Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/ietf/trainmat/trainmat-minutes-94dec.txt

Text File | 1995-02-22 | 9KB | 214 lines

CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_

Reported by Carol Ward/NASA

Minutes of the Network Training Materials Working Group (TRAINMAT)


Administrative Items

The agenda of this meeting and the minutes of the last meeting were
approved.


Catalog Of Network Training Materials

The beginning of the meeting was given to discussion of the Catalog of
Network Training Materials which was submitted as an Internet-Draft in
early December (draft-ietf-trainmat-catalogue-01.txt).

Jill Foster began with a brief overview of the charter of the TRAINMAT
Working Group and the beginnings of the TrainMat catalog.  The catalog
was to be modelled after the TOPNODE model, which was an NSF-sponsored
project.  The catalog is based on work done by Margaret Isaacs for the
UK Training Materials project.  Because the information that was
gathered for the catalog was done in 1992, it is in need of being
updated.  The goal of this group is to update the existing catalog,
``prune out'' items that are not relevant, and augment with new items if
applicable.  The hope is that it will be trimmed to a manageable size;
perhaps half of what exists now.  Volunteers were enlisted from various
sites on the Internet and they were tasked with updating and verifying
items that were currently cited.  This input was collected and
incorporated and then released as the current Internet-Draft.  At this
writing the catalog is available via the following URLS:

     http://coolabah.itd.adelaide.edu.au/TrainMat/catalogue.html
     gopher://trainmat.ncl.ac.uk/11/Bibliography/IETF_TERENA/
     ftp://ftp.isi.edu/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-trainmat-catalogue-01.txt

Mark Prior has taken the template and created an HTML form so that
updates and additions could be made via the Web.  The HTML form is at:

     http://coolabah.itd.adelaide.edu.au/TrainMat/form.html

The template is at:

     http://coolabah.itd.adelaide.edu.au/TrainMat/template.html

Unfortunately, at this time, the form only seems to work with some
browsers (e.g., MacWeb, XMosaic).  Mark is in the process of contacting
all those concerned with the browsers to report the problems.  In the
meantime, updates can be submitted using the template and sending it to
[e-mail].

Once the catalog has been pruned vigorously, verified and issued as an
RFC, it was suggested that items removed from the catalog should be
retained in a separate ``historical'' appendix.

Currently the document is organized in the order that the templates were
received and in one very large file.  The plan is to WAIS index it.  The
gopher version at the University of Newcastle will be moving off the
existing server to a new machine so that this can be implemented
(subject to effort being found).

Discussion and announcements pertaining to TrainMat will be officially
moved to [e-mail].

The next item on the agenda was discussion of the template and its
fields.  Jill explained that all but one field is IAFA compliant.  Work
is being done to cope with the wrapping of the URL field and with blank
lines.

The group was polled for their thoughts on whether or not the
``Category'' field was useful; and if so, what would these
``categories'' be?  Suggested items were:  Presentation Materials,
Networking Guides, Resource Guides, and Training Materials.  It was
suggested that perhaps ``Training Materials'' was too broad and
subcategories might be created beneath this.  After much discussion, the
group agreed that Training Materials would be broken down into
subcategories of:

   o presentation materials
   o self-paced
   o workshop exercises

Anything beyond this could be cross-referenced using the keywords field.

The group came to agreement on changing the wording of the
``Organization-Location'' to ``Organization-Address.''

The group considered the ``Language'' field of the template next.
Currently, it is requesting that the ISO 639 code followed by the
English word for the language be provided.  The group felt that this
could be a deterrent since some people were not familiar with the ISO
code.  Mark Prior said he could add an ``options'' button on the form
(i.e.  the most frequently used country codes).  The group thought this
would be helpful and suggested that this be discussed further on the
mailing list.

The wording on the ``Cost'' field was debated, however, the group
thought this should also be discussed further on the mailing list.

Other decisions pertaining to the template were:

   o ``Access Type'' should be kept.

   o Change wording of ``File Size'' to just ``Size'' reached no
     consensus one way or the other, so it will be left ``as is.''

   o ``Record-Last-Verified-Date'' should be kept.

   o No ``reference'' (e.g., ISBN) would be needed for electronic
     information.

   o Handles -- do we want to use them?  This is a unique identifier for
     the template and Mark needs them.  The Handles would be generated
     at the time the template was submitted.  It would greatly
     facilitate updating the guide and in the future could be used with
     Whois++.  The group consensus was yes.


It was also announced that Pete Percival at Indiana University would be
willing to mirror the catalog in the U.S.


Review of Available Materials

Skipped for Mark Handley's presentation.


Using The Net For Training

There was some discussion at the Seattle IETF about using the MBone for
training.  One suggestion was a tutorial on HTML authoring.  Joyce
Reynolds has been pursuing this but so far has not had much luck.

Mark Handley from University College, London, gave a presentation on
using video conferencing for training.  He gave three examples of where
this was being put to good use; Surgery Teaching, MICE project and
Remote Language Teaching.  (Their Web page was just announced on
net-happenings:  http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mice/.)

He believed Surgery Teaching held the most promise because there is a
real need, surgery is very visual, and because hospitals are a very
``technologically aware environment.''  The hope is to link operating
theatres with lecture theatres.  They are currently using 2Mbps H.261
video codecs and circuit emulation over ATM and MCUS twice a week.  They
recently did a test over the MBone between the Medical Center at the
University of California, San Francisco and Gottenberg.  They did
experience very slow data rates and some packet loss.  In order for the
technology to be used more successfully the bandwidth on the MBone needs
to be increased and the Reservation of Bandwidth Protocol (RSVP) needs
to be deployed.  This could be within the next 1+ year.

Mark Handley went on to describe his project, Multimedia Integrated
Conferencing for European Researchers (MICE), using video conferencing
and shared white board.  They have been using the MBone to do a series
of seminars on Distributed Systems, etc.  It is ``sourced'' from London,
Oslo, Stockholm, Darmstadt, and LBL and has been running since 1993.  He
says loss can be a large problem and is getting worse with increased
network usage and currently it is not visually oriented.

His final example was remote language teaching.  He cited the positive
reasons for using video conferencing technology as:

   o technical language teachers are a scarce resource
   o geared towards one-to-one training

And the negatives being:

   o currently the video to sound synch is not good enough
   o Mbone is not ready
   o RSVP in not ready to be deployed

As it stands now, experimental use of the MBone should be restricted to
within a country where bandwidths are higher.

Mark also answered questions regarding the CUSeeMee video conferencing
software for Macs.  Currently Macs do not support Multicasting (but it
is coming soon), so in order to use it over the MBone it means
sacrificing the quality of the MBone.  He believes it is better for
smaller groups.


Liaison With Other Groups

The TERENA ISUS Working Group was discussed in the USWG Working Group
meeting.

Jill announced that SURFnet has produced a network training floppy disk
for distribution to users (it's in Dutch of course).

Mark Prior has been trying to contact AARNET trainers; many of them are
in libraries.  He said traditionally libraries ``do not talk to computer
centers,'' however, Mark is trying to rectify this.  He has been
recently contacted by the Oztrain group who are interested in the work
being conducted in this working group and he will attempt to get them
involved with the ongoing work on the catalog.


Any Other Business

It was suggested that the ROADMAP series be added to the TrainMat
catalog.

Jody Chu announced that University of Hawaii has three new training
components scripted (videos) and they would be due out in the Spring.
She has the Distance Education Group working with her.  She hopes to
bring them with her to the next IETF. Once they have completed their
pre-test, she'll make a formal announcement to this list

Others described their network training activities.