Schools and IETF

[Ray Harder <[e-mail]>]

John, Tracy, Bill, Connie, all....

I attended several IETF mtgs last year and I have to wonder aloud with Bill: Is
this an appropriate forum for K-12 schools? This is an important *ENGINEERING*
group that is concerned with the nitty gritty details of the Internet etc. What
possible reason is there for the average teacher to participate? Do we send
teachers to the meeting of the Cable TV engineers? Or the Telephone Engineers?
The CCITT/ITU etc?

I am also the Chair of the Computer Assisted Research Group of the Society of
Biblical Literature. We have 7,000 university professors at our annual meeting.
We are currently working on the Electronic enhancement of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
the Electronic Publication of Ancient Inscriptions and Manuscripts etc... What
we do will eventually end up in 6th grade social science textbooks, etc. But,
what point would there be to have a 6th grade teacher show up to see how to do
multi-spectral image analysis of a certain ancient scrape of Aramaic text? He
wouldn't understand the Aramaic --we all spent years in school learning that.
He wouldn't understand the Image enhancement, we have a specialist from NASA's
Jet Propulsion Lab to help us with that. What would be the point of lay
participation in a meeting designed for specialists? Isn't this the same thing?

On the other hand, the work conceived and begun by the IETF ISN-WG is extremely
important. It fits into a really glaring gap between the experts and the lay
people in this field. I have to disagree with (or at least comment about) Bill
when he says:

> I think the docuements we produce should be targeted to the district/school
> technical staff who will be building the networks and keeping them up.
> It is then up to these staff to advise the administration on appropriate
> policies/architectures that should be deployed so that the teachers can
> do their jobs.  I do not expect a teacher to write a school or district
> AUP or design a connection architecture in the absence of any input from
> either a technology committee, staff or consultant who is paid to understand
> the things we do.

The problem in today's schools is that there is no real "technical staff." The
technology committees are usually hard working teachers who are volunteering
their time because they care about kids and love computers. The closest thing
is the Data processing department at the district and county offices.
Unfortunately these people too are really overworked and stuck in the 70's.
They can make an HP3000 or IBM or DEC mini dance and sing, but they often have
never even hooked up 3 Macs to a laserprinter! (Really, I'm not exaggerating!).
Most have never hooked anything to the internet and have not even connected a
Novell network to anything other than a few DOS clones.

We have teachers and principals being asked to spend hundreds of thousands of
dollars of the public's funds without any real guidance in language that they
can understand. We did it throughout the 80's with microcomputers and now just
as some of them are developing a fair amount of sophistication there (most
still aren't up to speed there yet either!), we are changing fields and asking
them to do the same with networking in the 90's. What is needed is a series of
documents that outline concepts and strategies for networking in the 90's.
These are like what in business would be called "Executive Summaries." But they
are more than that, they must explain the concepts as well as the components.

Okay, so this is needed. Now the key question before us is: Is the IETF the
appropriate forum for this? My feeling is with Connie and Bill that maybe the
answer is no. Why couldn't we move the ISN-WG to the annual Tel-Ed meeting and
maybe the NECC meeting where we have a more balanced group of educators and
technicians?  (Am I suggesting that the IETF people are imbalanced? Yes, they
have to be, but in a good sense ;-)> I also question whether this needs so
many meetings annually. I must confess a frustration of going all the way to
Amsterdam for a three hour meeting and basically sitting through exactly the
same meeting that I sat through in Cincinatti, Ohio. There are too many IETF
meetings to have a good cadre of K12 people who can attend regularly.

I also wonder if the CoSN group isn't the best umbrella organization rather
than the IETF? That's my $.02!

Raymond G. Harder
Pragmatic Geek



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* Raymond G. Harder                  "Can't walk today, I don't feel well."*
* Educational Technology Consultant  "Why don't you sit out in the sun?"   *
* 909-983-4713                       "What? People will think I'm lazy!"   *
* [e-mail]                         -- My 92 year old grandmother    *
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