EOT Accomplishments 2001
------------------------
Learning Technology
We have carefully studied our Tango collaboration system and the
current commercial systems: Netmeeting, WebEx, Placeware, Centra.
We have designed and prototyped a new education collaboratory based
on these lessons. It features integration of asynchronous and
synchronous collaboration by use of a common publish/subscribe message
service. This universal infrastructure enables convenient archiving.
It has the lessons of work with Trace Center to enable universal access.
This uses Gilman's idea that UA can be built as a collaboration between
multiple clients assigned to a given user. We are testing this with
collaboration between handheld and desktop devices.
The expected requirement of sharing high quality authored curricula
is implemented as a shared SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) viewer. This is
supported by Adobe now and we are working on Macromedia and Powerpoint 
SVG exports.
We will link our collaboratory to the Access Grid for multimedia
conferencing.

Outreach: The collaboration technology is core to work with Indian Nation
on building collaborative environments. We attended two multi-day
meetings organized by the American Indian Higher Education Consortium
AIHEC or rather their High technology Committee led by Tom Davis and Jack
Briggs. We developed the concept of a "Digital Indigenous Homeland"
designed to allow members of tribes participate in the modern economy
from their homelands. We are preparing follow-on proposals.

We continue to work with Jackson State University (JSU) and other HBCU's on
design and use of distance learning environments. JSU is
installing an Access Grid node and we have helped both planning and installation.

We believe that it was correct to rebuild the technology as there has
been such major changes in core technology that exploiting them was
essentially impossible with our new infrastructure built around a
single XML event service. This choice implies that we did not give
as many tutorials and classes during last year. We are beginning a new
series of outreach activities this fall. 

Publications:
Geoffrey C. Fox, From Computational Science to Internetics: 
Integration of Science with Computer Science,
Mathematics and Computers in Simulation, Elsevier, 54 (2000) 295-306 . 

Mehmet Sen, PhD Thesis November 2000 on "Distributed Asynchronous
Information Systems for Education"
Shrideep Pallickara PhD Thesis June 2001 on "Grid Event Service"

Several Presentations and Internal Memos can be found at:
http://aspen.csit.fsu.edu/collabtools/
Since May 2001, this lists 8 presentaions,4 reports and one PhD thesis.
One highlight was "Physics meets the Virtual University" -- a presentation
at APS Computational Science meeting June 25 2001 at MIT.