January 3, 2007
iStory Tour: Costa Rica
Perhaps it could only be an organization like SITE that leaves one occasionally perplexed when attempting to post a blog entry.
I have had the good fortune to work with a group of international educators since last summer on a project called iStory Tours. This 21st century learning approach to global awareness allows participants in academic travel to blog, podcast and create digital stories (in our case, we’re also playing around with geocaching). (The iStory Tour initiative was developed by Apple Computers and EF Tours.)
In any case, I am only a few hours away from leading a group of Kean University students, faculty, staff, and friends on an iStory Tour to Costa Rica (I know how tough that is to do in January!). Please follow our blog at http://web.mac.com/michaelsearson .
Of course, this is just the type of activity that I eagerly want to share with my colleagues at SITE. However, where would one post and entry on something like an iStory Tour? Does it belong to International Education? ..to Digital Storytelling? …the Teacher Education Council?(most of the faculty and students involved in our iStory Tour are from our College of Education, and they’re taking a course in educational technology).
The fact that I’m face with such a dilemma points to one of the key strengths of SITE. I really can’t think of an organization that blends so well many important facets that all contribute to a cutting edge treatment of 21st century technologies. Imagine that a teacher education student engaged in global travel creates a blog and podcast. Now isn’t that a true SITE approach!
Comments(3)
I saw your international tour while at a GLEF anniversary.My research is in spatial thinking and HPC. You might enjoy this rant.
Where is Science in the Information Society … If the world is flat we have to have science as a part of the technology initiatives.. if so..
Where does the Information Society come from?
How should it evolve in the future?
The past United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a challenge to the world’s scientists. While “recent advances in information technology, genetics and biotechnology hold extraordinary prospects for individual well-being and humankind as a whole,” he wrote in Science magazine, “the way in which scientific endeavours are pursued around the world is marked by clear inequalities.” Annan called on the world’s scientists to work with the United Nations to extend the benefits of modern science to developing countries.
First Steps
The Role of Science in the Information Society (RSIS) conference was in part a response to that challenge. Together with the International Council for Science, the Third World Academy of Sciences, and UNESCO, CERN is organised the event on behalf of the world’s scientific community.
Held at CERN in Geneva RSIS will review the prospects that present developments in science and technology offer for the future of the Information Society, especially in education, environment, health, and economic development.
This event brought together scientists, policy makers and stakeholders from around the world to develop a vision for how information and communication technologies can be applied for the greater benefit of all. The conference produced a declaration and an action plan, which will fed into the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
As an international, intergovernmental physics laboratory with 20 European member states and formal cooperation agreements with over 30 nations around the world, CERN was ideally suited to host RSIS. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while at CERN to enable scientists around the globe to work together effectively, and CERN then made the technology freely available to the global community, an enormous step toward democratizing the flow of information. One component of the RSIS discussion was how to apply lessons learnt from the history of the Web and other information and communication technologies.
RSIS themes
The prospects that science-driven technologies hold for education, economic development, health, and environment were a special focus of the conference.
We continue this work in emerging technologies.
Because the world is flat, we may want to consider high-performance computing as a case study that shows international collaboration.
There are emerging elearning ideas that use electronic media and the power of networks in new ways-primarily those based on Internet technologies but also using satellite based networks and the Grid or Teragrid to enable more efficient , flexible, personalized an and engaging learning.
High Performance Computing
(n.) A branch of computer science that concentrates on developing supercomputers and software to run on supercomputers. A main area of this discipline is developing parallel processing algorithms and software: programs that can be divided into little pieces so that each piece can be executed simultaneously by separate processors.
Grid Computing
Simply put the grid is a service for sharing computer power and data storage capacity in a geographically distributed way. Like the Web the Grid is a service that runs on the Internet. Unlike the Web there is no uniform standard or protocol for the Grid today.
Here is a web site that creates the idea using visualization and sharing of some projects. http://www.tryscience.org/grid/home.html
: Rather there are many different grids for difference applications. Some grids link together dozens of major computing centers on several continents to solve specific scientific problems.
Some Case studies of use of the ACCESS CRID, the Grid and the
Teragrid
CASE STUDY 1
EU co-funded
Enabling Grids for E-SciencE.
The EGEE project
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) is project funded by the European Commission’s Sixth Framework Programme through Directorate F: Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures, of the Directorate-General for Information Society and Media. It connects more than 70 institutions in 27 European countries to construct a multi-science Grid infrastructure for the European Research Area. Building on recent developments in Grid Technology and earlier test-bed projects such as EU DataGrid, its main aims are:
1. To build a secure, reliable and robust Grid infrastructure
2. To reengineer a light-weight middleware solution, gLite, specifically intended to be used by many different scientific disciplines
3. To attract, engage and support a wide range of users from science and industry, and provide them with extensive technical and training support.
EGEE began in March 2004 under the name Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe, but changed its name shortly afterwards with the addition of partners in the United States and Asia-Pacific region.
The project was launched using the pre-existing LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project as a springboard. LCG aims to provide computing resources for analysis of data coming from the forthcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva. This project connects High Energy Physics computing resources form across the globe, and is required to process the predicted 15 petabytes of data the LHC will produce each year. EGEE started from this infrastructure, adding more resources from all parts of the globe and attracting users from a number of other communities to form what has become the largest multi-science Grid infrastructure in the world.
Middleware
EGEE began work using the LCG-2 middleware, provided by the LCG project (but in itself based on the middleware from EU DataGrid, EGEE’s predecessor). In parallel it produced the gLite middleware, reengineered using components from a number of sources to produce lightweight middleware that provides a full range of basic Grid services. As of September 2006, gLite is at version 3.0, and comprises some 220 packages arranged in 34 logical deployment modules.
The gLite middleware is also used by a number of groups outside of EGEE such as the EC funded DILIGENT. The French space agency CNES also has plans to deploy gLite in the future.
Infrastructure
EGEE operates more than 180 sites, from a mixture of research centres, Universities, companies and other interested bodies. Originally in Europe, the infrastructure now features sites in the Americas and Asia-Pacific region in addition to these original resources. These sites provide some 20,000 CPUs, with the number expected to rise considerably in 2006-7 as machines are put in place to process data from the LHC and as the other application domains grow.
The infrastructure runs on a wide range of different hardware, but at present all computers in the EGEE infrastructure run the CERN version of Scientific Linux.
EGEE-II
EGEE was due to end on 31 March 2006, but a follow up project, EGEE-II, was started with the EC on 1 April 2006. EGEE-II has a larger consortium, with 91 contracting partners and 48 non-contracting partners from 32 countries, as well as expanded support for non-European participants and application communities. EGEE-II features a refocused middleware effort, increasing the integration of components from outside sources and putting more effort into integration and testing activities.
CASE STUDY TWO
Native American culture preservation and access to ICT
Karen Buller, President and CEO, National Indian Telecommunications Institute
Description of the Internet to the Hogan project, Bonnie Bracey Sutton
The two authors of these articles have often traveled the Southwest together and indeed many areas of the country, USA where the digital divide exists.This is just one of their stories, experiences and information that is being shared,.
Background
The History of telecom in Indian Country is a story of deprivation. To illustrate let me tell you a true story. When phone service first came to North Dakota, copper lines were dragged over Indian lands to get to White customers. My friend Carol Davis of Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe told me about how her grandmother desired telephone service, but was ignored by the service provider. In fact their phone company routinely pulled cable over her front yard to get to white customers.
After many requests and many rejections from the phone company, Carol’s grandmother devised a plan. Every morning she took large scissors to her front yard and cut the phone wire. It took several times of doing this before she finally received phone service too. I am proud that this brave little-old-lady found a way to get phone service when Native Americans were being ignored. It has not been so easy for other Native Americans to obtain phone service.
There are over 2 million Native Americans in the United States. An important background note for non-Indians is to recognize the diversity with the North American continent of Native Americans. Today there are over 562 federally recognized tribes in the Unites States. They are each sovereign nations with treaty rights. Before Europeans came, there were many more. Just as one would not lump all Europeans together as one of mind or spirit, neither can one lump all Native tribes together. The tribes of North America have different languages, foods and religions. To lump Tribes of the United States together would be like saying Italians are the same as Swedes because they are both Europeans. The differences are great.
I say this to help the reader understand that a Pan-Indian movement of any type is unlikely. Don’t expect diverse tribes to have the same opinions or ideas. Also telecommunications solutions will by necessity vary widely due the different geographic situations. For example a solution that is affordable in the plains may not even work in the mountains. Tribal diversity and geography must be taken into account when examining business and telecommunications solutions.
It is interesting to note that Native Americans seem to use the Internet in more interesting was than the rest of the population. While most Americans use the Internet to pull down information, and access facts. Native Americans use the Internet to put out information about themselves. In the past there has been so much misinformation about Native Americans that tribal people are anxious to correct that misinformation. The greatest power the Internet is that it gives us a chance to define ourselves in our own words and in our own voice.
Content . Mirror or Map
For centuries, we have been defined by historians, missionaries, archaeologists and academics. For the first time in history, we can use technology to voice what we think is important about ourselves in define ourselves in our own terms. The Internet allows anyone to be an author. A Native Americans does not need to have a Ph.D. or a publishing company behind him to become an author on the Internet. Anyone with access to computer can put their own ideas on the Web.
It is said that the number of Native American web sites out numbers the number of other minorities web sites per capita.
Finally, the Internet gives the hope of making money while living on our land base. For most Native Americans living on our own land base is preferred way to live. However over half of us live in cities because that’s where the jobs are. The Internet reaches internationally and gives the opportunity to reach out and perhaps successfully create a business and make money while living wherever we choose.
The Internet allows Native Americans to share cultural and language information was tribal members who live far away and with different tribes. Native Americans are reporting news, (Indianz.com); selling native made products, (K.jewelry.com); and waging political campaigns online. The Internet is used in wide and varied ways among Native Americans. For example, a Native American child who needed a bone marrow transplant, was able to find a donor quickly through the Internet. In one of the early native only list serves that I participated on, Native Americans college students who are unable to go home for Thanksgiving, complained of missing their mother’s foods. So other list serves members began sharing recipes and memories of foods from their own tribes. One list-serv member, who worked for the Native Americans agricultural Extension agency, collected the recipes and made a web site of them. Cultural preservation and cultural enrichment are enhanced by the use of the Internet and its power.
There is however, still a digital divide.
http://www.niti.org/
Cultural Content
http://www.niti.org/html/models.html
A Case Study ,
A Specific Case Study: the NAVAJO, DINE
The Power of the Internet
The Internet to the Hogan Project
New Mexico State Senator Leonard Tsosie, is a champion of the Internet to the Hogan legislation that brought the network to the Navajo Nation. “The Internet to the Hogan project seeks to bridge the digital divide in a culturally sensitive manner and tries not to leave a Hogan behind,” said Senator Tsosie. “The project benefits all citizens in or near Navajo Indian country, with inferences to services for children and health care. This project has great potential for services to all citizens.”
Navajo, or Dine -they call themselves, is the largest tribe of North American Indians. A hogan is a traditional dwelling
The Internet to the Hogan for the Navajo Nation of 250,000
citizens will bring a range of benefits to this remote and
underserved population. The territory of the Navajo Nation is a
territory slightly larger than the state of West Virginia.
The infusion of technology to this territory solves what has been
called the last mile program. It also provides a model for
educational delivery and economic development based upon the
ideas that only people who can move toward the engine of the
world’s technology train can hope to move from the economic
basement to the economic high rise.
The project is occurring in one of the poorest places in the
United States where mountain ranges, high deserts, and
canyonlands make even road access difficult to small communities.
The Navajo Nation is at the heart of the digital divide in the
United States , a place where people from many remote
communities have to drive seven or eight miles down dirt roads
that are impassible during rain or snow storms to get to the
nearest phone.
The “Internet to the Hogan” is an overall initiative to drive
connectivity to families in remote areas, including to Chapter
Houses and the hogan, which is a traditional Navajo dwelling.
Before the introduction of the IP network, Nation residents had
to spend up to 12 hours traveling great distances just for access
to social, health, educational and informational services. Now
with the roll-out of this network, expected to be fully complete
in the next 12 months, Navajo Nation residents will have quick
and easier access to numerous services using voice, video and
data on a single line, all at a greatly reduced cost:
Distance learning teleconferencing will feature classes from the major universities near the Nation,including Arizona State University, University of Arizona, University of New Mexico and the University of Utah.
Telemedicine will allow medical patients to receive superior health care via access to doctors in numerous large medical facilities in larger urban areas.
School children who travel as much as four hours daily on a bus to attend school will have after-hours access to the Internet for homework, ensuring that they keep pace with students in more populous areas.
Elderly populations, many of whom speak only the Navajo dialect, will have access to information on agriculture in their native language.
Central government services such as housing, children’s health insurance, e-government, job listings and voting will be as close as the nearest chapter House, versus hours away or even unavailable for those with no access to vehicles.
“Just as the Navajo Nation only recently upgraded itself by
moving from the horse and wagons to the automobiles, it’s the same with the Internet,” said Harold Skow, director of information technology for the Navajo Nation. “The benefits of
adoption are enormous for our people in terms of education,
economic development, access to vital services, preservation and
furtherance of our culture. And the savings will allow us to not
only use the funds for other resources but also perhaps generate
much-needed revenue streams.”
The Navajo Nation expects to save as much as 75 per cent over present network costs for this greatly enhanced network and its related capabilities when the network implementation is completed.
The Internet to the Hogan project is possible because of th
Use of Little Fe. This is a joke, that is, big computers are called “ big iron” and little Fe is a computational cluster that is portable
and it mimics or pretends to be a big computer.
Little-Fe: A Portable HPC Cluster for Computational Science Education http://cluster.earlham.edu/detail/project/Little-Fe/ppc-overview/little-fe-ppc.html
The Proof That It Works
The seminal Internet distributed computing project, SETI@home, originated at the University of California at Berkeley. SETI stands for the “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” and the project’s focus is to search for radio signal fluctuations that may indicate a sign of intelligent life from space.Arecibo Radio Telelscope
SETI@home is the largest, most successful Internet distributed computing project to date. Launched in May 1999 to search through signals collected by the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico (the world’s largest radio telescope) the project originally received far more terabytes of data every day than its assigned computers could process. So the project directors turned to volunteers, inviting individuals to download the SETI@home software to donate the idle processing time on their computers to the project.
After dispatching a backlog of data, SETI@home volunteers began processing current segments of radio signals captured by the telescope. Currently, about 40 gigabytes of data is pulled down daily by the telescope and sent to computers all over the world to be analyzed. The results are sent back through the Internet, and the program then collects a new segment of radio signals for the PC to work on.
Over two million people – the largest number of volunteers for any Internet distributed computing project to date – have installed the SETI@home software.
This global network of 3 million computers averages about 14 TeraFLOPS, or 14 trillion floating point operations per second, and has garnered over 500,000 years of processing time in the past year and a half. It would normally cost millions of dollars to achieve that type of power on one or even two supercomputers.
The basics
Grid computing is a form of distributed computing that involves coordinating and sharing computing, application, data, storage, or network resources across dynamic and geographically dispersed organizations. Grid technologies promise to change the way organizations tackle complex computational problems. However, the vision of large scale resource sharing is not yet a reality in many areas – Grid computing is an evolving area of computing, where standards and technology are still being developed to enable this new paradigm.
http://www.grid.org/about/gc/
The exotics
Visualizations and Modeling
Scientific- (or data-), and Information visualization are branches of computer graphics and user interface which are concerned with the presentation of interactive or animated digital images to users to understand data. For example, scientists interpret potentially huge quantities of laboratory or simulation data or the results from sensors out in the field to aid reasoning, hypothesis building and cognition. The field of data mining offers many abstract visualizations related to these visualization types. They are active research areas, drawing on theory in information graphics, computer graphics, human-computer interaction and cognitive science.
CASE STUDY
More projects
http://www.grid.org/home.htm
http://www.gis.com/
Grid computing is an emerging computing model that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure. Grids use the resources of many separate computers connected by a network (usually the Internet) to solve large-scale computation problems. Grids provide the ability to perform computations on large data sets, by breaking them down into many smaller ones, or provide the ability to perform many more computations at once than would be possible on a single computer, by modeling a parallel division of labor between processes. Source, Wikipedia.
Here is a powerpoint on the Grid.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/vonlaszewski02gestalt.html
Teragrid
Grid Computing Basics
The TeraGrid takes its name from two concepts from high-end computing. “Tera” is the metric prefix for “trillions” as in teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) and terabytes (trillions of bytes) and reflects the scale of the computing power provided by the TeraGrid. SDSC and NPACI broke the teraflops computing barrier for U.S. academic computing with the installation of Blue Horizon in 1999. The TeraGrid has nearly seven times the computing power and 130 times the disk storage of Blue Horizon.
The “Grid” portion of the TeraGrid reflects the idea of harnessing and using computers, data storage systems, networks, and other resources as if they were a single massive system. In other word, Grid computing uses software technologies to allow researchers to create “virtual supercomputers” far larger the individual hardware components. http://www.npaci.edu/teragrid/
http://www.teragrid.org/eot/booth.html
The evolution of nanoscale science, engineering, and technology as areas of scientific inquiry brings into sharp relief the critical importance of educational innovation in the field at all levels. While nanoscale phenomena themselves offer significant teaching challenges, the problems are increased by the growth of simulation as a key method of inquiry.
Enter nanoHUB.org, the Network for Computational Nanotechnology’s (NCN) bid to bridge the gap between the potential discoveries of nanotechnology research and the difficulties inherent in learning this complex subject. nanoHub provides a single point of aggregation for simulation tools and educational materials. According to NCN, it is rapidly influencing both research and education in its core areas of nanoelectronics, nano-electromechanical systems and nano- fluidics, and nanobiology.
TeraGrid is the computational engine that powers some of the simulation tools that educators and researchers can use through nanoHUB in support of research and learning.
nanoHUB combines its signature service-online simulation- with lectures, seminars, examples, and exercises. To date, the nanoHUB team has created nine full learning modules, informing every scientific theme within NCN. The notion of using modules to contextualize research within learning is attracting industrial partners to the NCN. It holds great potential for standardizing the way content is delivered across the globe.
In the trade, these supercomputers are called big iron. There is a low cost solution to these computers. But called little Fe.
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[...] iStory Tour: Costa RicaPerhaps it could only be an organization like SITE that leaves one occasionally perplexed when attempting to post a blog entry. I have had the good fortune to work with a group of international educators since last summer on a project … [...]