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 catalogue@itd.adelaide.edu.au. 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 network-training-tf@mailbase.ac.uk. 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.