The meeting took place in the Woolslair Library. In attendance were Roberta Feldman, Priscilla Franklin, Carol Hicks, Myron Lentz, Ruth Martin, Mike McCafferty, Ernestine Reed, Ralph Roskies, Barbara Rudiak, Mary Lou Ruttle, Linda Savido, Mary Shields, Judy Weinberg, Rick Wertheimer, Mario Zinga, and Gail Futoran as observer/recorder.
Mario passed out an agenda and Rick introduced the first part of the meeting by summarizing the state of the first and second year sites. He said that the first year sites were close to being completed and should be completed by January. Equipment for the second year sites has been received and several user devices at each site have been installed. Wiring is completed at Phillips and the two Fulton campuses; the rest should be completed by the end of 1994 with the exception of East Hills, which proved difficult to wire and will probably not be completed until January. Rick acknowledged that CK:P staff made a lot of mistakes with regard to getting wiring accomplished, but that they and the school district had learned a lot from the experience about retrofitting schools for networking. He expected the second year sites to be up and running by the end of January. He mentioned that all eleven network teams had completed action plans and which can be found on the CK:P gopher.
Regarding recent grant proposals: the teacher enhancement grant was not funded. The Department of Commerce grant and the NSF extension grant were funded. The Commerce grant is a one-year community outreach effort involving the Carnegie Museum and Hill House. Hill House and Carnegie Museum will receive equipment to produce their own home pages (for example, Carnegie will put their Pennsylvania collection online). In addition Hill House will receive a server so they can have direct Internet connection and do outreach to the six hill district schools. Hill House will be largely responsible for staff support in this effort; CK:P will serve in a consultant role. Implementation of the project is in the very early discussion stages. The school district is getting a Project Teacher for one year to provide support (help create home pages, etc.). Ralph Roskies brought up the TCI component and Rick said that Bob Carlitz and Gene Hastings were holding discussions with TCI regarding TCIÕs responsibilities under the Commerce and NSF grants. However, regarding the CK:P schools that are supposed to have TCI connectivity to the Internet, Rick said CK:P is planning backup connectivity.
The NSF extension grant was funded after extensive revisions were made in July. Those revisions included: (1) PPS is the prime contractor with MPC as subcontractor, the reverse of the situation on the first two year NSF grant; (2) Bernie Manning and Rick Wertheimer became PPS PIs on the grant, representing policy and project concerns, respectively. (3) Migration to the PPS accelerated and staffing changed, with PSC losing technical staff and PPS gaining. (4) The amount requested was reduced to $3 million, which was awarded through calendar 1997.
NSF was also given a draft copy of the school districtÕs technology plan to show that CK:P was aligned with the effort. In year 3 (of the five year grant period), three schools will be added; another six in year four; nine in year five, for a total of 29 over the five years. At the end of five years the technology must be institutionalized. Institutionalization was defined as the school district having the expertise , staffing and hardware in place to sustain the network once the PSC and the CK:P staff are no longer funded. Rick pointed out that the first two years were designed to find out whether the project could succeed in technical and educational terms; NSF feels that was demonstrated, and in the next three years it is the institutionalization question which interests them.
There was a discussion, started by Bobbie Feldman, about putting that goal into the strategic plan. Judy Weinberg referred to the technology plan and mentioned that Phil Parr will have a draft completed by the end of the month. Ernestine Reed then mentioned that the building administrators will need to have some idea of costs of the technology, since they will be responsible for managing much of those costs in two yearsÕ time. Everyone agreed that was a reasonable request, although Myron pointed out that it is still too early to begin quoting costs. He mentioned, for example, that CK:P is still experimenting with different types of connectivity with which unique costs are associated. Ralph mentioned that the market is volatile and he expects prices to come down in the next few years.
Next on the agenda was migration, which Rick introduced but said was deferred to the next meeting of the committee. The technical advisory committee has already been dealing with technical migration issues. Finally, he mentioned that committee meeting minutes and usage reports could be found online in the CK:P gopher and web home pages. He provided path information to those documents, and mentioned that usage reports had been recently added by the CK:P assessment staff.
Mario conducted the second half of the meeting which dealt with policies regarding student and adult accounts. He mentioned several issues to resolve or at least provide input for the accounts working group (wg-accounts) to take action on: (1) an overall policy concerning access (e.g., 24 hour vs. limited access) for the long-term; (2) who can have accounts at a CK:P site (some ÒguestÓ accounts include parents working on CK:P projects); and (3) accommodating requests for non-CK:P student accounts (there are currently 32 such accounts).
Oberon currently has about 1100 accounts; a majority of these are teacher (46%) and student (28%) accounts (some inactive), and will be migrated to the school servers by the end of the school year. Someone at each site will be responsible for creating accounts (e.g., Oscar Huber at Schenley). Some of the discussion revolved around technical issues, and Mario showed overheads describing the server architecture at CK:P sites and an Internet access diagram, distinguishing between direct connection and dial-up connection via Pitt and CMU modem pools. The agreement with Pitt and CMU is that only ÒteachersÓ (which Mario used generically to mean PPS educators and staff) could have dial-up access, so essentially there is no student access outside of school. The question is whether this policy should continue or change, and if it changes how could access be provided. Bobbie suggested that students could get accounts depending upon age and other criteria, such as the type of independent projects they were conducting using the Internet. Mary Lou Ruttle mentioned a problem with one student and said that safeguards were needed, and there was agreement on that point. Myron mentioned the Board modem pool which is used only during the day, and there have been some discussions of providing after-hours access, although not necessarily to students. Judy suggested a pilot study whereby students would be given 24 hours access daily to see what they did with it. She said it may take until June to get an answer, but that the group needed the data. There seemed to be agreement with this suggestion although there was no formal vote.
The issue of who can have accounts revolves around a few parent accounts, but those are people who are contributing to CK:P project (e.g., at Frick and Westinghouse). The feeling was that those parents should be ÒgrandfatheredÓ but that no new accounts should be given out to non-PPS personnel. Rather than formulate an overall policy the feeling was that each site should create a criteria for who gets accounts on their server.
Finally, the issue of non-CK:P student accounts was discussed. Since these students have contributed in terms of their exploration of the Internet, and seem to qualify as Òpilot subjectsÓ under JudyÕs suggestion, it was agreed that those accounts would remain active, but that no new student accounts (non-CK:P) would be given out, simply because resources are too limited right now.
Another issue that was brought up during the discussion was other access routes. Mike suggested looking into a possible partnership with Telerama, as a pilot program. Rick agreed that it was worrth looking into, if for nothing else than to get parents a reduced rate on their accounts if they were working with the schools. Rick said he would call Telerama.
The meeting adjourned at 6:00 p.m.