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Page 57
8
The Electronic Universe: Network Delivery of Data, Science,
and Discovery
Gregory Bothun, University of Oregon
Jim Elias, US West Communications
Randolph G. Foldvik, US West Communications
Oliver McBryan, University of Colorado
Abstract
When technologists discuss the "information highway," their
conversations usually revolve around high-end technologies such as
"broadband" and ''asynchronous transfer mode" (ATM). Unfortunately,
this focus on the exclusive use of very high bandwidth solutions
fails to reckon with the limitations confronting many learning
institutions, and especially most of the K-12 environment, in
gaining access to the "highway" or even exploring their
options.
This paper describes a set of advanced networking tests that
were conducted in Oregon and Colorado during 1994 and early 1995.
High-speed ATM capabilities were effectively merged with readily
available T1-based connectivity to deliver affordable information
highway capabilities to K-12 educational institutions. Innovative
collaborations between the university and K-12 level served to
accelerate the introduction of the new technology to the K-12
level. A range of application capabilities were effectively
delivered over the integrated ATM/T1-based infrastructure.
Multimedia workstations were used for video to the desktop, desktop
video teleconferencing, and access to multimedia servers via Mosaic
and the World Wide Web.
The tests that were conducted, and the results and trends, are
covered in detail in this paper. These findings are then used to
suggest technology deployment models for the next 5 to 7 years.
Statement of the Problem
The concept of "network everywhere" is a goal that is achievable
through cooperation between education, industry, telecom carriers,
and the government. But why is this important? Its importance lies
in a paradigm shift in how the individual interacts with and views
the world. Almost 300 years ago, the philosopher John Amos Comenius
penned these words: "It is lamentable, utterly unjust and insulting
that while all men are admitted to God's theatre, all are not given
the chance of looking at everything."
This is a description of an inclusive philosophy of education
that has never really been implemented. Instead, education has
focused intensely upon the exclusive theme of "educating each
according to his or her needs." Ironically, K-12 education is now
in a position of reviving this old idea through the use of new
technology: the high-speed network. High-speed network connectivity
will provide the K-12 classroom with a vast array of resources in
all disciplines.
Is access to high-speed networking a reasonable goal for the
K-12 classroom? Unfortunately, the high media profile of fiber
optics, high bandwidth applications, and advanced communications
technologies has distracted many institutions from exploring other
options for access. This is the case with most of the K-12
environment. There may be other ways for them to deal with some of
the limitations confronting them. This is particularly true in most
of the western states, where low population densities and
correspondingly high deployment costs prevail. These challenges
created an opportunity to explore the limits and possibilities of
defining a high-speed ATM trial network for the educational
community that could be integrated with the existing
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
school district
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geographically dispersed public network. This trial environment
offered an opportunity to explore existing biases about fiber optic
and high-speed networks, overcome the constraints of distance and
dispersed population centers, and bridge the ever widening
educational gap between technological "haves" and "have nots."
Education and lifelong learning are primary keys to societal
success on both a personal and a national level. As our
information-oriented society continues to move rapidly forward,
tremendous pressures are exerted on schools at every level of
learning. The rate of information acquisition in learning and
scientific inquiry is astounding, making it extremely difficult for
teachers and school districts to keep up. The problem is
particularly difficult for both rural and urban schools with
limited enrollments, diverse student populations, and constrained
budgets. Many students in these types of schools are being taught
advanced topics by minimally qualified teachers with outdated
textbooks. These students are placed at a decided disadvantage if
they advance to the college level and are forced to compete with
students coming from schools with advanced curricula based on more
current information. Worse yet, certain subjects may not even be
taught in some schools due to lack of resources or expertise.
The trial activities described in this paper support the premise
that these shortcomings can be addressed by means of a high-speed
network to integrate communications transport at a variety of
speeds and bandwidths and effectively partner university-level
experts with teachers and students in the K-12 system. Such a
network, both technological and human, can allow for a more
efficient delivery of information and curricular material at both
the university and K-12 levels.
Beginning in April 1994 and extending through March 1995, US
West engaged in a set of technical trials of asynchronous transfer
mode (ATM) technology in western Oregon and in Boulder, Colorado.
Partnering with several leading universities and a number of other
organizations, these trials explored issues surrounding the use of
advanced networking technologies in combination with existing
network services. Issues that were addressed included network
platforms and architectures, along with an understanding of the
types of applications that would use such an advanced mix of
networking technology. Many planners assumed that high-end niche
applications associated with such things as supercomputers would
predominate. However, we soon realized that trial participants were
placing a strong emphasis on the extension of advanced technologies
to secondary schools. Even as that trend began to emerge, some felt
that while extension of advanced technologies to secondary schools
might be technically feasible, economic and social factors would
make such applications unworkable.
Innovative work conducted separately by the University of Oregon
and the University of Colorado proved the skeptics wrong. Advanced
capabilities were in fact extended to a number of secondary schools
in both Oregon and Colorado with encouraging results. This paper
discusses the experiments that were performed, the trends observed,
and subsequent plans made for follow-on activities. Insights gained
are used to project a baseline of technologies that could be
deployed over the next 5 to 7 years. We believe that these results
should influence the deployment of advanced technology to secondary
classrooms and could serve as a model for effective future
cooperation between universities and K-12 schools.
Background
US West announced a multiphase ATM strategy in October 1993.1 Key elements of this strategy
included small, scalable ATM switches flexibly and economically
deployed in a distributed architecture, as was done in the western
Oregon and Boulder, Colorado, trials. The results were positive,
and US West subsequently announced availability of an ATM-based
Cell Relay Service offering in its 14-state region in January
1995.2
Experimentation in Oregon was conducted in conjunction with the
Oregon Joint Graduate Schools of Engineering as part of "Project
NERO" (Network for Education and Research in Oregon).3,4 Five widely dispersed
graduate-level engineering schools (Oregon State University, Oregon
Graduate Institute, University of Oregon, Portland State
University, and Oregon Health Sciences University) and several
state office buildings were linked together via a network of ATM
switches and associated OC3c and DS3 lines in several major cities
in western Oregon. In addition, connectivity was also extended to a
teacher training workshop at school district headquarters in
Springfield, Oregon. Experimentation in Boulder, Colorado,5 was conducted in conjunction with
Page 59
the University of Colorado6 and
included three government laboratories, four industrial
laboratories, a public library, four public schools, and even a
private residence.
Analysis of Primary Trends
LANs at All Locations
All major trial participants had an extensive imbedded base of
legacy LANs. For most large organizations, the LAN environment has
expanded rapidly over the past 10 years. For example, less than 10
years ago the campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene had only
one Ethernet LAN serving about 50 host computers. Today the campus
has more than 80 LANs spread across 70 buildings supporting 6,000
host computers. A complex infrastructure of LANs, bridges, and
routers has evolved over the intervening years to support these
networks, which have become an integral part of the University of
Oregon environment.
The level of sophistication of these campus LANs continued to
increase as the trial progressed. Typical campus configurations
eventually included a variety of ATM switches providing gateways to
remote locations and connectivity between central routers. Direct
ATM connectivity was extended to workstations and hosts to allow
them to communicate directly over ATM using native IP per RFC
15777 as well as to distributed ATM
hubs supporting 10BASET and 100 Mbps Ethernet for devices using LAN
emulation.8
Based on this high level of sophistication, one might make the
mistaken assumption that LANs are therefore too sophisticated for
school districts to deploy. However, we found that the trial school
district and library locations had numerous LANs already in place.
For example, the School District Headquarters in Springfield,
Oregon, has an Ethernet LAN supporting a number of high-end
workstations. A Macintosh lab in a school in Albany, Oregon, has a
mix of LocalTalk and Ethernet LANs supporting 65 Macintosh devices.
The four participating middle schools and high schools in Boulder,
Colorado, all have Ethernet LANs supporting a mix of devices. Even
the Boulder Public Library has an Ethernet LAN with a sophisticated
set of routers and servers supporting local and remote access to
online card catalogues and banks of CD-ROMs. While the existence of
LANs may not be typical for all K-12 schools, their presence at our
trial participant locations is an important indicator of future
direction. Local area networks are quickly becoming a plug-and-play
item that routinely comes with off-the-shelf workstations and can
be installed by the local school administrator, the local library
staff, the home user, or (in the case of the Issaquah school
district near Seattle) by the students.
IP Networking and Mix-and-Match
Telecom
In addition to the universal presence of local area networks,
all trial participants accessed the network via routers and TCP/IP.
Typical high-end configurations utilized a router to access the
public wide area network via either a DS3-based (45 Mbps) or an
OC3c-based (155 Mbps) ATM user network interface (UNI). The router
often worked in conjunction with local ATM switches as previously
discussed.
Existing distributed Internet infrastructures in both Oregon and
Colorado are typically based on TCP/IP routers that are
interconnected with T1 lines running at 1.5 Mbps. The university
trial customers used ATM to construct new Internet infrastructures
still based upon TCP/IP routers, but with 155 Mbps rather than 1.5
Mbps interconnectivity. Connectivity at 155 Mbps was then extended
to a central campus hub where it was distributed in turn to a few
individual desktop computers. By using ATM with routers and TCP/IP,
the trial participants were able to gain a 100-fold increase in raw
speed and aggregate carrying capacity without changing their basic
protocol structure. One might assume that high-end transport
options would preclude the participation of secondary schools;
however, this did not prove to be the case. The use of IP-based
networking provided the ability to cost effectively bring secondary
schools into the networked environment.
Routers emerged as the universal anchors to enable the new ATM
transport option without affecting existing applications and
infrastructures. Routers support most types of network
connectivity, providing the ability to transparently mix and match
various types of networking options in different parts of the
network. With
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the central dominance of IP-based routers, telecommunications
transport became a transparent commodity to be mixed and matched
based on cost-performance analyses for each individual
location.
Using this extreme level of flexibility, the trial participants
proceeded to deploy ATM in their backbone networks and their
central locations where high aggregations of traffic were
important, while extending trial connectivity to outlying schools
and libraries via less expensive T1 or frame relay links. All of
the secondary schools were in fact brought into the new environment
via lower-cost T1-based telecommunications links in the existing
copper-based public switched network. The universal use of IP-based
routers to support all types of telecommunications transport
allowed the creation of sophisticated "internets" employing the
complete spectrum of telecommunications options from low speed to
high speed. This is an extremely important trend to consider as we
move forward into the next 5 to 7 years.
Multimedia Workstations
All trial participants made extensive use of multimedia
workstations. These workstations provided the ability to receive
audio/video broadcasts at the desktop, to engage in desktop video
teleconferencing, and to access multimedia servers. Initial testing
was primarily with high-end SGI or Sun workstations with multicast
routing capabilities built into their UNIX kernels. One could
easily assume that using high-end workstations would preclude the
participation of secondary schools. However, this was not the case.
In some situations the expedient option of loaning high-end
workstations to the individual schools was adopted so that
proof-of-concept work could proceed. As the trial proceeded, other
less expensive terminals became available, such as X Window
terminals and AV-capable Macintoshes. The use of multimedia
workstations from the secondary schools to the university
environments was an extremely important trend observed during the
trial, along with the increasing availability of affordable
multimedia-capable workstations.
Broadcast Video to the Desktop
The broadcast of educational video directly to the desktop was
accomplished via M-bone (multicast backbone) capabilities.9,10,11 M-bone originated from an
effort to multicast audio and video from Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) meetings.12 By late
1993 M-bone was in use by several hundred researchers located at
approximately 400 member sites worldwide. The M-bone is a virtual
multicast13,14,15 network that is
layered on top of portions of the physical Internet. The network is
composed of islands that can directly support IP multicast (such as
Ethernet LANs), linked by virtual point-to-point links called
"tunnels." More recently, several vendors have supplied native IP
multicast routing protocols. Multicast routing information was
distributed using PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast).16,17 Desktop video delivery was
initially accomplished via the M-bone tool "nv," with later
migration to a newer video tool called "vic" that supported not
only nv but also other video encodings and standards such as H.261
and JPEG.
M-bone has been routinely used for some time to broadcast
various events to individuals' desks via the Internet. Examples
include "NASA Select," the NASA in-house cable channel broadcast
during space shuttle missions, and "Radio Free VAT," a community
radio station. "Internet Talk Radio" is a variation on this
technique to conserve network bandwidth by making prerecorded
programs available as data files to be retrieved via ftp and then
played back on the local workstation or other appropriate devices
as desired. This can have a powerful impact on the inclusion of
current, nearly up-to-the-minute information in curriculum
development. Programming as varied as talks by Larry King and the
"Geek of the Week" are made available via this technique.18
These broadcast services have been significantly expanded
recently via the Internet Multicasting Service (IMS), which
broadcasts live multicast channels on the Internet such as
satellite-based programming like Monitor Radio and World Radio
Network, network-based programming such as CBC News and SoundBytes,
and live links into the National Press Club, the U.S. Congress, and
the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.19
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The Oregon universities used these capabilities to broadcast
computer science colloquia out over the Internet. They found that
bandwidth as low as 56 kbps was adequate for broadcast of the image
of an instructor, while 500 to 750 kbps was required for proper
transmission of text images with hand-pointing motions. They also
extended experimentation to the actual teaching of an engineering
statistics class to several registered students as an alternative
to attendance, using specially equipped video classrooms.
Broadcast of various events via M-bone proved to be very popular
at the four secondary schools in Colorado. Every time the space
shuttle flew they tapped into the 24-hour-a-day M-bone broadcasts
of the live space shuttle activities and monitored the shuttle
flight with great interest. A window was brought up on the
workstation screen on which the students could watch live pictures
of the space shuttle as the mission proceeded. In November 1994 the
students monitored the "Prince Charles Video Event" from Los
Angeles via M-bone. In addition, movies precompressed via MPEG were
broadcast out over the network. In December, an MPEG-compressed
portion of a Star Trek movie was successfully broadcast out at 30
frames/s via schools' T1 connectivity and was then decompressed at
the receiving workstations. Based on this success, it has been
proposed that MPEG-compressed university courses could be delivered
to desktop workstations at secondary schools with minimal T1-based
access capabilities. Experiences in Colorado showed that only 128
kbps was generally needed for typical M-bone broadcasts, while
full-frame 30 frame/s VHS quality video functioned very well via
MPEG compression at T1 speeds. One of the more creative uses of
M-bone broadcast capabilities was an "end of Boulder trial party"
broadcast out over the Internet from a residence directly connected
to an ATM switch. A 3-week-old baby at the party was given the
distinction of being the "youngest person to ever do an Internet
broadcast."
Desktop Video Teleconferencing
Closely related to the delivery of video to the desktop is the
use of desktop workstations for video teleconferencing. Desktop
video teleconferencing emerged as a strong trend in both the Oregon
and the Boulder trials. M-bone proved itself to be extremely useful
and versatile for desktop teleconferencing and collaboration, as
did InPerson software from SGI and CU-See-Me software for Macintosh
computers from Cornell University. Other similar software packages
are also becoming more readily available on the market. In general,
this type of software supports simultaneous conferencing with as
many as four or five other people, along with the ability to share
application and white-board windows.
These capabilities were used extensively and successfully in
Colorado on a daily basis for four- or five-way conferences.
T1-based connectivity was adequate for this type of conferencing,
although more efficient compression by the associated software
would be helpful. Dr. McBryan used the InPerson software to teach
classes at the four Boulder secondary schools. He networked with
the four public schools, each of which had an SGI Indy workstation
in a classroom. The students then clustered around the Indy
workstation while Dr. McBryan taught the class from his home. He
taught classes on how to write World Wide Web (WWW) home pages so
that the schools could come online with their own servers. All four
schools subsequently came online with their own servers based on
what they had learned in these online classes. This was an
effective demonstration of cooperative work between universities
and secondary schools via the network. The capability was so
successful that the schools wanted to obtain a large-screen
projection capability to make it easier for students to participate
and to see the screen. It is significant to note again that this
was done entirely with T1-based connectivity on the existing
copper-based public infrastructure as well as fiber optics.
In October 1994 a similar experiment was conducted in Oregon at
a demonstration of the "21st Century Classroom" for the ITEC Expo's
"Computer Office and Automation Show" in the Portland Convention
Center. A group of students from Grant High School in Portland
participated in a live audio/video exchange with faculty in the
Physics Department of the University of Oregon. During this
exchange the students were shown how to use a software package
called Mosaic and were then able to "sit in" on a physics lecture
delivered at the University of Oregon. The students had full
two-way audio/video capabilities. They could see the lecturer and
the other students and could ask questions during the lecture.
Page 62
Other Colorado applications included the ability for a student
ill at home to interact with teachers and other students. Similar
capabilities were used at the college level for off-hours
consultation between instructor and students, with video
consultation as an enhanced alternative to the current electronic
mail procedure. All of these applications have direct value in
delivering more timely and customized learning to students in
dispersed locations.
Multimedia Servers, Mosaic, and the
World Wide Web
The final trend is closely related to the use of desktop
workstations for receipt of teleconferencing and video broadcasts.
Desktop access to multimedia servers was an extremely important
area of emphasis in both trials and was successfully extended to
the secondary schools. The National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois developed an
environment called "NCSA Mosaic"20,21 that enables wide-area
network-based information discovery and retrieval using a blend of
distributed hypermedia, hierarchical organization, and search
functionality. NCSA has developed Mosaic client software for X
Window Systems, Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows. NCSA Mosaic's
communications support is provided courtesy of the CERN World Wide
Web (WWW) project's common client library.22 No longer isolated within the
academic community, the WWW has emerged as one of the Internet's
most popular technologies. Commercial companies now advertise the
availability of their "home pages," associated software is readily
available, and commercial bookstores are stocked with numerous
basic how-to books on Mosaic and the WWW.
As used in the Oregon and Boulder trials, the WWW servers were
accessed via the Internet and controlled a set of self-paced
courses that contained a mixture of video, audio, and text. A
student would take a particular course via a multimedia
workstation, with the course consisting of multiple windows on the
screen, including fullmotion film clips with audio, along with
associated interactive text. The multimedia courseware is delivered
over the WWW and is received and viewed using a WWW reader such as
Netscape or Mosaic.
Examples of Technology Uses
The combination of IP networking capabilities, multimedia
workstations, video to the desktop, video teleconferencing, and
multimedia servers was used in creative and effective ways in both
trials. During the summer of 1994 a teacher training workshop was
held for Springfield (Oregon) School District science teachers on
the use of multimedia X-terminals as network information retrieval
machines. As previously mentioned, T1 connectivity was extended to
the Springfield School District headquarters as part of the ATM
trial in Oregon. Two X-terminals were located there, connected to
the university hosts and used by the teachers to practice
information access as well as the preparation of their own
multimedia courseware.
During the 1994 fall and 1995 winter term at the University of
Oregon, three physics classes were done entirely using Mosaic. The
students in those classes were able to retrieve the class notes
offline and hence were no longer compelled to incessantly take
notes during the lecture. As judged by improved performance on
exams, this situation seems to have led to better student
comprehension of the material. The Mosaic browser allowed the
students to personally annotate each lecture page and thus "take
notes on the notes." The use of class newsgroups and e-mail allowed
the students to work collaboratively on some class assignments as
well as provide more useful feedback to the instructor than from
the traditional lecture format. Normal lectures were still given,
but the lecture material itself was in the form of Mosaic pages
projected to the class on an LCD projector. In the winter 1995
term, in a course on alternative energy, students working together
in self-organized teams successfully constructed WWW pages of their
own in response to a homework assignment to create a virtual energy
company and advertise it to the world. This effort and the course
can be accessed at http://zebu.uoregon.edu/phys162.html.
In mid-November 1994, Dr. Bothun went to the Cerro- Tololo
Interamerican Observatory in Chile to make observations with the
telescopes located there. Even though the telescope and classroom
were separated by 10,000 miles, successful interactive classroom
sessions did occur and the class was able to follow along with the
observations as the data were reduced and then placed on the WWW in
quasi-real time. These data can be found
Page 63
at http://zebu.uoregon.edu/fp.html. The delivery of scientific
data, in this case digital imaging from a telescope, to the K-12
classroom through the Mosaic interface is perhaps the most powerful
educational application on today's Internet. As part of the NERO
project, the University of Oregon is hoping to get its Pine
Mountain Observatory (located at an elevation of 7,000 feet, 26
miles SE of Bend, Oregon) on a T1 link to the Internet for purposes
of delivering access to a scientific instrument and data
acquisition directly to a networked K-12 classroom. Another example
of this kind of activity is provided by the recent space shuttle
mission. Dr. Bothun was part of the scientific experiment on board
the Endeavor and kept several WWW pages updated about
mission progress and the scientific data being obtained. Digital
optical photos of the targets that were imaged with the ultraviolet
telescope were made available to the Internet audience so that
interested followers of the mission could get some idea of the kind
of object currently being imaged by the shuttle astronauts. This
effort can be seen at http://zebu.uoregon.edu/uit.html.
As previously mentioned, a class on how to create WWW home pages
was taught via teleconference to four Boulder, Colorado, secondary
schools. Subsequent to receiving this remote training, each school
set up its own WWW server on the Internet. The students then
proceeded to set up their own WWW home pages, learned how to scan
pictures into the computer, and then made their pictures available
online via the Internet. The students used the network heavily as
part of school projects. As part of an oceanography project, they
used WWW "search engines" to research material and make personal
contacts with researchers around the country. Individual students
made personal contacts with professionals at Scripps Institute in
La Jolla, California, and with researchers at Sea World. They also
successfully accessed supercomputer centers at the National Center
for Atmospheric Research and at NOAA. In addition, a teacher at one
of the high schools developed a chemistry class for remote delivery
to students at middle schools. In conjunction with this class, some
of the high school students mentored middle school students via the
network. It is precisely this kind of new, dynamic interaction
between experts, information resources, and students at various
levels that precipitates the kind of quantum leap the experience of
learning can undergo.
Finally, a number of demonstrations were held in conjunction
with efforts associated with the Council of Great City Schools, a
nonprofit organization representing 50 of the nation's largest
urban public school systems. These demonstrations included
deployment of a technical model for a high-performance classroom at
the Council's Annual Conference of Technology Directors in Denver,
Colorado, in May 1994, and the design and deployment of a "21st
Century Classroom" for a computer office and automation show at the
Portland Convention Center in October 1994.
Analysis and Forecast: A Look to the
Future
A number of follow-on projects are either proposed or under way
as a result of these successful experimental activities. These
follow-on activities, when taken in conjunction with the various
experiments, are excellent examples to look to for help in
forecasting networking trends for educational institutions over the
next 5 to 7 years.
The schools in Boulder, Colorado, used their workstations and
associated connectivity in an impressive and successful way. The
teachers and students adapted very well to the advanced technology,
perhaps even more successfully than anticipated. In 1993 the voters
approved a bond issue to allocate funds for provision of a T1 line
to every school in the Boulder Valley School District by early
1996. Within a year the schools will be running their own 51-school
network, routinely doing the things that were on the cutting edge
during the trial period. The ability of schools to actually know
and experience the value of these networked services facilitates
solicatation of taxpayer support for efforts of this type. When the
community sees direct value, then the resources and synergies
required to build these networks (both technological and human)
emerge more easily.
The schools have a talented pool of teachers and students who
will continue with the work begun during the trial. Dr. McBryan has
continued to work with the schools and the public library and is
currently testing delivery of highly compressed, 30 frame/s,
full-frame, VHS-quality video to the schools. The work conducted in
Boulder could serve as a model of cooperation between secondary
schools and local universities, extending university expertise into
the secondary schools and "bootstrapping" them into the information
age.
Page 64
In October 1994 the University of Colorado was awarded a
Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information
Administration grant to develop the Boulder Community Network
(BCN). BCN collects information resources from all available
sources in Boulder County and makes them available to the whole
population through the World Wide Web. Many residents have access
through work or school, including schools at the elementary and
secondary levels. To widen access, information kiosks have been
deployed at strategic locations throughout the county, including
libraries and public buildings. The Senior Citizens Center and
several similar institutions were provided with both computer
platforms and network access. Over 50 community organizations now
supply and update information on a regular basis and participate in
BCN management and development. Commercial information resources
are also available on BCN, including a countywide restaurant menu
guide and shopping information. BCN may be accessed at
http//bcn.boulder.co.us/.
Dr. McBryan was one of the founding members of BCN, is principal
investigator on the NTIA grant, and has been BCN Technical Director
from the outset. As a result the BCN information resources were
rapidly made available to the T1-connected schools, resulting in
interesting curriculum developments. As examples, Spanish classes
are translating some BCN home pages into Spanish and a history
class plans an online archive of tapings of early Boulder
residents, both available to all residents via BCN. The marriage of
community network and school Internet connectivity represents a new
paradigm for outreach in education.
Looking forward into the future and taking a 5- to 7-year view,
the Boulder participants see a number of key trends developing. In
today's environment, students must leave their classrooms and go to
a computer lab. In the future the computers must be located
directly in the classrooms. CD-ROMs will be installed on every
desktop, allowing individualized instruction programs to be
developed with each student having his or her own programs and
subjects. Even today schools can acquire a Performa 630 with a
CD-ROM for $1,200 or less. Video broadcast and video on demand will
mix freely with CD-ROM capabilities. All three media and their
supporting network topologies will bring high-quality educational
and current affairs materials into the classroom.
In October 1994 the University of Oregon received one of 100
NTIA grants from the U.S. Department of Commerce. The university in
partnership with 15 other Lane County agencies will use the
$525,000 grant to create the Lane Education Network. This
high-speed computer network will connect the participating
agencies' information systems in a seamless, fully accessible
community network. The grant will finance demonstration projects,
electronic classrooms, and distance-learning, off-campus classes.
Agencies in the partnership include three local school distrits. In
one of those school districts, voters recently passed a $37.5
million bond levy, $3 million of which is designated for
instructional technology.
In conjunction with these associated activities in Oregon a
cooperative effort is currently being proposed called "The On-line
Universe: Network Delivery of Multimedia Resources in Science to
the K-12 Classroom and the General Public." Building on the
successful experiments outlined above, the project will focus in
several areas. Multimedia educational materials will be developed
in the areas of astronomy and the environmental sciences. These
materials will be delivered via Internet connectivity at the T1
level between the University of Oregon, the Oregon Museum of
Science and Industry (OMSI), and individual science classrooms at
Grant High School in Portland and at Springfield and Thurston High
Schools in Springfield, Oregon. All materials will be organized and
accessible through the Mosaic interface. In addition, M-bone
connectivity will be used at these sites for desktop conferencing
and live interactions between students, university professors, K-12
teachers, and museum educational staff. The existing multimedia
Internet classroom on the University of Oregon campus will be used
to develop a new classroom at OMSI to serve as a training area for
K-12 science teachers in the Eugene and Portland areas.
Along the same lines but on a larger geographic scale, the
Council of Great City Schools is proposing an "Urban Learning
Network" to link urban high schools in 14 states to deliver useful
information and practical educational services to teachers and
students in the real-world environments of urban community high
schools. The proposed list of services and applications to be
provided should sound familiar at this point: video on demand,
interactive multimedia courses, distance instruction or
teleconferencing, electronic field trips, and fully equipped smart
classrooms.
These various activities show that electronic networks offer the
possibility of forming learning communities of educators and
learners who can share and develop courseware. The process can be
highly interactive, and feedback from the students can be
integrated into improving the content. Most importantly, a
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network of this type facilitates educational outreach activities
between higher education, K-12 school systems, libraries, and
science museums. These new, network-based partnerships will allow
any expert's resources to be delivered to a larger audience with
the aim of improving education through the delivery of real data in
an interface that promotes learning as a discovery process. Such
capabilities will place vast amounts of information at the
fingertips of educators, students, and ordinary citizens.
Summary and Recommendations
This trial and our collective observations support the
expectation that traditional barriers between student, teacher, and
professional researcher will erode and be replaced by a learning
community of individuals who are collectively interested in a
particular subject. Herein lies the paradigm shift. The keeper of
the knowledge will no longer be the individual K-12 teacher or the
professor. Rather, students will now be able to access and interact
with a diverse and distributed knowledge base. Professional
researchers can make their real data available via interactive
networks to this learning community, and science can be taught as a
discovery process rather than a collection of facts "known" about
the physical world. This approach duplicates what the professional
scientist does and can go a long way toward improving science
education.
These technological breakthroughs and educational links between
universities and K-12 schools underscore the value of education at
every level. The electronic superhighway will increasingly allow
experts to share their research and foster an excitement for
learning among interested students, and in this process they can
also help K-12 teachers navigate quickly through the vast and often
times confusing information highway. Thus, through this
partnership, the "looking at everything" ideal becomes increasingly
real with seemingly endless possibilities for exploration,
dialogue, and learning.
Through the activities of this trial two unexpected insights
were gained relative to the communications technologies: (1) the
power and pervasiveness of TCP/IP as a common denominator for
educational networking was dramatically underscored; and (2) the
scalability, robustness, and aggregation strengths of ATM switching
make it an ideal fabric for a public switched network to support
educational and developing multimedia applications. Also, the fact
that the IP networking of education communities is already in place
and expandable, and that applications were deliverable at T1
bandwidths (allowing for the use of existing copper-based
infrastructures), means that K-12 and learning communities can
begin accelerated access to the information highway today,
migrating to other exclusively fiber networks over time. Although
DS3 and other higher speed network capabilities are often
desirable, it is currently neither feasible nor financially
possible to extend these capabilities universally to all schools.
Until the value of these networks is comprehended, "affordability"
remains a circular argument. The network demonstrated in this trial
comes within the reach of anyone when properly scaled, and its
incredible value can be experienced by learners and educators.
Society's challenge will be to provide schools and universities
with the resources and support they need to have full and equal
electronic access to information in this new era. Such a
partnership extends also to business and industry, whose success
ultimately depends on qualified personnel entering the work force.
This trial highlighted the possibilities that will emerge when a
learning community discovers the value that can be derived from the
effective application of technology and communications networking.
Communities of interest exist everywhere in human society. Each
community must individually shape the vision and define the value
that these networks can deliver. There is no "one size fits all
solution." The trial demonstrated that the technologies are very
flexible, with many of them already in place to deliver the "value"
the users want. Value has a direct relationship to "affordability."
Obtaining funding for these technological advancements and
communications networks will require creativity from the
communities that build them.
Notes
1. Wallace,B. 1993. "US WEST Plots ATM
Course with Planned Expansion," Network World, October 18,
pp. 28 and 31.
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2. Greene, T. 1995. "US WEST Places Its
ATM Services Cards on the Table," Network World, February 6,
p. 23.
3. Owen, S. 1993. "Network for Engineering
and Research in Oregon," proposal submitted to Education Division
of National Aeronautics and Space Administration, September 23.
4. Foldvik, R., D. Meyer, and D. Taylor.
1995. "ATM Network Experimentation in the State of Oregon,"
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on
Communications, June.
5. Foldvik, R., and O. McBryan. 1995.
"Experiences with ATM: The Boulder Perspective," Proceedings of
the IEEE International Conference on Communications, June.
6. Research supported in part by NSF Grand
Challenges Application Group grant ASC-9217394 and by NASA HPCC
Group grant NAG5-2218.
7. Laubach, M. 1994. "IETF Draft RFC:
Classical IP and ARP Over ATM," RFC 1577, January.
8. "LAN Emulation Over ATM: Draft
Specification," ATM Forum Contribution 94-0035.
9. Macedonia, M., and D. Brutzman. 1993.
"MBONE, the Multicast Backbone," Naval Postgraduate School,
December 17, taurus.cs.nps.navy.mil:pub/mbmg/mbone.hottopic.ps.
10. Macedonia, M., and D. Brutzman. 1994.
"MBONE Provides Audio and Video Across the Internet,"
Computer 27(4):30–36.
11. Casner, S. 1993. "Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQ) on the Multicast Backbone (MBONE)," May 6,
available via anonymous ftp from venera.isi.edu:/mbone/faq.txt.
12. Casner, S., and S. Deering. 1992.
"First IETF Internet Audiocast," ACM SIGCOMM Computer
Communication Review, July, pp. 92–97.
13. Deering, S. 1989. "Host Extensions for
IP Multicasting," RFC 1112, August.
14. Moy, J. 1993. "Multicast Extensions to
OSPF," IETF draft, July.
15. Deering, S. 1988. "Multicast Routing
in Internetworks and Extended LANs," Proceedings of the ACM
SIGCOMM 1988.
16. Deering, S., D. Estrin, D. Farinacci,
V. Jacobson, C. Liu, and L. Wei. 1995. "Protocol Independent
Multicast (PIM): Motivation and Architecture," Internet draft,
draft-ietf-idmr-pim-arch-00.txt, November.
17. Deering, S., D. Estrin, D. Farinacci,
V. Jacobson, C. Liu, and L. Wei. 1995. "Protocol Independent
Multicast (PIM): Protocol Specification," Internet draft,
draft-ietf-idmr-pim-spec-01.ps, January 11.
18. Release 1.0. 1994. "The
Internet Multicasting Service: Ted Turner, Watch Out!,"
94(2):10.
19. Refer to
http://town.hall.org/radio/live.html.
20. Andreessen, M. 1993. "NCSA Mosaic
Technical Summary," May 8, marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu.
21. Valauskas, E. 1993. "One-Stop Internet
Shopping: NCSA Mosaic on the Macintosh," ONLINE, September,
pp. 99–101.
22. Powell, J. 1994. "Adventures with the
World Wide Webs, Creating a Hypertext Library Information System,"
DATABASE, February, pp. 59–66.
