The government touted the beginning of the roll-out of the Rural Broadband Initiative last week with the first three rural schools connecting to ultra fast fibre.  The media event saw schools in Henderson, Omaio in the Bay of Plenty and Granity School near Westport connected by video over fibre cables to hold an on-line astronomy lesson.

All that is just fantastic and Minister Steven Joyce’s clear delight at the commencement of the rural broadband project is gratifying.

But in some ways, the Minister's media event was a tragedy.

We have effectively lost three years in the roll-out of high speed broadband to schools because of government ideology getting in the way of just getting on with building the infrastructure.

Those three years may never be recovered compared to the gains of other countries that are using high speed broadband today.

Schools in South Korea are promising a paperless classroom by 2015.  So the heavy back-packs full of text books that we see some young children lugging to school, will be a thing of the past in Korea before all of our schools have access to libraries of digital books.  The cost-savings of not having to purchase expensive text books for a one-time use will make higher education available to many more people who previously simply could not afford it.

In remote western China, around 2,200 students have been enrolled in e-Education initiatives that are raising a new generation of software engineers.  The impact is to significantly increase average household earnings from $10-$15 per month.

In Australia, the investment in e-Learning initiatives is now greater than that of instructor-led training leading to productivity gains in the education and training sector.

Last week we looked at the dramatic impact of e-Education on the poor in India.  More interestingly, the experiments of educationalist Sugata Mitra in group-centred learning without the involvement of a teacher promises new ways of teaching, ways that are focused more on the learner than the teacher.

That the Internet has already fundamentally transformed education around the world is clear.  And here is New Zealand, just getting back to rolling out high speed broadband to rural schools now, the same position we were at 6 years ago under a different program led by a different government.

This is the tragedy of the Minister's election year media event.  Instead of using the last three year's to build on and improve the previous program, we have seen little progress in e-Education activities. Students in those schools that are at the tail-end of the six years still remaining in the Rural Broadband Initiative roll-out, will be at a greater disadvantage.

There are a number of New Zealand schools that are not waiting for the government to do it for them.  They are just getting on with what they see as the best thing for their students.

In Auckland, Pt England School is already using a web-focused approach to make a real difference to their student’s achievement.  As a part of their strategy, they are implementing a community WiFi network so that students can take their school laptop home to complete homework and study requirements, and to explore the world in ways that suit them.

Also in Auckland, Albany Senior high School uses web technologies, including mobile devices, to enrich their student’s learning experiences.

If there is a positive to take out of the commencement of the rural broadband initiative, it is that through a focus on schools, the government are sure to build a culture of use of high speed broadband, and so the promised benefits will, eventually, accrue.