Re: Schools and IETF

[Brian Lloyd <[e-mail]>]

At  1:24 3/20/94 -0800, Ray Harder wrote:
>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?

Why not?  Sometimes the engineers neglect the forest by concentrating too
much on the trees.  It certainly wouldn't hurt for teachers and
administrators to understand something about the technical world they are
getting into (and there is *NO* turning back folks) just as it won't hurt
to have the engineers understand something about the problems teachers and
school administrators are trying to solve in the school.

We (Lloyd Internetworking) regularly set up elementary, middle, and high
school building/campus LANs.  We regularly set up their Internet
connections and district/county wide WANs.  (We at Lloyd Internetworking
are actually making a living at it!)  We always make a point explain *why*
we are doing what we are doing and to involve the responsible school
personnel in the design and implementation process.  I *always* make a
point to spend time teaching the teachers and administrators (those I can
get to sit still and listen, that is :^) the basics of routing, routers,
servers, and clients.  It means that they have a fighting chance to keep
their network running smoothly.

I am sure that many in the education field view building LANs/MANs/WANs as
rocket science.  It isn't.  I have taught people with no prior computer
experience to design LANs, configure routers, and install networking
software.  All it takes is a grasp of the fundamentals (only takes a few
hours) and an ability to break a problem down into its component parts and
then deal with the parts independently.  (Aha!  We are talking basic
*problem solving skills*!)  The hardest part is just convincing people to
try and not give up out-of-hand.

So I strongly urge more educators to get involved in the technical aspects
of their schools; whether they be networking, telephony, audio/video,
heating/cooling, computers, plumbing, electrical, whatever.  The more
different technical areas one experiences, the more one discovers that the
same laws and processes tend to apply everywhere.  It tends to turn people
into technical generalists.  And isn't that what a teacher is supposed to
be?


Brian Lloyd, President                         Lloyd Internetworking
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