The Living Textbook Project The Living Textbook is a multidisciplinary project designed to demonstrate the use of leading-edge HPCC technologies in the K-12 classroom of the future [1,2]. Led by NPAC and the School of Education at Syracuse University, the project combines teacher teams, software developers, education researchers, computational scientists, HPCC vendors, and information content providers to deliver digital video, images, and text to the classroom, to prototype interactive, information-on-demand systems and their integration into K-12 curricula. The Living Textbook project aims to enable teachers and students to access educational resources using multimedia information servers, supercomputers, parallel databases, and high-speed networks. NPAC is initially developing three educational applications requiring state-of-the-art HPCC technologies: an interactive journey of New York State, video-on-demand, and cached Internet resources for K-12. We currently have these applications running in our laboratory, and are beginning to test them in the classroom. Our goal is to learn how new, learner-driven, explorative models of learning can be supported by these high bandwidth, interactive applications and ultimately how they will impact the classroom of the future. As an education testbed, the Living Textbook also addresses the training of school staff in new skills and issues of changing school culture. The future NII will likely evolve from testbed networks such as NYNet [3], a wide-area ATM gigabit network developed by NYNEX that links NPAC with Cornell, Rome Laboratory, and three schools in upstate New York, in the Syracuse, Rome, and Whitesboro school districts. NYNet has recently been connected to a similar network testbed downstate, which links schools and universities in the New York City area. Living Textbook applications are designed specifically to exploit NYNet. Downward compatibility with widely available network alternatives such as ISDN is a secondary goal. Over the past six months, we have installed the project hardware infrastructure, conducted well received and quite successful teacher training workshops and developed working prototypes for the three main software applications. We are now setting up a process for teacher and student feedback into software development. Classroom user requirements include ease of exploration, the opportunity to learn from many types of linked visual - language materials, and extensive resources that can be called upon to answer learner-generated questions and solve curiosity-driven problems along with problems posed by the teacher to ensure an integrated educational context. Computing and Networking Facilities Our vision of the NII is based on a wide-area, high-performance, client/server model. This model includes large parallel database and compute servers, high-speed networks as well as alternative network solutions (e.g., ISDN), and distributed networks of personal computers in the classroom. Our server model includes stand-alone Macintoshes or PCs in the classroom accessing subsets of the Living Textbook project via CD-ROM storage. The full client/server system connects workstations in the classroom via an ATM gigabit network to parallel multimedia servers with terabytes of hierarchially arranged storage. Several smaller clients connected by ISDN bridge these two solutions. Our testbed includes systems which differ in performance (computer power, network bandwidth, storage capacity) and cost by several orders of magnitude. NPAC is able to develop this model by utilizing its diverse state-of-the-art computational facilities that include a Thinking Machines CM5, IBM SP2, DECmpp, Intel iPSC 860, nCUBE 2, and clusters of high performance workstations (IBM RS6000's and DEC Alpha's). NPAC also has a number of high-end database products installed on our MPP platforms, including Oracle's Parallel Server running on the nCUBE and SP2, and Oracle's Parallel Text Server, running on the nCUBE. We have implemented our own video pump software on the nCUBE and use this platform as a Video-on-Demand server. We are building a scalable, balanced model for delivering interactive multimedia software to the classroom. We currently focus on ATM delivery using NYNet, with future extensions including widely available network solutions such as twisted pair, ISDN, T1-T3, and possibly cable/fiber hybrids. Our classroom interface is based on standard Web browsing software (NCSA Mosaic, Netscape). Development efforts underway at NPAC to extend the level and kinds of interactivity supported by the Web server and client will be incorporated into the Living Textbook as these tools become robust. Living Textbook Applications The Living Textbook project predicates much of its work on the assumption that the learner needs to participate and be able to drive the direction of the activity. This project incorporates real and fascinating content (e.g., video material, scientific simulation, image collections) into a framework that can be used by teachers to support content-based learning and by students to support personal exploration. Because the content is real-world based, it is inherently interdisciplinary. We have three innovative educational software applications running in the laboratory, and under test in the classroom. These applications are an interactive journey of New York State, video-on-demand, and cached Internet resources for K-12. Much of the world's data and information, physical, social, or political, is spatially located. The interactive journey is designed to take advantage of the spatial locality of information by combining spatial databases (currently for New York State and the planet Mars), real time navigation through three dimensions (based on parallel terrain rendering algorithms), and linked multimedia databases. We have implemented a terrain navigation simulation developed by NASA JPL on the IBM SP2 at NPAC, by migrating it to the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. We are also developing our own parallel terrain rendering software that will be tunable to allow real-time performance across a range of computing platforms. We are working to integrate these rendering programs with World Wide Web browsers to allow access to multimedia educational information on the region being viewed, such as historical, cultural, and geological information that is spatially indexed. Results of scientific simulations, news wire material, and documentaries are examples of video content that are immediately useful in the classroom as reference materials. Advances in digital video technology make it possible to construct on-line video archives and retrieve selected clips on-demand. Access and dissemination of video content is a first step. To impact learning, video-on-demand archives must be interactive. We must be able to link video with reference materials in other formats, and allow learners to load their own video content into the archive. NPAC and the prestigous Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University have recently signed an agreement with CNN to digitize and distribute video news broadcasts for educational purposes. The World Wide Web represents a rich source of information, but most of this information is not targeted at the K-12 level, and it is difficult for children to find relevant material on the Web. Also, access by kids to inappropriate material over the Web is a growing concern in the educational community. The recent explosion in Web traffic has slowed network performance which has implications for teacher preparation of Web materials for use in the classroom. For these reasons, caching resources available on the Internet locally, and connecting this cache with high speed links to the classroom is an attractive alternative. Kids Web (http://www.npac.syr.edu/textbook/kidsweb) is a prototype Web digital library for schoolchildren that has been developed at NPAC. We propose the Living Textbook as a prototype Education Information Infrastructure of the future. Our software development and delivery model is based on the vision of multiple-use services. Our K-12 education applications take advantage of technologies previously developed for large scale scientific simulation and parallel database applications. Our delivery model takes advantage of bandwidth installed for other purposes. We are sharing software (e.g., NASA terrain rendering) and expertise with related applications (e.g., MPEG compression) and re-using a rich high-performance computing and communications (HPCC) base infrastructure. [1] Kim Mills, Geoffrey Fox, Barbara Shelly, and Steven Bossert, The Living Textbook: a Demonstration of Information on Demand Technologies in Education, NPAC Technical Report SCCS-647, available from http://www.npac.syr.edu/techreports/html/0600/abs-0647.html. [2] The Living Textbook Project has a home page at http://www.npac.syr.edu/projects/ltb. [3] NYNet has a home page at http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/hariri.