January 2006 — Features
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Beyond Borders
Instant Headaches
Still, not all schools want completely open international communications. Many schools, for instance, block popular consumer IM systems from America Online (www.aol.com), Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), and Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com). However, the IM systems, although wildly popular with students, can introduce security and privacy risks to school networks. Hackers increasingly target IM systems to spread worms and viruses. The number of IM attacks increased 226 percent between October and November of 2005, according to Akonix Security Center (www.imsecuritycenter.com), a company that tracks monthly threats to peer-to-peer software systems.
Most schools block sites that allow instant messaging. 'The schools in Kesennuma and Callisburg have unblocked the necessary sites,' says Karla Burkholder, Callisburg ISD's director of technology. 'Other schools in the program have had to move their videoconferencing off site to private homes or to Starbucks.'
In addition, most Starbucks (www.starbucks.com) retail locations now offer basic Wi-Fi Internet access through such service providers as T-Mobile HotSpots (hotspot.t-mobile.com) in the US and Bell Hotspots (www.bce.ca) in Canada. Starbucks partnered with Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) to roll out the wireless Internet access across all its stores.
Distant Challenges
Although technology shrinks the world, it doesn't eliminate international time-zone differences. Since Japan is 14 hours ahead of Texas during daylight-saving time, the Callisburg students and the Japanese students needed to carefully plan videoconferencing times that were amicable to both groups. The Texans agreed to convene after school at 5:30 pm to link up with the Japanese students, for whom it was 7:30 am.
Some students are learning to be flexible at an even earlier age. In November, a United Nations educational conference held in Sendai, Japan, featured a videoconference between Kesennuma Omose Elementary School and Callisburg Elementary School. Callisburg students, parents, and teachers agreed to sacrifice their Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 24) in order to communicate with their counterparts in Japan, where—due to time-zone differences—the conference kicked off on November 25.
Such compromising will serve students well as they head to college and then the business world. 'Many junior executives find it difficult to adjust their schedules to international time zones and foreign cultures,' says Ed Golod, president of Revenue Accelerators (revenue-accelerators.com), an executive consulting firm in New York. 'International collaboration, in essence, trains students to adapt to these issues before they enter the workforce. In many ways, these children are learning the lessons of international business before they even make it to high school.'
