1. Education as a Peer to Peer Grid Service
PTLIU Laboratory for Community Grids
Geoffrey Fox
Computer Science, Informatics, Physics
Indiana University
Bloomington IN 47404
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2. P2P Grid with Peers and Servers
Peers on the Edge of the Internet
Servers at the center of the world
P2P Grid with Peers and Servers
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3. Some Technology Trends
Increasing performance of Internet backbone and last mile (access)
Hand-held devices and wireless  Pervasive Access
Peer to peer technologies enable new ways of collaborating and blurs distinction between clients and servers
Client-Server  Multi-tier Architectures
XML Schema and tools  All data defined as objects
Separation of client, system and persistent storage models for information
Development of (application) service model to capture common (maybe centralized) capabilities
Semantic Web, Grid or … “Next Generation Web”
New Technologies imply New Opportunities requiring typically New Business models
For Education and Training
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4. What is a Grid Service?
The Grid is distributed system allowing communities to access seamlessly heterogeneous resources from heterogeneous clients
Resources are web-pages, instruments, Object repositories, Simulation codes running on supercomputers ….
A Service is a generic application or capability respecting standards (general web and application specific) allowing multiple providers to compete on a given service
Middle Tier Broker
Portal is
customizable
User interface
Back end Capabability
Resource
The Grid is essentially is the future Web
IBM just announced they were investing around $1 Billion in Grid
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5. Some General Grid Services
Business is developing “web service” concept to support areas like e-commerce where one composes atomic services like
Security
Payment
Catalog
Goods supply
Each of these services could allow
Multiple choices of provider
In a given session
Security
Catalog
Payment Credit Card
Warehouse
shipping
WSDL is new standard
for web services
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6. Architecture of Grid: CommodityScience
Commerce, Entertainment, Healthcare, Science, Computing, Education …. will be Grid Services
Science Portals & Workbenches
Twenty-First Century University
and laboratory
Computational
Services P e r f o m a n c
Networking, Devices and Systems
Grid Services (resource independent)
Grid Fabric (resource dependent)
Research Services & Technology
Research
Grid
Community Portals
Next Generation Consumer Web
Education
Business Services
Commerce
C o n v i
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7. Why use Distance Education and Training?
New and rapidly changing Curriculum suggest the use of distance education as it will allow a few experts to deliver instruction to more students and this addresses both
The shortage of trained faculty
Offering classes with small enrollments at one university
cost of developing new curriculum QUICKLY requires many students (say around 5-10 times traditional class) to amortize cost
Distance Education is technically sound based on web curricula-- both synchronously and asynchronously -- today with very robust clear implementations available over next few years
Both delivery mechanism and identification of knowledge nuggets that are smaller than or different in content from a traditional degree suggests different approaches to certification
Courses are given, graded etc. by multiple organizations -- University integrate degrees?
Similar arguments for distance training with relative importance of synchronous and asynchronous learning differing by customer group
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8. The Virtual University
Motivated either by decreased cost or increased quality of learning environment
Will succeed due to market pressures (it will offer the best product)
Assume that as with text books, only a few pedagogically excellent teachers will produce lectures; only a few charismatic souls deliver them
“Centers of Excellence” (“Hermits Cave Virtual University”) are natural entities to produce and deliver classes supported by good technology and wonderful graphics
University acts as an integrator putting together a set of classes where it may only teach some 20% but acts as a mentor to all
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9. Capabilities of the Education Grid Service
Curriculum or “Learning Objects”
Web Pages becoming more sophisticated (Flash)
Audio-Video Conferencing, Chat rooms, white boards to support student, teacher, mentor interactions
Shared Documents for synchronous collaboration
Learning Management Systems
Student registration, Quizzes, Grading, Security
Database Storage (persistent Learning Objects)
IMS and ADL standards for interoperability
Asynchronous self paced access
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10. Some Education Grid Services
Registration
Performance (grading)
Authoring of Curriculum
Online laboratories for real and virtual instruments
Homework submission
Quizzes of various types (multiple choice, random parameters)
Assessment data access and analysis
Synchronous Delivery of Curricula
Scheduling of courses and mentoring sessions
Asynchronous access, data-mining and knowledge discovery
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11. Portal for Education Service
The User Model is that of a Portal familiar from Yahoo and the growing effort in Enterprise Information Portals (Lotus Notes implemented with Web or Object Grid technology)
Education service must use generic Portal service
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12. Hierarchical Delivery Model
One could teach to 1000 different students – each at a separate workstation but …
No real opportunity for questions so better to use broadcast technology – not conferencing
Further could better deliver to 40 classrooms – each with an average of 25 students
Each classroom has central high quality A/V conferencing, displays and
A Mentor monitoring and helping students
Each student could have wireless laptop or PDA
So synchronous systems must support simultaneously disparate clients – high end display to PC to PDA
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13. Authoring of Curriculum
Market pressures push to high end authoring
Authoring approaches for the Web can include
Basic HTML
Macromedia/Adobe/etc. packages like Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Illustrator
PowerPoint and Word exported
Also can include RealNetworks or Microsoft or .. Format Multimedia
Note Streaming multimedia formats have larger buffers than A/V conferencing formats
Certainly use XML to specify content and render this into attractive portal
SVG and SMIL are important 2D vector graphics and multimedia standards
HTML does not give reproducible pages
Flash can be thought of as “proprietary SVG”
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14. Current Status and Futures
Commercial Systems such as Centra, WebEx, Anabas and Placeware offer similar functionality to our old system Tango for synchronous collaboration
Shared applications, chatroom, whiteboard, A/V conferencing
Blackboard, WebCT, Lotus offer learning management systems – Can they switch to IMS, ADL standards; high-end authoring and XML based object technology (not databases or files)
Access Grid (community e.g. classroom) and HearMe (desktop) are new internet audio-video systems which are be used with shared object systems
I develop research system Garnet for education portals
Features hand-held and desktop clients, integrated collaboration and some “technical advances” – major use of XML, shared SVG
Peer to Peer Grids suggest decentralized architecture (
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15. Commercial Collaboration Systems
Centra
Anabas
WebEx
PlaceWare
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16. SVG Sharing PC to PDA Batik Viewer on PC
PowerPoint can be converted to SVG via Illustrator or Web export
SVG Sharing PC to PDA
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17. Access Grid (Argonne, NCSA) and HearMe
Access Grid: Community HearMe: desktop integrates phones and Internet Audio
Ambient mic
(tabletop)
Presenter
camera
Audience camera
mic
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