Learning Technologies and Internetics (Informatics) Curriculum

The FY01 work will continue and combine our two major activities
1) Collaborative Education Portals to support synchronous and
   Asynchronous Education
   	We will continue work with those in the Alliance interested in Learning
	Technologies (see
	http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/ncsaalliance/totalltech.html) with a
	strategy described in our longer FY00 program plan. As part of the Alliance
	Common Portal work we are developing a new collaborative portal that will
	support both computing and education. We will not discuss technical features
	here (see ET SoW) but note key features of relevance to EOT which are
	described in http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/ncsaalliance/ncsaeotdreams.html
	We will have initial protypes that support computing
	and education by Summer 2001. 
	Key characteristics of the portals are:
a) Attractive convenient user interface to a broad range of information and tools 
b) Shorter development times for customized high quality sites (e.g. in
   education this means that it will be quicker to develop a new course) 
c) User customization 
d) Methodology and tools to support the integration of simulations
into curriculum. These will emerge from using a common architecture for computing
and education portals and will be prototyped of course from work with the AT
teams. This type of capability is not likely to be addressed by commercial
education portals like Blackboard, LearningSpace or WebCT
e) Special capabilities such as collaboration, Access Grid linkage, and hand-held
devices, which come from linking Alliance specific ET technologies with education
portals.
f) Special capabilities coming from our relationships with organizations like the
Trace Center and the Indian tribal colleges. 
Here a good example is aspects of universal access and our work with Al Gilman.

2) Computational Science and Information Technology Education
	We were impressed by the interest in our "Internetics" Curricula
	http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/documents/internetics2/ by
	schools such as HBCU's Morgan State and Jackson State and the tribal college
	at LacCourte Wisconsin. The DoD laboratories are also interested in this
	technology which will be used in Indiana's Informatics program.
	We will therefore continue to enhance this material and make it available
	to MSI and government components of EOT. We will use it as our first testbed
	for the education portal technology.