GM: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk Webcast and this special Educom '98 technology highlights session. You are here because it is time to discuss the leading core technologies in your future. This is Greg Marks of Merit Network, your CREN host for today. I'm pleased to be here today with the first Tech Talk show originating from Orlando, Florida, at the Educom '98 Conference. Let me introduce Howard Strauss of Princeton, the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series. Howard is a well-know Web and all-around technology expert. Welcome, Howard.

HS: Thank you, Greg, and thanks to CREN for choosing me as the technology anchor for Tech Talk. The job of the technology anchor is to engage our guest or guests, as it is today, in a lively dialogue that will answer the questions that you'd like asked and ask those very important follow-up questions that you also would probably like to ask them. Remember that you can ask our experts your own questions by sending E-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this Webcast. If we don't get to your question during the Webcast, we'll answer it in the archive for the Webcast. As Greg mentioned, we are Webcasting live today from Educom '98 in Orlando, Florida, where the conference theme is "Making the Connections." The connections in question are those that connect information technology to people and those that connect people to each other. Although today's three guests all have substantial technical expertise, as you'll certainly see, in keeping with conference theme, we will try to focus on how the new technologies affect the people that must use them and on the ability of the new technologies to connect communities of people together. Greg?

GM: Right. Our guest experts include Brian Hawkins, President of Educause, who will be joining us in just a few minutes. Brian was formerly the senior Vice President for Academic Planning and Administrative Affairs at Brown University. He has also recently finished a new book on academic information resources that I hope we can hear more about during this session. An extended bio and photo is at the Tech Talk site on www.cren.net. Another of our guest experts is Gary Crane, Senior Director of Network Development at NicerNet, Incorporated, and the principal architect of the NicerNet 2000 program, an advanced research and education network infrastructure in New York State. We will talk with Gary about advanced network services for research and education. In particular, Gary will update us on the NicerNet 2000 program and its role in the evolving Internet 2 initiative. The third member of our expert panel is Jim Wolfe, Director of Academic Computing at SUNY Binghamton and a member of the CREN Board of Trustees. We'll talk with Jim about collaborative teaching and learning projects, wireless networking, Internet 2 and the topics that have come up as he's been around the floor here at the Educom '98 conference. We welcome all of our guests, thank all of them for being here at this special edition of CREN Tech Talk at Educom '98.

HS: Gary, I'd like to start off by asking you, since you're here at Educom and you're wandering around, attending sessions and looking at the corporate exhibits and things like that, if you see some real excitement or real interest in Internet 2 that perhaps we hadn't seen in the past?

GC: Well, yeah. I would say that I definitely have. There's a series of talks that have been given. There's a real presence here by the Internet 2 and the UCAID groups explaining their programs. There's folks here from MCI explaining some of their new initiatives in the advanced network arena, and a real presence by the academic community that's playing a key role in the roll-out of these advanced network services. So there's a real presence here that I don't think, probably hasn't been that way in the past, and there's been a real thread through the conference of discussions about what these services are and how they can be made available to a broader community, too.

HS: What do you think are the real concerns that are being brought up here with regard to Internet 2, at this conference?

GC: Well, I think there's a lot of concern about the cost. We're early in the deployment of a lot of these connectivity services, particularly when you get down to the regional level. The NSF certainly has been fueling this with the VBNS program and the VBNS network has been up and running for -

HS: Just remind our listeners what VBNS is, just for those who are not quite up on this.

GC: The VBNS is an NSF-funded high-speed backbone that's been in place for at least a couple years now. It was originally constructed to interconnect the five supercomputer centers that were funded by the National Science Foundation and over the last year and a half or so, the NSF has opened up access to that network to individual campuses. And this has really fueled the whole advanced network initiative with the formation of regional aggregations which are known as gigapops around the various parts of the country that are providing aggregated services to a number of campuses and shared access to the VBNS. And then, of course, the Internet 2 project and the Abilene announcement, which is really an alternative to the VBNS. It's another national, high-speed backbone that's really a grassroots initiative that's coming from the university research community themselves to put in place a high-speed, advanced network infrastructure that's national in scope.

GM: You said a key word there in the Internet 2 project. One of the early listeners on the session today, George Brett, has sent us messages to make sure that we understand that it's the Internet 2 project, that Internet 2 itself is not a network, whereas VBNS and Abilene are specific implementations that are of value to the overall project effort.

GC: That's exactly right.

HS: I believe I just heard the phone ring. Is that Brian?

BH: Yes, it's Brian.

HS: Okay, Brian, it's nice to have you join us. If I could turn to Brian for a moment here, I think one of the things our listeners are going to be very interested in is just a few words on how the consolidation of Educom and Cause is going. A lot of us at the conference have heard quite a bit about it, but there's lots of people out there who didn't have the opportunity to be out here. I wonder if you could say a few words about that?

BH: I'd be happy to. Educause as of last Thursday was 100 days old, and we have now reached that milestone. We've done quite a lot in terms of trying to bring the two organizations into a single entity, which we think will have a synergy that will serve our members better. There will be a single conference next year, both the Cause '98 Conference which is scheduled for Seattle in early December and this conference, which is coming to a close, bring to a close some 35 years of history of EDUCOM and 28 years of Cause, and our first annual Educause meeting will be Educause '99 in Long Beach. It will be a unified conference. We announced yesterday that the keynote speakers for that conference will be General Colin Powell, it will include Dr. Barry Munitz, who is now head of the Getty Trust and formerly chancellor of California State University, and will hopefully include an extraordinary woman who we're waiting for final confirmation, who is one of America's leaders in education and technology. So the combination of those three, plus nine featured speakers in addition, will highlight the larger combined conference. In addition, we're trying to combine a whole host of programs in professional development, in our communications strategy, etc. There's been a great misconception that we will be eliminating one of the two offices, and that's not the case. Our operations and member services will be run through the Boulder office and our policy and legislative arena and network (inaudible) is out of our Washington office. And so we have announced a new dues structure as of Tuesday of this week. We have defined a new conference strategy. We have some 16 professional development opportunities during the next 12 months that are already confirmed, and so we think we're off to a reasonably good start, but we're open to concerns and issues and suggestions from the membership and I would encourage you, if you're listening and you have areas, to contact me with E-mail. I'm hawkins@educause.edu. Or any of the staff. We would be more than interested in hearing of concerns and suggestions on how we can better serve the membership.

HS: Brian, I don't think you gave the dates for that conference. I wonder if you could do that.

BH: Yes, it's October 26-29, again in Long Beach, California, at the Long Beach Convention Center.

GM: In terms of Educause next year, in a sense having both an EDUCOM and a Cause conference opens up a number of slots to people to make presentations. Combining it, in theory, might give you half the number of slots for presentations and that much of a reduction in the information flow. How are you dealing with that?

BH: Well, I just left a four-hour meeting of the program committee for next year.

HS: Actually, I was in it as well.

BH: And what we have is have defined a number of tracks, but they're not as narrowly defined. They're more broad. They try to deal with a series of sort of a matrix approach, but it's a multidimensional matrix to encourage the breadth and the complexity of our field to be represented. But as well, there'll be poster sessions and discussion groups and other ways for participants to share their ideas. But you're absolutely correct. There will be something less than the sum of the two. One of the things, as well, because of the affiliate program, have a number, I mentioned, of professional development opportunities. Increased focus on regional conferences is something which Educause will continue and try to enhance because not everyone can go to a national conference, and therefore to provide other alternatives and other options is part of the overall strategy as well, so that the services and growth experiences of the association can be made available to more members, and I think that will, in the long term, enhance and increase the number of opportunities, Greg.

HS: Brian, on quite another topic here, if I could, I understand that you and Patricia Batten have a book out about reconfiguring academic information resources for the twenty-first century. And since we're about to cruise right into that, I understand that you can't tell us everything in the book in a few minutes here, but if you could, what's happening in the twenty-first century that the are the main themes in your book?

BH: The book is a compilation, first of all, of readings. The book was published by the Council on Library and Information Resources and AAU, the Association of American Universities. No one's making any money on this. This is one of those books that is trying to share some concerns with - it was geared to presidents and provosts specifically, but I think the basic premise is that our current models, both of libraries and to some degree, although a lot of the focus is on libraries, as well the IT organizations. They don't scale. They don't scale to the massiveness, and that's where the title The Mirage of Continuity. It's not continuous, and incremental approaches and solutions won't serve the long-term problems. We have an exponential growth of information. We have exponential growth in terms of our need for collections. I think most people are familiar with library budgets, they're familiar with the acquisitions side, but as well, so is the demand growing exponentially. The only thing that's not is our budgets, as opposed to the requests. And so, therefore, a different model is called for, and what this book tries to do in four different sections is identify some of the philosophical problems and how it's tied to the academic mission. Some of the technical issues is sort of a section we've colloquially called "Easier Said Than Done," dealing with some of the operational issues of achieving that and finally, some of the management issues that we face when the information environment becomes far more complex.

HS: Brian, with respect to the fact that one of our conferences is going to disappear here, we're only going to have one conference instead of two, are there going to be more regional conferences? Is there going to be some attempt to replace the lost conferences some way?

BH: The professional development has been, for the most part, on the Cause side of the house, if you will, and their strategy that was defined in the early '90's will be continued, which is to increase regionalism in that regard. Our affiliates NERCOMP in the Northeast, the SAC Conferences which occur in the mountain states in Snowmass, recently we've just held a conference with NWAC, the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium in the Northwest. And so the answer really is, yes, we're going to continue to try to make opportunities available so that it's not long-distance travel. It could be drive in opportunities for a day or two days in each of the regions, so that will continue to try and expand, but only when we can guarantee a high level of quality. And one of the things which we're trying to do with our affiliates is work with common curricula so that we can draw upon the database of where papers have been submitted, what kind of opportunities and who's doing what work out there so that it reduces some of the overhead of these kinds of conferences in terms of putting them on from our volunteer, but as well serves a broader membership.

HS: Brian, a lot of universities, as you know, are doing a lot of stuff with distance learning and things like that, and I know that Educause does a lot of professional development. Are there plans to try to do some of that professional development in the mode of distance learning so people can be at their offices and use the Web or other online resources, that kind of model?

BH: Yes, absolutely. And that is one of the things that, as I interviewed for the job, I expressed concern about is that right now, our PD opportunities all require the bandwidth of a 727 in order to engage in them. And so what we're trying to do is, if we can't practice what we preach, there's a problem. Those initiatives are in their very early and formative stages. They'll include a variety of types of synchronous and asynchronous opportunities, we hope, in the long run. One of the things is just having discussion groups and other methods, electronic methods, so you can carry along the interests of community that are generated at our face-to-face kinds of gatherings so that the benefit of meetings will continue beyond just the close of the conference.

HS: That's really great to hear. I agree that sometimes I can't get all my folks to be on 747's, and sometimes I don't have the time to be on one either. I would really like to take advantage of the professional development opportunities that Educause is going to offer.

BH: We'll also look a lot more at Webcasts. Historically, we have tried to get from both associations the Webcasts up, at least in a delayed fashion, if not online so that other people can enjoy those. For example, the presentation by Sir John Daniel that occurred at Snowmass is available on the Educause Website. The meetings here will be, etc., so I encourage people to let us know what their interests are and to let us know if these are successful.

GM: Very good.

HS: Before we turn to Jim, Brian, is there anything else you want to - any other point you want to make on this Webcast?

BH: I just want to say that this is a new association. Yes, it's the sum of both, but at the same point, any combination, hopefully, you get some synergy out of. But that will only come with the input from the membership, and I would really encourage, once again, that if there are thoughts and suggestions, we are open to those. We're not caught in our traditions when we're as young as we are.

GC: Greg, this is Gary.

GM: Yeah.

GC: I'd like to point out that there's a secondary consolidation going on at the same time along with the EDUCOM and Cause consolidation. There's a consolidation of a couple of networking groups, the NTTF and FARNET. And I wonder if Brian would like to comment on the progress of that also.

BH: Yeah, someone suggested that our new title really is Mergers R Us. At the very same time that the EDUCOM and Cause consolidation was occurring, the National Telecommunications Task Force, which has been an EDUCOM entity for about 14 years, if I recall, found that it was doing increasing overlapping work with the Federation of Academic Research Networks group which emerged in the early '90s with the regionals. And so what happened, in order to better serve the totality of membership, is that these two have merged and there's a new entity. Both those other sets of labels went away, and they're now called Net@edu, and this will be the consolidated efforts of these two efforts. While historically, these have sort of been pay to play entities, one of the things which EDUCAUSE is doing is subsidizing the effort so that there's a tech transfer program going on, so that the issues of advanced networking are carried to schools that are not necessarily R1's and hooking onto Abilene and the like, but instead, geared to the ASCU and the Association of American Community Colleges and other kinds of groups can benefit from the leading edge group as well.

GM: Great!

HS: Okay, thank you, Brian. Jim, I assume that at EDUCOM, you've been looking at all kinds of collaborative teaching and learning aspects of the conference here?

JW: I've been looking at some of those. Actually, when I came here, there were really two things that I wanted to pay attention to. One was the application of wireless networks in a collaborative classroom, specifically a flexible environment classroom, and the other, I was very interested in following up in what's going on with Internet 2 as it might apply to an institution that doesn't really have VBNS connectivity at this point.

HS: Are you such an institution?

JW: Yeah, Binghamton has not submitted an application for VBNS connection yet, and I guess one of the things was initially there was a fairly high potential barrier. The potential barrier was partly geography.

HS: Why would geography be a problem when we're talking about Internet connections?

JW: Well, in New York State, Binghamton is not on the Thruway. It's not near New York City. It's kind of tucked down there on the Pennsylvania border, and even with good operations like NicerNet, the cost of that local loop was looking pretty high.

HS: Gary, aren't you a NicerNet person?

GC: Absolutely.

HS: Jim's saying that he really can't afford to get into this Internet 2 stuff because of you NYCRNet people.

GC: Even with our help, he's still having problems, is I think how I would interpret that question. Actually, we're working hard to try and address that. And really, I think this is one of the roles that the regional gigapops, the regional networking organizations are playing in the whole Internet 2 and national advanced network rollout. We have to deal with these issues that are regional in nature and the problems that arise from geography and a lack of carrier facilities to certain parts of our states. They're real. It's very expensive to connect schools like Binghamton. But one of the ways we're looking at in addressing that in New York is through a partnership with the state itself. The State of New York is in the process of deploying a high speed network service that will serve their government purposes, to connect all of their state office locations across the state of New York. One of the things we're trying to work out with them is to be able to use that service as a feeder for the NicerNet backbone service, NicerNet 2000 across the state of New York, getting into places that are geographically difficult in New York State that the state has an incentive to get to also.

JW: That's one of the things that really gives me a lot of encouragement. I knew that, of course, before coming down here. The fact that there's this Thruway project in New York state, and then the loop, the alternative, going through the southern tier helps us quite a bit and it reduces some of the costs. I certainly hope! The thing that encourages me here at EDUCOM, however, is -

HS: EDUCAUSE is okay. It's perfectly okay to call it EDUCAUSE. We're getting there.

JW: Is that I hear a lot of other states with similar things happening, and I suspect maybe we're heading to the same kind of situation as we did when they first got those supercomputer centers. And the ones who didn't get the supercomputer sites, the states for economic development reasons and other kinds of reasons started to pony up to make the playing field more level.

HS: Jim, you said another area you were interested in was this whole wireless area, and I know wireless encompasses lots of different things. You're talking a little bit about using wireless in a classroom for collaborative purposes, I believe you said?

JW: Yeah, we have a faculty member who is - the original concept was that this person wanted beanbag chairs, laptops and wireless networks so that -

HS: And you can only afford the beanbag chairs!

JW: We could afford the beanbag chairs pretty easily.

GC: And you couldn't figure out how to network them.

JW: The beanbag chairs? No. The laptop computers. We were going out there looking at some models, and initially, people were saying, "Well, it's too slow." And then we found a vendor before coming down here who is touting ten megabits per second. And so I tried on coming down here to kind of go through the floor of the vendor area and see what was available and also to talk with some of the other folks at the discussion tables about their experiences with wireless networking and a couple other environments. I did not find anyone on the floor who was talking ten megabits per second to the access point, but I did find a number of vendors who were doing some interesting things. I was kind of pleasantly surprised that the costs seemed to be fairly consistent.

HS: Tell me about what the costs seemed to be. I've been looking at this a bit for Princeton, and the costs still seem prohibitive to me. So consistency is not good enough. It's got to be affordable as well.

JW: I was hearing about $1,000 for access points, and most of the vendors were talking about one access point being able to deal with somewhere between 25 and 40 stations.

HS: What about the cost of the cards in the machine?

JW: There were prices ranging from $335 up to about $500 for a PC MCIA card for a laptop.

HS: How would you envision that would work? Would the students just each go out and buy this $330 PC card? Would the university supply them?

JW: The model I was assuming was that the university would supply them, and actually for my particular application, I wasn't assuming that the students would necessarily have their own laptops either.

GM: Did you talk with any of the vendors about whether there is any prospect that a volume purchase of this, if you were going to students and you were buying in the thousands rather than five or ten, whether there would be a significant change in the price?

JW: I didn't explore that with them. Most of the people I talked to were really kind of fuzzy on the actual pricing. Most of them tended to deal through distributors rather than deal directly. They wanted to kind of defer a lot of the details, so I suspect that the prices we're talking about here are prices that in quantity could go down some, but I wouldn't hazard a guess as to how far down they'd go.

HS: You said that you envision that the university would own these laptops. The university would just buy them for the students, or the university would lend them to the students when they were taking this class?

JW: The latter. This would be the latter, in the case I'm thinking about, Howard. Binghamton is not dealing with a laptop program at this point, and I guess I don't see that coming in the next year or so. But for an experiment in providing a this flexible environment classroom, the purchase of 25, 30 laptops for a classroom doesn't seem to be out of line.

GM: Jim, were you able to find other people here at the conference who had tried wireless solutions, and if so, did they have positive experiences or descriptions of problems with those?

JW: I talked with a number of people at one of the luncheon discussion tables. There were a couple of tables dealing specifically with wireless networking. There were some people from North Carolina and person from Manhattan and someone from Wisconsin as well who had tried some smaller scale kinds of things. Nothing large, like four stations and an access point in a fairly confined environment, and that experiment was viewed positively and the person intended to expand it. There was a session also from the University of Iowa libraries talking about utilizing wireless in a library environment. I wasn't able to attend that one. I saw it on the program. I'm also aware of some things, I think it's at Drexel, where they've utilized this kind of technology in the library and seemed to be very proud of it. We were looking at some of the flexible environment classrooms, however, and there was one at Stanford where they did something similar to what we were going to do, and my understanding is that the wireless part of this thing may not be something that they are going to continue with. I don't know the exact details on that one, though.

GM: There's obviously still plenty of opportunity to be a real pioneer in this area.

JW: There certainly is. It seems like the librarians like it a lot.

HS: (Inaudible.) Jim, did you happen to see in the vendor area, there was one vendor--I wish I remember who it was--who instead of having a PC card had something that was attached to a cell phone so you didn't need an access point at all. What you did is you could communicate between any place that you could just by going through this cell phone connection. Did you happen to see that?

JW: I didn't see that one.

HS: Well, it's out there, and my first glance was, "Wow, cell phones are so expensive that you couldn't afford to do this," but talking to many people, they've pointed out that the price of cell phones, at least cell calls, has gone way down. So this might actually be another approach to the thing, something I really had never considered up until now.

GC: I've seen these. I'm a little familiar with this, and it's essentially just a modem connection using the cell phone as the connection. Unless this has changed in the last six months or so -

HS: You're going to say it's a bit slow.

GC: Yeah, it is, it runs at 9600 baud, which seems to be a real limiting factor. I don't know that they've really improved the speed of that yet.

HS: I really hadn't looked at it carefully.

GM: (Inaudible) used a 9600 baud connection for anything.

GC: Yeah.

JW: The various vendors I talked to, by the way, the ones on the floor here were still in the two megabit per second range. One of them was saying, "Well, by first quarter, we'll be up to 11 megabits" and the other one says, "Well, within the next couple of years, we'll be up to that range as well." Then I am aware of this one outfit that does have ten megabit per second RF (inaudible.)

HS: Don't you think it's a real sign of progress that we're talking about two megabit per second stuff and saying, "Boy, it's awfully slow! It's not enough!" It's the kind of thing we wouldn't have been saying just a short time ago.

JW: What worries me a little bit about this stuff is in a classroom environment, I can just imagine the instructor saying, "All right, everybody hit return." Or "Click on this thing on your Web page."

HS: Right. And you've just got to combine two megabits.

JW: Right. That kind of stuff. Or even take the ten or 100 megabit stuff and divide it up. I don't think that when they say so many devices per access point, that they're considering that type of a use.

GC: It's the equivalent of all the students taking the telephone off hook at the same time, right?

HS: Right. (Inaudible.) One other thing you mentioned you were looking at, Jim, was some collaborative teaching and learning environments. Could you tell me the things you've seen out there or what looks particularly promising now?

GM: Or did you find anything?

JW: Well, I didn't - as I mentioned when you raised the question the first time, I was not really able to - I decided not to focus on that so much. I sent that off to somebody else in the group, so I didn't follow up on that as much as I thought I was going to.

HS: But are there things that are out there that you're aware of that look promising?

JW: I guess what I'm looking at for collaborative learning, I know that there are a lot of things going on in terms of IBM's Learning Space and some of the things that they've got, and also the Lotus Notes environment. I haven't really tried to follow up on that too awful much. I'm a little bit afraid of some of the overhead of some of those things. It's going to be there for us, I know that.

HS: But Gary, isn't Internet 2 going to solve those problems? Jim's concerned about performance.

GC: Well, they'll certainly be able to address some of the performance issues, but I don't know that the Internet 2 project itself is addressing the application side of that. That's one of the issues here that I think you're getting at with this collaborative teaching and learning environments is, okay, if you have an infrastructure that can support some of that, why aren't we seeing more of it?

GM: Let me interrupt and just mention that if any of the folks listening in have questions, did we see this other thing at the conference, send us E-mail at expert@cren.net and if we don't get to your question during the session, it will be on the Website afterward.

BH: Let me just jump in and say that the Internet 2 application area is obviously in just its thinking stage and beginning in terms of opportunity, but yesterday I spent some considerably time with Doug Van Howling, who obviously heads Internet 2 and the UCAID group. And he had special interest in trying to elaborate both the learning environment applications as well as the research aspects in that regard. And while it's absolutely early in the game, we're looking at between the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, NLII efforts and the I2 areas to at least explore what possibilities and what needs might drive applications development in that area. A paper coming out from Mark Luker who heads the Net@edu group I mentioned earlier and Carol Brone will soon be out that shows the high level of interdependency, that you can't do the learning stuff without the networking and how interdependent they truly are.

HS: And then we've got all of us talking about applications on Internet 2. I keep hearing a lot of talk about Internet 2 needing some kind of killer app, that to get this going, there has to be some application where Internet 2 really makes it possible and it wouldn't be possible otherwise, something more than just fast FTTP. Could any of you talk about any potential killer apps or whether we need one or not?

GC: So you want us to predict the next Mosaic, right? I know, but I'm not telling!

HS: (Inaudible) because it's in your basement right now, growing. Or to tell me that we don't need one. Do we need a killer app to make Internet 2 successful?

GC: I think what you have to be careful about is your measure of "successful." A lot of people look at the VBNS and say, "Gee, you know, the federal government dumped $50,000,000 into this thing and you look at the usage of it, and it's 15 or 20% of its capacity. What are you guys doing? This seems like a real waste of money." But I think what you have to realize is it's a very different environment, that you can't look at average usage and utilization of network links like you do in a commodity Internet because what you really have to look at are applications that are very, extremely bursty, that need a lot of bandwidth for a short period of time, or they won't work at all. And the obvious example is real-time interactive video. The Internet 1 network can actually do that as long as nobody else is using it, but often these interactive video sessions aren't really long and require long periods of time. Like, they don't run for hours and hours, but when they do run, they need real solid bandwidth that's defined for that particular purpose. I've seen some really good applications using interactive video for teaching. In fact, at Ohio State, they've rigged up an operating theater in their medical school and they're actually distributing it through their state system, and they're teaching people how to perform laparoscopic surgery using a network, so that students who are not actually in the location where the surgery is taking place and the instructor is explaining what's happening see all of the interactions that are going on in the operating theater. They have a video feed that's coming off the laparoscopic camera. They have patient telemetry data coming off the instrumentation that's measuring the patient's statistics. And there's an instructor at the other end who's interpreting all of that for the class.

HS: I've heard the next step is actually to do the surgery remotely, possibly over Internet2, which brings up the question of if you're controlling a delicate instrument or doing something delicate to somebody's body, that's a real stretch.

GC: That's a real stretch. The problem there is finding anybody that will actually let you do that to them!

HS: We never ask permission when we want to do that kind of thing! But it brings up the quality of service issue. If you're doing surgery remotely to someone, but that's too much of a stretch. Okay, if you're operating some delicate instrument remotely where the control required requires that you not miss a millisecond or the instrument does something horrible, how can we guarantee or what steps are being made to guarantee quality of service on Internet 2? I hear that's a real problem.

GC: Well, it is a real problem because a lot of that stuff is in development. Really, the way, when you say Internet 2, it's in general advanced network services. But the way that that's being dealt with with Abilene, for instance, is they're just provisioning an awful lot of bandwidth. And they're hoping that, in the short term, by over-provisioning bandwidth they won't have to worry about the quality of service issues immediately because there aren't good technical solutions for that in the IP space right now. But there are good technical solutions for that in using ATM technologies in a wide area, and so there are other ways to approach this. And in fact, one of the things that we're doing at NicerNet is actually trying to address that head-on. Part of our deployment is a real deep partnership with Newbridge Networks, and Newbridge produces a real flagship ATM switch that's in most of the telecommunications carriers' infrastructures. And what we're doing with them is helping them to deploy some early releases of an architecture they call CSI which is an attempt to actually bridge the IP store-and-forward best efforts world with the wide-area ATM world where you can define the size of pipes between two points and create a seamless, end-to-end guaranteed service. That's in development. We hope to actually deploy some of that stuff by the end of this year or very early next year. But in general, these things are in development right now.

GM: And that would also be proprietary protocols that are limited to where it's deployed in your area?

GC: Well, actually, Newbridge is trying hard to work within the standards bodies and introduce this as a potential standard, but I think that's an approach that we've seen a lot of vendors take. They have to develop things that are different in order to do things you can't do today, so they're not standard when they develop them. But if they're engineered well and they solve a problem, they can often be accepted into the standards bodies.

HS: We only have a few minutes left here and what I'd like to do is ask a closing question, really to all of you. You've been wandering around here at EDUCOM and looking at various things and attending sessions, I hope, and hiding from the 90 heat that's outside here, but while you're here, have you spotted anything that might be the beginning of a new trend or something that we're going to see a lot more of in the future that we're just beginning to see here now?

BH: I'm going to not answer your question, but there's one thing I want to -

HS: (Inaudible.) A good politician says whatever he or she (inaudible.)

BH: (Inaudible.) There's one thing I think we need to say. Given all the enthusiasm that Gary mentioned about Internet 2, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that there are lots of opportunities for people to get more information about preparing themselves to participate in high-performance networking. CREN, UCAID, NSF, EDUCAUSE, all of those organizations are working together to kind of get the message out. CREN's virtual seminar on Internet 2 is available now, and EDUCAUSE has been promoting the workshop in Austin for, I guess it's in January, 7 to 9, is that correct?

GM: That's the day it starts.

BH: Correct. Those two things, I think, are opportunities that people who want to be prepared for high-performance networking ought to take advantage of.

JW: I would say that that's something I have seen as a trend here, and that's there does seem to be an increasing focus on broadening the community that can access these advanced network services that are really still fairly early in development, and so I think we're seeing very early in the deployment of these advanced technologies, these advanced network services, a real strong desire to make this available to the broadest possible community. I think that's a fantastic trend. I think it's great to see that happening early.

BH: I'm not sure it's a trend. I think one of the things that I've heard as I've chatted in the hallways and heard sessions is that there's an increasing pressure to be able to demonstrate the impact that some of these things are having in terms of research and instruction and pedagogy and learning. And I think this growth of pressure on being able to assess and demonstrate benefits is something that I think all of us are increasingly going to have to focus on.

GM: I think that one of the things which I saw in going around the conference was a level of interest that leaders on campuses were finding, the faculty was pushing upwards in terms of wanting to use the stuff and use it well, that meant a whole different level of focus on the use of technology in learning than we've seen in the past.

HS: Actually, my impression has been, at least at this conference, looking at the vendors and hearing the papers, it was less a whole bunch of new stuff than of people really polishing the old stuff and learning how to use it more effectively and better. And I think it's nice to do that from time to time.

GM: Any other final comments or questions before we wrap up for the day? If not, then I'll say thanks to all of our local participants here, and I appreciate your joining for this special session on EDUCOM '98. If any of you listening out there have follow-up questions, you can send them to expert@cren.net and they'll show up on the Website. Our special guests, Brian, Gary and Jim, will respond and we'll put them there. Do be sure to mark your calendars for the next Tech Talk event. That's October 22, only a week from today, at the same time. That session will feature Howard Strauss again, except that this time he'll be in the role of the special guest, and he'll be providing his regular update on Web happenings in your future. If you'd like to receive regular announcement messages on these sessions, send E-mail to cren@cren.net or sign up at the Website, www.cren.net. I'd like to help everyone who helped make this possible today: the board of CREN; our experts today, Brian Hawkins, Gary Crane and Jim Wolfe. Our anchor, Howard Strauss. The folks at U of M Web Services for the encoding effort. And all of you for being here, because it's time. Bye, everyone.