Re: Minutes of the ISN meeting at Columbus IETF

["Raymond G. Harder" <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 13 Apr 1993, William Manning wrote:

> The WG chair(s) will have to request a slot from the Area director(s),
> publish an adgenda, and actually show.  The logisics for Amsterdam
> have already been published... at least the hotel info. (reproduced
> below)   IF we actually meet, it will be very interesting, since we
> will have a much larger EC component, and corspondingly smaller US
> component.   This group seems to have a very UScentric focus.  It will
> be refreshing to see how what we do can be utilized by other countries.
> We need to remember that what we do has global scope.

I assure all that my comments should not be taken as "UScentric" but
purely a personal pragmatic. I had heard many of the partcipants say that
they would be unable to participate in the IETF Amsterdam meeting. I want
to make sure that there will be enough active participants to make it
worth the expense for me.

Who will be chairing the meeting and who will be setting the agenda? What
are we hoping to accomplish? I do recommend that we petition for more time
and perhaps meet informally as well.

I would say that one of the most difficult tasks for the Internet
committees is going to be scaling up in such a way as to take into account
the various "cultures" that have not been a part of this community before.
I do not mean cultures in the traditional sense of national groups, but
local specialized working cultures such as schools vs corporations.
Unfortunately, because of the way schools are (in some countries), they
can have very different needs and do things very differently from school
to school --even within the same community.

Back in my days in Linguistics, one of the holy grails was to find
linguistic universals. Are there "school universals?" Are there things
that are going to help provide targets and goals on a large scale for
schools worldwide? Are there things that are true of the way teachers use
(Could, should, might use?) technology/telecommnuications everywhere?

Thoughts,

Ray

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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!    *
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