Networked Ocean Science Research and Education,
Monterey Bay California
Don Brutzman, Ph.D.
Code UW/Br,
Naval Postgraduate School
Monterey, California 93943 USA
408.656.2149 voice, 408.656.3679 fax
brutzman@nps.navy.mil
Don Brutzman's presentation was based on the following paper.
May 12, 1995
Abstract
The Monterey BayNet regional network is connecting students, educators,
researchers, institutions and individuals around a common theme of environmental
and ocean science. A variety of exciting volunteer efforts are building
networked information links that can effectively and compatibly operate
at low and high speeds. Connectivity, content, access and applications are
the four key areas of action. Throughout this large project we have learned
that people issues are just as important as technical issues. Our efforts
have developed a regional model which effectively supports education at
all levels together with the conduct of active scientific research.
Contents
1 Introduction
A regional network has been constructed to connect K-12 schools, colleges,
universities, museums, libraries, government agencies and research institutions
in two California counties adjacent to the Monterey Bay National Marine
Sanctuary ( Figure 1 ). The network provides
researchers, educators and students information access via text, hypertext,
multimedia, audio and video. This project is an exciting broad-based collaboration
which teams education, science, business and government in an effort to
fundamentally improve our schools by connecting teaching with ocean-related
research. Our network design approach provides individuals access to any
type of live or archived media using a variety of bandwidth rates. Our emphasis
has been connectivity, content, access and applications. Our group approach
to myriad challenges may be useful to other community networking projects.
1.1 Goals
Specific goals of our regional collaboration are many. From an educational
perspective, we wish to enable teachers and students from kindergarten through
college to have full Internet access. Medium-speed (fractional T1) Internet
access has been provided for 43 schools, libraries and colleges in Monterey
and Santa Cruz counties. From a high-performance networking perspective,
we have connected eight research institutions and universities at ATM speeds
(55 and 155 Mbps). From a research perspective, linkages between schools
and laboratories that work across a variety of architectures and bandwidth
levels are of particular interest. Regional collaboration has worked effectively
at many levels. Taking advantage of our regional strengths has provided
common ground for many diverse interests.
Figure 1. Monterey
Bay, California USA.
1.2 Players
The regional network is the backbone for multiple educational initiatives
and research projects. Organization and collaboration are loosely coupled
under the local Initiative for Information Infrastructure and Linkage Applications
(I3LA) and Monterey Bay Regional Education Futures Group (MBReEF) so that
various research efforts are complementary and can leverage past successes.
Network bandwidth is provided by Pacific Bell (PacBell) California Research
and Education Network (CalREN) grants for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM),
Frame Relay (FR) and Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) access.
The resulting network is called Monterey BayNet.
Regional member institution network profiles reveal a spectrum of expertise
and interests. Tier I, high-performance ATM sites are producers and consumers
of high- bandwidth video and graphics streams. Members include the University
of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), UCSC Extension Santa Clara, the Tech Museum
of Innovation in San Jose, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI),
Monterey Bay Aquarium (MBA), California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB),
and the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). Tier II magnet sites include Cabrillo
College, Santa Cruz and Monterey County Offices of Education, the Monterey
Peninsula Unified School District (MPUSD) Model Technology Schools Project,
the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy (MIRA), the Moss Landing
Marine Laboratory, and the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS).
Tier III sites include over 40 local schools and libraries. Figure
6 shows regional network players.
Of particular interest is the development process which emerged during this
project. People-related issues were recognized early on as being just as
important as technology issues ( Figure 2
). Tier I sites contributed administrative and technical support to provide
initial Internet connectivity to local Tier II and Tier III sites. Zero
initial expertise was assumed at Tier II/III sites.
Figure 2. It
takes equipment AND people to connect a new school network.
Electronic mail lists proved essential in discussing issues, producing answers
and motivating results ( Figure 3 ). Four
"tiger teams" work critical issues on a continuing basis: i3la_conacc
(information infrastructure content and access), i3la_diglib (digital libraries),
i3la_edu (applications for education), and i3la_netdesign (regional network
design and management). These "tiger teams" have provided an effective
way for people with diverse full-time jobs to volunteer time and effort,
benefitting their parent organizations and themselves.
Figure
3. Electronic mail list instructions.
I3LA listserver: mail a message help to majordomo@mbari.org
for a list of commands. Message bodies must be written as shown since a
program processes these messages. Example message commands:
help
lists
subscribe i3la@mbari.org
subscribe i3la_conacc@mbari.org
subscribe i3la_diglib@mbari.org
subscribe i3la_edu@mbari.org
subscribe i3la_netdesign@mbari.org
info i3la_netdesign@mbari.org
who i3la_edu@mbari.org
unsubscribe i3la@mbari.org
Successes have been attributable to creating sustainable people processes
and seeking consensus within active working groups. Although reaching solutions
that everyone understands may take longer than might be required if an "expert"
came in with a default solution, the process of achieving consensus turns
out to be better understood by participants and results in good fits for
local needs. Since we are looking to create sustainable processes, an individual
sense of ownership and empowerment for each participant is very important.
2 Connectivity
Three tiers of network service connect Monterey Bay I3LA sites. Tier I ATM-level
sites are producers and consumers of multiple very high-bandwidth information
streams such as video, audio, 3D real-time computer graphics, robot telemetry
and environmental datasets. Tier II sites are magnet sites including Monterey
and Santa Cruz County Offices of Education with moderately high bandwidth
(Frame Relay), serving as example testbeds and training centers. Tier III
sites are schools and libraries with lower bandwidth (Frame Relay and eventually
ISDN) adequate to provide student users with interactive information access
and a single audio/video teleconference ( Figure
6 ).
The net design team has been the single most effective group in I3LA. Getting
K-12 students and teachers online has been "job one." Network
design, configuration and installation has been a 20-month volunteer effort.
Much of this time was due to teaching and learning the numerous concepts
and issues involved in local and wide area network design. School walkthroughs
and site inspections were an essential part of this effort. Computer science
students, network engineers and interested educators learned the idiosyncrasies
of ATM, Frame Relay and ISDN service offerings. A close partnership with
PacBell provided additional expertise and support when needed. A recommended
set of configurations for PCs, Macintoshes, interface cards, hubs, routers
and servers was produced to provide clear guidelines for schools which are
planning and financing new network connections. Occasionally group purchases
have been able to reduce cost and stretch precious education dollars.
County offices of education in Monterey and Santa Cruz now find themselves
growing into a service provider role. The critical reference guiding this
transition has been the California Department of Education K-12 Network
Technology Planning Guide [1] . Student teams
from the Naval Postgraduate School and Cabrillo College have provided essential
manpower in implementing design plans and providing interim network information
and operations support. Student support has been enthusiastic due to the
opportunity to work on real-world problems of great personal and professional
value [2] [3]
.
3 Content
As is happening in many places around the Internet, our regional institutions
are putting existing knowledge resources online and developing new ways
of accessing them. A frequent common denominator is to provide context through
HyperText Markup Language (html) pages ( Figure
4 ). Other advanced hypermedia interfaces have been adapted for accessing
very large environmental datasets and archived visualizations. The Multicast
Backbone (MBone) is being used to multicast educational courses with worldwide
scope, followed by audio/video archiving for digital video retrieval on
demand [4] [5]
. Online multimedia design courses at the University of California Santa
Cruz (UCSC) are challenging college students to provide easy and effective
templates for new K-12 schools to use. Additionally students and teachers
are discovering for themselves how to publish information content on the
Web, often discovering new innovations in the process.
Figure
4. Pointers for regional research and education home pages, providing context
for archived content.
- Learning About Monterey Bay (LAMBAY), http://lambay.cse.ucsc.edu/mb
- Monterey Bay Regional Education Futures (MBReEF) Consortium, http://www.ucsc.edu/mbay-region
- Initiative for Information Infrastructure & Linkage Applications (I3LA),
ftp://taurus.cs.nps.navy.mil/pub/i3la/i3la.html
- Real-time Environmental Information Network & Analysis System (REINAS),
http://csl.cse.ucsc.edu/reinas.html
The content and access (conacc) tiger team is focused on helping make
pertinent data, information, and knowledge resources available for the environmental
activities of students, educators, resource managers and researchers. The
tiger team is paying special attention to the immediate needs of regional
application exemplars. They are also identifying and filling gaps in the
data, information and knowledge needed to link students to researchers,
researchers to resource managers, educators to researchers and resource
managers, and students to students.
Guiding principles of the conacc team are that an environmental information
infrastructure includes ubiquitous connectivity, pertinent content, effective
access, and applications targeted to specific user groups. Content will
include existing scientific environmental data; information in the form
of traditional publications, bulletin boards and mailing list servers; information
in new forms such as multimedia curricula, scientific visualizations and
electronic representations of conceptual ideas; and knowledge resources
such as "ask the expert" forums and video teleconferencing services.
Equitable access implies that the content of critical applications will
have to be usable in different modes and across generations of technology
with different levels of capability. We want to prevent developing an "information
have/have-not society." Effective content access also implies that
information retrieval is pertinent, relevant to users' specific needs, authentic
and of high quality. Thus the overall connectivity, content, access and
applications model provides a clear framework for action from both individual
and group perspectives.
4 Access
Computer equipment has been provided independently by member institutions
with an emphasis on using personal computers or workstations capable of
audio, video and hypermedia as a baseline common denominator. In most instances
the schools had at least one Macintosh or PC that was suitable. Not all
schools fit in this category, but initial school involvement in this project
was voluntary so most had some computer experience. Schools uniformly had
to pay additional funds for routers and adapter cards.
Use of freely available videoconferencing and hypermedia software applications
(e.g. tools for the Multicast Backbone [4]
and the World-Wide Web [6] ) has provided
an immediate and well-understood path for complete connectivity to a wide
variety of existing information sources. We have followed the Internet model
in order to include all types of media as well as all types of people. We
did NOT propose any brand new technical or engineering study because open
solutions already exist. The intellectual forces and market forces driving
the Internet now have an irresistible momentum. Software tools freely available
on the network are often superior to commercial tools due to active research
communities, rapid feedback correction, zero dollar cost to users, and portability
over most hardware/operating system architectures. Because the delivery
of information content must be rapid enough to stimulate student interest,
we are connecting at bandwidth levels adequate for educational videoconferencing.
We want students and other people to be able to interact with scientists,
educators and each other to maximize learning and the discovery process
( Figure 5 ).
Figure 5. Once
they have connectivity, educators only need a little time to access real
content and put it to use.
The Multicast Backbone tools provide audio and video across the Internet
in a way that conserves bandwidth and scales up. Multicast lets a single
information stream (such as video) touch multiple receiving machines, and
also lets receiving machines ignore unwanted packets at the hardware level
instead of wasting processor cycles deciding whether or not a given packet
is of interest. Although tools are just beginning to be ported to PC and
Macintosh architectures, we are practicing delivery of conferences and classes
with regional and world-wide scope using a variety of workstation architectures
[7] [8] .
We expect MBone use to eventually be widespread for PCs and Macintoshes.
College student volunteers have been installing network connections, upgrading
personal computers and configuring host systems in regional schools. There
is now a large number of qualified participants who can effectively teach
others how to install and use the network. Existing school computer equipment
has been used only when it meets minimum standards for World-Wide Web (WWW)
audio and image access. Predictable network performance and reasonable maintainability
has been attained through group buys of identical routers and network interface
cards.
Ultimately, we want to enable widespread information access by making it
easy for students and educators to create their own home pages. This makes
new study connections possible for everyone. It also provides identical
solutions for children whether at home or at school. We hope that many parents
will be willing to help this project when they see that they can access
and reinforce their childrens' curricula and projects. Thus we have created
a set of distribution diskettes containing free and shareware software tools.
This software set is installed at each school. Copies and updates are conveniently
available over Internet connections via home pages. Software costs have
thus been reduced to the bare minimum while still observing copyright and
intellectual property restrictions.
5 Applications
Education exemplars include the live exploration of Monterey Canyon using
a deep remotely-operated vehicle, a "virtual canyon" science archive,
a "virtual telescope" interface to astronomical data collected
by the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy (MIRA), and a "watershed"
project which explores the hydrographic relationships between agriculture,
estuaries, cities and Monterey Bay.
BayLink connects the auditorium at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to remote
sites via live audio and full frame-rate video over ATM. Four days each
week an experienced "linker" guide interprets scientific missions
in progress to aquarium audiences. Live science is supplemented by a videodisc
collection covering 300 different clips about Monterey Bay biology, oceanography
and geology. Addition of BayLink permits group interaction with remote
auditoria at the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation and elsewhere.
The Virtual Canyon project is another "virtual field trip" designed
to bring innovative applications directly to students. A large collection
of interpreted videos, images and presentations are being archived in videotape,
videodisc and online hypermedia formats. Putting a "scientist in a
box" and making ocean science content available in a form accessible
by any school will supplement curricula regardless of their school's connectivity.
Students will be able to conduct their own research on deep-sea habitats,
creating their own individual papers and field trips, and (on occasion)
publishing them electronically.
MIRA's Field Trip to the Stars uses a Virtual Telescope to provide students
with Internet access to 100 gigabytes of archived astronomical imagery.
Students will be able to browse through massive image archives as if steering
a telescope unaffected by time of day or weather. A remote telescope control
interface will permit qualified students to schedule actual telescope observations
as well as interact with NASA and other networked electronic telescopes
around the world. Structured instruction designed around key themes will
provide a supplement to standard science curricula. Addition of an Artificial
Neural Network Intelligent Teaching Assistant (ANNITA) will provide an innovative
intelligent tutoring system.
The Watershed Project involves students with the Monterey Bay National Marine
Sanctuary in assessing and monitoring water quality. Data is collected from
surface and groundwater samples, from biological monitoring of aquatic insects
and fish, and from analysis of interactions involving the agriculture industry,
estuaries and cities ringing Monterey Bay. Students interact with scientists
and each other as they participate in monitoring the watershed.
A variety of other new applications (such as networked robots and large-scale
virtual worlds [9] ) are being planned and
implemented to take advantage of the significant capabilities offered by
the Monterey BayNet regional education network.
6 Lessons Learned, Problems and Future Work
We have had many lessons learned. First, people issues are always as important
as technical issues. You cannot build a network if no one understands what
is going on. Second, everything takes three times longer than expected.
Despite what we believed were conservative time estimates, it took almost
twenty months to go from initial conception to actual students sitting at
actual keyboards "surfing the Web" in their schools. Hundreds
of hours have been invested in analyzing objectives, writing grants and
developing new interinstitutional research relationships. Hopefully our
successors can use some of our results and won't need as long. Finally,
participatory ownership produces sustainable results. It is not enough to
get things working for a week or two. People have to be involved in their
own destiny throughout the process so that they understand the costs, benefits
and time commitments.
A number of things that we tried just didn't succeed. Despite recurring
attempts to attract corporate sponsorship and cooperative business partners,
funding for new school equipment has been mainly from strained local budgets.
Formal memoranda of agreement between member institutions remain conceptually
appealing but difficult to implement. Intellectual property issues still
restrict access to some scientific data and curriculum materials. Key players
have been so busy establishing the current network that new schools are
becoming ready to join faster than can be practically supported. Long-term
funding mechanisms are not clear, especially when CalREN-sponsored network
access runs out.
Future efforts include establishing routine ways for new individuals and
schools to get involved and get connected. Establishing sustainable funding
and training mechanisms is believed essential for educational network growth
and sustainability. We now understand why funded Network Information Center
(NIC) and Network Operations Center (NOC) support are so important, and
we are working to move from ad hoc support to a properly staffed NIC/NOC
operation. We hope to develop better ways of getting useful computers into
the schools, and business partners are especially welcome to work with us
in this area. We expect to learn more lessons and continue working on new
problems as we pursue our long-term goals of educating real students while
conducting real science.
Our next event is SIGGRAPH in August 95 [10]
when we will enable educators in our area to connect remotely to SIGGRAPH
and SIGKIDS Interactive Communities exhibits. The objective is to provide
teachers new to the Internet with a series of lively projects that can help
them learn firsthand how to use the Internet in their classes. We expect
to give them access to interesting projects, collaborators, and a "SIGGRAPH
TV" channel over the MBone.
As always, our goals are first to open doors for education and science,
and then to get out of the way so people can get to work. We are excited
by the many great opportunities which Monterey BayNet has brought. Throughout
this process, individuals have found that they get back much more than they
can put in. We will continue working at the grass-roots level, and we welcome
participation by other interested individuals and groups.
7 Summary
If we look from one end to the other at the overall problem of connecting
live science to students, we find that this group is working to put all
of the pieces in place. We have science, scientists and educators working
on the shared natural resource of Monterey Bay in a variety of disciplines.
We have bandwidth from grants to enable interactive transfer rates. We have
locations where students and public can best be served by connecting to
these resources. We have a coherent model based on the Internet that has
already solved the software and hardware problems associated with wide-area
multimedia distribution. We have a sensible vision which is putting all
of these pieces together in a dynamic and exciting way. Our planned graduation
exercise is an International Conference on the Environment and Education
in summer 1996. We invite others to collaborate with these compelling efforts
and take advantage of the "lessons learned" described here.
Acknowledgements
This paper describes the efforts of over a hundred people. Network design
and deployment to date has taken over 7000 volunteer hours. Our prime mover
is Bruce Gritton of MBARI who brought together the original key players
and has sustained the vision of connectivity, content, access and applications
that works so well. On behalf of the students and teachers of Monterey and
Santa Cruz Counties, I thank Marti Atkinson, Rowland Baker, Pat Barrett,
Jim Bellamy, Carl Berman, Roger Born, Peter Brewer, Jeff Bryant, Rex Buddenberg,
Jon Bigelow, Jan Dickens, Bob Ellis, Tracey Emswiler, Heather Forsythe,
J.J. Garcia-Luna, Nancy Giberson, Bruce Gritton, Mike Herbst, Tom Hoskins,
Birt Johnson, Frank Kelbe, Syd Leung, Brian Lloyd, Mike Macedonia, Pat Mantey,
Lora Lee Martin, Kam Matray, Jim May, Mike McCann, Peter McMillan, Mike
Mellon, RADM Thomas Mercer USN, Katie Muir, Mike Newman, David Norman, Maxine
Reneker, Deborah Richards, Greg Scott, Gary Sharp, Fred Siff, Jon Spear,
Brian Steckler, Trish Stoddart, Chris Taylor, Dennis Trepanier, Jim Warner,
David Warren, Steve Watkins, Bruce Weaver, Steve Webster, the David and
Lucille Packard Foundation, and the many enthusiastic people working in
the I3LA tiger teams.
References
[1] Building the Future: K-12 Network Technology Planning
Guide , California Department of Education, Sacramento California, 1994.
Ordering information at 1.800.995.4099 or 1.916.445.1260
[2] Trepanier, Dennis, Buddenberg, Rex et al., The
Initiative for Information Infrastructure and Linkage Applications (I3LA)
Network: Physical Configuration Team Project , Naval Postgraduate School,
Monterey California, April 1995.
[3] Bigelow, Jon, Internetworking: A Case Study in
Planning and Implementing a WAN, Master's Thesis, Naval Postgraduate
School, Monterey California, June 95.
[4] Macedonia, Michael R. and Brutzman, Donald P., "MBone
Provides Audio and Video Across the Internet," IEEE COMPUTER
, April 1994, pp. 30-36. ftp://taurus.cs.nps.navy.mil/pub/i3la/mbone.html
[5] Rhyne, Theresa Marie, Brett, George, Brutzman, Don,
Cox, Donna J. and Santos, Adelino, "Exploiting Networks for Visualization
and Collaboration: No Network Roadblocks?," discussion panel, Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics
(SIGGRAPH) 94 , Orlando Florida, July 24-29 1994, pp. 481-482.
[6] Hughes, Kevin, "Entering the World-Wide Web
(WWW): A Guide to Cyberspace," Enterprise Integration Technology Inc.,
May 1994, http://www.eit.com/web/www.guide/
[7] Brutzman, Don and Paxinos, Garry M., "MBone
at SIGGRAPH 94," COMPUTER GRAPHICS , December 1994.
[8] Emswiler, Tracey, Using the Multicast Backbone
(MBone) for Distance Learning: A Case Study, Master's Thesis, Naval
Postgraduate School, Monterey California, September 95.
[9] Brutzman, Donald P., "A Virtual World for an
Autonomous Underwater Vehicle," Visual Proceedings, Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics
(SIGGRAPH) 94 , Orlando Florida, July 24-29 1994, pp. 204-205.
[10] Brutzman, Don, "Remote Collaboration with
Monterey Bay Educators," Visual Proceedings, Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH) 95
, Los Angeles California, August 7-11 1995.
Author Information
Don Brutzman is a computer scientist working in the Interdisciplinary Academic
Group at the Naval Postgraduate School. His research interests include underwater
robotics, real-time 3D computer graphics, artificial intelligence and high-performance
networking. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers (IEEE), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest
Group on Graphics (SIGGRAPH), the American Association for Artificial Intelligence
(AAAI), the Marine Technology Society (MTS) and the Internet Society (ISOC).
Figure 6. Monterey
BayNet member sites.
Don
Brutzman http://www.stl.nps.navy.mil/~brutzman
mailto:brutzman@nps.navy.mil
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