Meeting Notes for 6 Oct 2010

Present:Liz, Bob, TomL
Absent: Marge, Phong, TomJ

Event on the Mall and Argonne Outage

We discussed why having the Argonne machines down would be a problem for the event on the mall (Oct. 20th). Liz clarified with Marge that the detector array will be in the tent, but that there will be no internet access. Perhaps there is a way that Phong could set up a laptop to demonstrate the e-Lab. We will have to discuss it with him when he comes back. It does not seem like Argonne's being down is as critical to the event on the Mall as previously thought.

CMS Help

Marge and Liz talked with Randy Ruchti and Lothar Bauerdick about the developer we hope to get to help on CMS and other e-Lab work. It looks promising so Marge will try to discover how to juggle funding along with potential contributions from CMS Outreach and QuarkNet.

CMS

Mihael made the changes to the 3D event display that Ken Cecire asked for. They are currently on www12 and work very well except for one very small problem that Ken has communicated to Mihael. This means that they are ready for the Master Classes as well as the e-Lab.

Tom Loughran continues to work on improving the milestone references for "interpret data" and "Momentum, energy ...". Marge will look at them soon. He also has added some screencasts. He will be working on more screencasts and a calendar for CMS folks.

LIGO

Dale was hoping we could deploy the latest development versions of LIGO so he can use them in workshops. Liz was reluctant to deploy to www18 without Mihael and Phong to fix problems. It will have to wait until Phong returns.

ELabs Community

With the wiki and forum not really working well for our teachers, Tom Loughran is suggesting we should look into LearnCentral and its video conferencing Elluminate!. He is also interested in Atomic Learning – technology training for teachers. Liz suggested that we should write down the requirements as perhaps they are different now that we have had some experience. For example, maybe we do not need the tight coupling between the e-Labs and the Community pages and that seamless login is not as important. We have some functionality like adding Classroom Activities and Glossary Items that we could move. We would have to decide whether we want to use transclusion from a wiki in the future. Using an "off-the-shelf" solution could give us some protection from too much dependence on software that our developers need to support. On the other hand, Liz pointed out that Ning, a very popular product with teachers, has recently changed its pricing and driven teachers away so you cannot always count on these solutions. Marge mentioned that NCSA used Moodle for a Chemistry program for rural teachers. Tom L. pointed out that Moodle is more oriented to deploying courses. Eric gave us a demo of Ning a year or so ago.

-- Main.LizQuigg - 06 Oct 2010