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19 October 2004
Access Grid offers networking education for students and telcos
Schools get a taste of the collaborative internet
Stephen Bell, Wellington
Access grid technology could be used to improve consistency among schools in sometimes-controversial NCEA marking. That's the suggestion of a group from Wellington Girls College which took part in a three-centre demonstration of the collaborative use of broadband technology earlier this month.
As well as three schools, the exercise involved three telcos working in apparent harmony. Telecom provided the link between Auckland and Wellington, TelstraClear connected Wellington and Christchurch, and Citylink handled local networking in Wellington.
Wellington Girls' has already had architects onsite to plan a suitable suite for an access grid, which needs a long flat wall on which to project images and documents communicated from remote and local sites as well as all the necessary computing, telecoms, sound and visual projection equipment.
In order to access broadband links, the Wellington school group was hosted at MediaLab South Pacific, while Rosmini College, Auckland and Christs College, Christchurch were accommodated by the cities' respective universities.
The Wellington team sees the grid as a tool for collaborative online decision-making in the case where "we've given a bare pass and another school has given a merit mark for a similar piece of work," says one of the Wellington pupils. The respective teachers could link up via the access grid, show specimens of the work and explain why the marks concerned were given. Such deliberation could work towards more uniform standards, she suggests.
The feeds to about a dozen screens at last week's demonstration, showing participants, document images and applications, typically totalled 4-5Mbit/s, says coordinator Laurence Zwimpfer, "but we can use up to about 20." Observers from the Ministry of Education attended.
Although much of the work shown was pretty basic lecture-style presentation, Rosmini showed another tool with collaborative potential. By coding the progress of a rugby match on an electronic chart, they could instantly call up any point of play or watch, for example, all the scrums or all the lineouts in a sequence.
The demonstration was run with the help of funding from NZ Trade and Enterprise.
Courtesy Computerworld
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