the-gig-in-chattanooga-and-everywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"The Importance of the Gig in Chattanooga &#8212; and Everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hive Chattanooga is heading to <a href=\"https:\/\/us-ignite.org\">U.S. Ignite\u2019s 2015 Summit<\/a> in Washington, D.C. on March 23. This dynamic event brings technologists, policy leaders and community organizers together to chart a <a href=\"https:\/\/us-ignite.org\/smartfuture2015\/\">Smart Future<\/a> made possible by next-generation networks. Two Hive Chattanooga Projects, <a href=\"http:\/\/hivecha.org\/portfolio\/adagio\/\">Adagio<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/hivecha.org\/portfolio\/viditor\/\">Viditor<\/a>, will demo at the Summit, showing attendees the smart future of education that we are already experiencing with Chattanooga\u2019s gigabit network.<\/p>\n<p>In Chattanooga, our team is constantly asked the same big, juicy question by community members: <b><i>so what?<\/i><\/b> Why do you really need a gig? Why do high-speed networks really matter? My hope is that our project teams\u2019 demos help to answer this \u201cso what?\u201d question. We\u2019re excited to captivate summit attendees with how next-generation networks can make teaching better, learning more fun, and classrooms more engaging through real-world, community-based gigabit innovations.<\/p>\n<p>Answering the \u201cso what?\u201d question wasn\u2019t easy when we first launched Hive Chattanooga a year ago. Chattanoogans had seen demos, concerts and showcases displaying the power of the Gig, but few community members had experienced the impact of our next-generation network in their everyday lives. <b>The <\/b><a href=\"http:\/\/hivecha.org\/portfolio\/#\/*\"><b>eight projects<\/b><\/a><b> we\u2019ve supported through the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund have changed this community dynamic, moving \u201cthe Gig\u201d from abstract idea to reality<\/b>. The impact on learning that next-generation networks can have is now abundantly clear to the thousands of students and hundreds of educators teachers who have interacted with the Hive Chattanooga Gigabit Fund projects. That impact includes these essential qualities:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b><b>Immediacy: <\/b><\/b> Next-generation networks make learning immediate and immersive &#8212; just ask any student who\u2019s built a video with <a href=\"http:\/\/hivecha.org\/portfolio\/viditor\/\">Viditor<\/a> or any teacher who worked with a student across town via video through <a href=\"http:\/\/hivecha.org\/portfolio\/wireless-earth-watchdogs\/\">Wireless Earth Watchdogs<\/a>. Gig speeds mean that students don\u2019t have to wait for a video download or for their projects to compile losing valuable classroom minutes. They don\u2019t experience weird lurches in video calls or buffering times on media-rich websites. This advantage may seem minor, but its impacts on engagement are huge. When videos load instantly, there\u2019s no time to become distracted with another tab or another student. When there\u2019s no lag on video calls, distance learning feels like in-person learning.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><b><b>Equity: <\/b><\/b>High-speed networks level the technological playing field for Chattanooga\u2019s students. Gig speeds mean that schools don\u2019t need the latest and greatest hardware to be on the cutting edge of technology. Chattanooga\u2019s high-speed network allows data to stream without delay or lag to the cloud, where hardware-intensive processes can take place. This means that students working on old laptops or outmoded tablets can &#8212; without a great processor or expensive software &#8212; edit videos thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/hivecha.org\/portfolio\/viditor\/\">Viditor<\/a> or mix music with <a href=\"http:\/\/hivecha.org\/portfolio\/adagio\/\">Adagio<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The students, teachers, and community members who have participated in Gigabit Community Fund projects through Hive Chattanooga might not be able to explain software-defined networking, how <a href=\"https:\/\/www.geni.net\/\">GENI<\/a> works, or why low-latency connections matter. However, they do know that they don\u2019t have to wait for the video they made to upload and that they won\u2019t have lags or freezes when talking to a class on the other side of Chattanooga via video chat. These Chattanoogans have experienced the benefits of the gig &#8212; the <i>so what? <\/i>of this work &#8212; even if they can\u2019t explain it with technical jargon. They have experienced how our next-generation network makes learning more immediate and bleeding-edge technology more equitable and accessible. They\u2019ve experienced the <a href=\"https:\/\/us-ignite.org\/smartfuture2015\/\">Smart Future<\/a> in Chattanooga today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hive Chattanooga is heading to U.S. Ignite\u2019s 2015 Summit in Washington, D.C. on March 23. This dynamic event brings technologists, policy leaders and community organizers together to chart a Smart Future made possible by next-generation networks. Two Hive Chattanooga Projects, &hellip; <a class=\"go\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/gigabit\/the-importance-of-the-gig-in-chattanooga-and-everywhere\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":700,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/gigabit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/gigabit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/gigabit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/gigabit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/700"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/gigabit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/gigabit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/gigabit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/gigabit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/gigabit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}