Lessons learned in China

My trip to China was amazing. I had a great time and learned a lot. Overall I'd say our learning system will work in China. Sight seeing was fun, but mostly Terrie and I enjoyed the shopping. Below are some of the lessons I learned while in China.

Lesson one- All the web 2.0 sites I use (such as this blog) don't work in China. I was planning on updating my blog on a daily basis as well as my Facebook and Twitter status. Of course if I had thought for a minute I would have remembered that none of these sites work in China.

Lesson two- Video sucks in China. YouTube didn't work, but Viddler did. Well, it wasn't blocked, but it still took at least 30 seconds for videos to play. I should not have been surprised by this, but I still found it weird that the people I talked to haven’t ever heard of YouTube. Although Viddler worked, it did not work very fast. Our biggest challenge seems to be streaming video.

Lesson three- There are decent server hosting solutions in China. China telecom is the hosting company run by the government. It basically hosts everything. We got a price from them equal to about 10K/year which does not include any service at all. if something goes wrong and we need a hard reboot- we have to hire somebody to go in for us and turn it off. We then met with a sub contractor who quoted us a price that was only a third of the price and included 24/7 support. So, what should we choose; cheap with service, or expensive with no service? Seemed like an easy decision for me- but apparently China Telecom is what everybody uses because it is so much more secure.

Lesson four- Test speeds indicate that most of our Westminster specific tools work great in China. Some of the test speeds are a little hard to interpret. Some of our wiki pages loaded in less than 3 seconds, and most less than 10 seconds. The video’s we tried to play took between 15-30 seconds to begin playing. The results were pretty consistent between testing on campus, in the hotel, and an internet café. Unfortunately things were noticeably slower when we ran our tests at our interpreter’s house (it was a DSL line but only got speeds of about 500 kbps which might explain the slow load time).

Lesson five- Shopping in the bargain markets is fun especially once you realize how to play the barter game. Always offer 25% of their first offer and stick with it. I love how many of them would finally break down and give me the price I wanted because we were “friends”.

China: Browser tests

While in China I'm going to be testing how quickly our Westminster sites load- particularly our LMS, wiki, and web conferencing tools. To do this test we are going to be taking at three laptops and we will purchase one there. We will be running tests from the hotel, on campus, at a student home, and from an internet cafe.

I have assumed that I should be performing these tests with Internet Explorer. I've heard that China tends to use mostly Microsoft products, but I thought before I go that I'd do a speed test while still in Utah so I have a comparison. I don't use I.E. very often, so I decided to run my own browser comparison to see what is the best browser for the Westminster IT system.

The browsers I've used to compare are:

• Internet Explorer 8.0.6
• Firefox 3.5.3
• Google Chrome 3.0.1
• Safari 4.0.3

The complete results can be seen on this Google Doc: Division of New Learning Browser Test.

There were 27 sites that got tested. Here is a table which shows the total number of sites where each browser was best and worse.

Browser	Best	Worst
Internet Explorer	3	17
Firefox	9	3
Chrome	7	2
Safari	8	5

I find it interesting that IE is the most popular browser in the world, but from what I've seen it has the worst performance.

I'm going to China!

I'm going to be in China the next week and I'm going to try to blog about this as much as possible. My wife is going to be blogging about more of the fun/sight seeing stuff that we do, so you might want to check it out if you are wanting the fun stuff. I'm going to try to blog as many of the technical lessons that I learn about. My hope is that by recording my thoughts while I'm there I won't forget some of the valuable lessons I'm sure to learn while there.

At Westminster we have been building a relationship with a University in Shanghai. The relationship is going to come into fruition next fall when we launch a partner degree.I get to go on a visit to their campus so I can see what their technology systems are like. I'll be testing our online learning tools and trying to figure out how well our servers work from China.

Basically I know very little at this point. I have a few assumptions, but I'm basically going into this without knowing what to expect. I've got a list of tests that I'm going to be running while I'm there, but if anybody reading this has any suggestions or questions that I should be researching while I'm there feel free to ask them in the comments.