CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Margaret Isaacs/University of Glasgow Minutes of the Network Training Materials Working Group (TRAINMAT) The TRAINMAT Working Group met once at the Stockholm IETF on 19 July. Topics covered in the meeting included a round-up of training activities, the Catalogue of Network Training Materials, using the network to deliver training, registration of Powerpoint as a MIME type, and liaison with other groups. Round-Up Of Training Activities The meeting began with a round-up of training activities with which members were involved: o Jill Foster reported on the recent Networking Workshop for Technologically Developing Countries in Honolulu in June 1995. The workshop was sponsored by the Internet Society, and other bodies, and comprised 180 students from 60 countries, divided into four tracks, of which 52 were included in the Network Navigation and Services track. The course covered many aspects of networking including information services and services via e-mail, authoring and information provision, setting up clients and servers, etc. o Jodi Ito from Hawaii described the Hawaiian training program using interactive video. o Ingrid Melva of Nordunet reported on a Norwegian distance learning course in using the Internet utilising e-mail, WWW, and paper. URL: http://www.uio.no/wwwfik/inter.html o Pien Voortman from SURFnet indicated that there are many varieties of user-tailored training and support provided by SURFnet, including the SURFnet Guide. URL: http:///www.nic.surfnet.nl/surfnet/user-support o David Hartland from the UK's Mailbase described how they support and train mailing list users and subject-based groups. He also talked about a new large-scale training project called `Netskills' at Newcastle, funded under the UK Electronic Libraries Program. Netskills will train librarians, information providers, and users. At Newcastle, they are looking at WWW and training over the network. o Nicky Ferguson of the University of Bristol described the current subject-based UK training and support program for social science researchers and users of social science research. o April Marine, NASA contractor at Ames, described an interesting multi-agency program called Globe which seeks to involve K12 students in taking environmental measurements, inputting them via the Internet and eventually seeing the results of the analysis via the Internet. Every teacher who is involved in the program is trained. The program is exported to countries outside the US. In the US, the Project aims to get 2000 schools connected to the Internet, at no cost to the individual schools. URL: http://globe.fsl.noaa.gov/ There were some further reports of training activities from the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Croatia, Sweden, and Japan. Catalogue of Network Training Materials The Fields in The Template The following fields were introduced at the last working group meeting: Content-Subject (General User/Administrator/) Content-Level (beginner/intermediate/advanced) There was some doubt expressed about what was actually agreed to at the last meeting. Today's meeting agreed that the Content-Level field was useful, but Content-Subject was less so, and therefore should be scrapped. Content-Level should be re-named Audience-Level. Categories There was some discussion about the additional categories proposed last time for inclusion, and about the definition of various categories and whether some materials were adequately catered for in the existing list of categories. For instance, it was suggested that handouts be included with other material with which they are associated, i.e., a handout relating to a presentation should be classed as presentation material. A new category of `On-line Collection' was accepted. This category would encompass hyper-linked lists of on-line training materials, servers which offer organised collections of network training materials or links to them, and so on. It would effectively broaden the scope of the Catalogue so that many more training materials could be accessed through it, without the necessity for describing each one in detail. A number of draft entries for items in this category had been prepared by Margaret Isaacs. The meeting agreed that the high-level categories proposed at the last meeting, but not yet incorporated into the Catalogue, should be dispensed with. These were: o Training Materials o Documentation This would then give the following flat range of categories, e.g.: o User guides o Resource guides o Trainer guides o Presentation materials o Workshop exercises o Self-paced materials o On-line collections The aim of the Catalogue of Training Materials is to provide a select list of quality items. At the last IETF, volunteers from the working group had agreed to take ten each of the existing one hundred items and cull them. The catalogue is now in a reasonably good state, with much out of date and inappropriate material deleted or suggested for deletion. One minor anomaly in the present system of input to the Catalogue is that when the Record-Last-Modified-Name field is modified, only the name of the last modifier appears in this field, overwriting the previous modifier or author of the entry. The meeting did not think this was a problem, as long as all contributors' names appeared in the list of acknowledgements. However, it was pointed out that the acknowledgement is generated by Record-Last-Modified-Name field. It was suggested that the acknowledgement should be manually compiled and maintained. There was a question about applying some sort of quality control to input to the Catalogue, as the Web interface effectively makes it possible for anyone to add any entry to the Catalogue. It was suggested that the review group, which currently consists of Jill Foster, Mark Prior, and Margaret Isaacs, be expanded and volunteers to vet entries were called for. Carol Ward was volunteered by April Marine and Robert Janz from SURFnet also volunteered to find someone. Some deletions from the Catalogue were suggested. When amendments have been made, Margaret will make sure that categories as proposed at today's meeting are given for every title, and Mark will then have the Catalogue sorted by category. Sally Hambridge had volunteered at the last meeting to check through the Catalogue for consistency. Using The Network to Deliver Training The working group has been interested in the use of the MBone to deliver training. Joyce Reynolds has tried to get support from technical people for this but was discouraged. She will try a route via the IESG to the relevant MBone working groups. Ingrid mentioned a report on using the network to deliver training in Norway and volunteered to give a summary in English of the report to the network-training-tf@mailbase.ac.uk list. Registration of Powerpoint as MIME Type Jill had been trying since last July to get Powerpoint registered as a MIME type. There were initial concerns about the section on ``security implications.'' These had been addressed, but there were subsequent quibbles about the exact name of the proposed type, version numbers, etc. There was to be a BOF at the IETF about the problems with the registration procedures. Liaison With Other Groups Mark Prior gave a brief review of the situation in Australia where currently proposals are being received for some government funding for training. Meanwhile there is an explosion of Internet service providers offering training.