I have done the best I can with the information I have. Attached is the draft as it stands. I have taken the preproposal and added to it. So in places there is a multiplicity of info. In other places there are holes. This is my understanding of what has to be done to have a complete draft by tomorrow evening. Dave: We need the ARMS pieces filled out and integrated into the text that is there. What of ARMS is covered by this proposal? Geoffrey: could you read the Virtual Classroom,. I have integrated some of your webwisdom and other items you sent to me. could you look at the Tangosim section, probably too long, but I felt we needed some description of the system. could you work on the "work to be done" in terms of ARMS integration. could you provide some text on the assessment and evaluation. also your budget info. Virtual Classroom 1)Generally Good Write up. If space could add the "egg" shaped figure of WebWisdom architecture to show there is some vague plan! 2)Add at end of first sentence some sort of discussion like: The power of the Web has been demonstrated in many cases for dissemination of curricula material. First Habanero and now TANGOsim have demonstrated that we can add the critical teacher-student and student-student interactions or collaboration to the simple information services and asynchronous browsing capabilities of the basic Web 3) Add some where later on something about: One of the most important applications of these technologies is to transfer knowledge from institutions at the leading edge to those which are not well integrated with the resource community and where curricula of key technology courses has not kept up with the rapid changes. Both HPCC and Web technology are examples of such curricula as the fields are being revolutionized on a time period of one to two years. Syracuse successfully offered distance education to Harbin in China -- a good University but out of the main stream. Student assessment was uniformly positive as they were given material (basic HPCC and Web) that was not otherwise available at Harbin. This effort is being expanded as the Chinese participants translated the two semester curricula into Chinese (HTML) and distributed over 1000 CDROM's throughout China. Syracuse is focussing nearer home and with the help of the DoD modernization program, applying the same approach to Historically Black Colleges and Universities. (Initially Jackson State in Mississippi). We do not know how best to implement such distance education but do believe the approach in this proposal can truly make knowledge more generally available and this must be important to the nation. We believe that this (and other) goals of distance education should be advanced by a set of experiments using and assessing the different possible approaches. These will explore issues such as: 1) Tradeoffs between synchronous and asynchronous delivery with presumably both being important. 2) Role of professors at "client" site could vary from traditional synchronous deliverer to being a mentor for students with remote University (e.g. NPAC) delivering material. This was model for Harbin experiment where local faculty paid a key role 3) "Train the trainers" (i.e. professors at client institution) versus "Train the Students" implementations. 4) Importance to students of the exploratory aspect of learning which is naturally supported by Web-based approach. The Virtual Workshop has enabled this particularly well. Integration of TANGOsim and ARMS ARMS already schedules a variety of compute and communication (HPCC) services. TANGOsim can be viewed as providing integration of clients (people, their front ends and client applications) with the network of servers implementing the HPCC system. As both ARMS and TANGOsim implement services through Web Servers, there is a straightforward way to integrate them together. Clients have network performance requirements for both multimedia and conventional information delivery and CAVE and other high-end visualization systems need to be scheduled. ARMS will be extended to include these requirements in its resource management scheme. Assessment Assessment and Evaluation will be critical as we claim that it is currently unknown which ways are most effective in using the dissemination and collaboration capabilities of the Web for distance education. We have already discussed some of the different approaches and associated issues. Obviously we will use the obvious student, teacher and mentor experience. At Harbin, this motivated our translation into Chinese of key material and our decision to distribute material widely. New concepts are hard to understand except in one's native tongue. We can also use the database at the heart of TANGOsim to record the navigation paths of students and identify areas which need improvement. We intend a set of Java analysis tools (linked by JDBC to the logging database) which initially will just analyse page hits and the time spent on each page. As we get more experience, the pathways (links between pages traversed by students) can be studied. Video Servers We believe that video material can be useful at all levels of education. Typically we use short clips to add value to selected areas of the curricula. At the K-12 Living SchoolBook level, this involves CNN news clips on topic events while in graduate education we insert wise words from the many excellent UVC tapes on high technology. NPAC has a fully functional video server (best implemented with ActiveMovie on PC's) which is designed for disseminating short clips as it supports database searches of text indices into the video frames. Here we use either automatic (close captions) or hand addition of indices. The video server has been integrated into TANGOsim. We will use this (or alternative commercial offering if better) server technology and integrate with ARMS which will schedule the multi server (video is replicated as necessary to ensure adequate network performance) multicast delivery by finding the most appropriate server and network resources. Budget Given program I suggest dividing NPAC budget into 50% technology development: 25% TANGO enhancement, 25% TaNGO ARMS integration 25% education delivery 25% assessment and evaluation Original budget number is fine!