I talked to Gary Markovits about using Tango for distance learning.
He is very interested, and has pitched it to the New York state
education board, and they are also interested. They want him to put
together a proposal by mid-November.

His requirements are basically those that we discussed at our initial
meeting. All his teaching materials are HTML pages, so what he needs is:

1) A means for students to join the teaching session.
2) Ability for a teacher to show the same HTML page on all the 
   students' computers.
3) A multicast audio feed from the teacher.
4) A feedback mechanism (chat program) for the students.
5) A very easy-to-use system with a simple intuitive user interface
   (many teachers are computer illiterate).
6) Ability to use the system on both PCs (most of which are 486 machines)
   and (low-end) Macs, using a 28.8 modem.  
7) Also, it would be useful to archive the audio provided by the teacher
   for each Web page, so that it can be accessible later by students
   accessing the material asynchronously (on-demand). 

Note that since Gary is targeting the education community, it is vital that
the system be available for Macs. Gary estimates that his target audience
are about 40% Mac users. So the plug-in would need to be ported to the Mac,
which could perhaps be a problem (I'm not sure if NPAC has anyone with 
Mac expertise who could do this?). 

Gary's goal is to initially use the system to offer the course he is 
currently giving (an introduction to using the Internet) to teachers, 
plus use it for regular short refresher courses. He also has some other 
ideas for using the technology in other applications in the future, such
as having a celebrity guest in an online chat session, but with the guest
using an audio feed, and the "viewers" using a text-based chat to send 
questions. 

Initially the system would be useful if it were usable by around 20 students,
but he would like to be able to scale it up to audiences in the hundreds for 
teaching, and perhaps even more for celebrity chats.

I assume the next step would be for Marek and Gang to provide and estimate
of how much development effort would be required to build such a system, 
and when it might be ready. This information could then be used by Gary to
develop a joint proposal to NY state board of education, in consultation 
with Geoffrey (and Denny?).