INSIGHTS July 1998 Volume 6

American School of Paris student Eric Morgan gives instruction to Mrs. Clinton during the distributed education demonstration.

Mrs. Clinton delivers comments to the assembled students, dignitaries and press.

Mrs. Clinton and NASA's Learning Technologies project manager Mark León added their voices to the NASA/French space agency project. The project linked two space programs, countries and continents to demonstrate how educational access to NASA science information will flow around the globe.

Eric Morgan and Mrs. Clinton in France.

Hillary Clinton goes back—and forward—to school by Tom Mead

On May 13, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton learned that it doesn't take big pipes to tap into a huge reservoir—sometimes a straw will do.

That was the lesson when she went to a French schoolhouse for a demonstration of how Internet-based educational opportunities will eventually be distributed to a worldwide, multilingual student body through low-bandwidth, low-cost, off-the-shelf technology.

This demonstration of the benefits of advanced computing being delivered to ordinary citizens was also witnessed by NASA Director Daniel S. Goldin, as well as the U.S. Ambassador to France, the President of Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES-the French National Space Agency), the French Ambassador to the U.S. and the French Minister of Education.

The educational technologies demonstrated by this event were (1) a French interactive software that permits shared control of a program providing layers of environmental data within a single birds-eye view of a location, and (2) an American interactive program that involves students around the world as expert ground-based observers validating satellite-observed ground conditions.

The event is the result of the close collaboration between NASA and CNES. Learning Technologies (LT) Project Manager Mark León of NASA Ames Research Center (ARC), Moffett Field, Calif., said, "Participating at this level is a profound opportunity for both NASA and CNES. While we are serious competitors at the national aeronautics level, we are equally serious about finding and creating opportunities to cooperate in the service of education, which is for the common good of all mankind."

Also contributing vital resources and expertise to the success of this project were individuals from NASA's software debugging group, the Independent Verification and Validation facility and from LT units within NASA's High-Performance Computing and Communications Program at Goddard Space Flight Center, Langley Research Center, Lewis Research Center and ARC.

Observing the demonstration from the French National School of Chemistry, Physics and Biology in Paris were first lady Hillary Clinton; Ambassador and Mrs. Felix Rohatyn; Alain Bensoussan, CNES President; Jeffrey Hoffman, NASA; and Mrs. Segolene Royal, France's deputy education minister.

Across the Atlantic, observers at the Kramer Middle School of Environmental Studies in Washington, D.C., included NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin and His Excellence Francois V. Bujon (Ambassador, Republic of France), while the Brooklyn School for Global Studies in New York hosted M. Richard Duque, Consul General of France.

"We are six months into the project, and we can already support 1,500 schools online, with students listening to audio content from NASA Ames and asking questions in live chat windows.

Mark León,
NASA

Back in France, students at the American School of Paris also participated.

This two-continent event demonstrated LT's expansion to Europe. The LT broadcasts live audio and video across the Internet from NASA's Ames Research Center to 10 other NASA centers. These centers then act as transmitters, providing local access to a constantly expanding global network of science and space information and education.

The May demonstration of the expanding global network presented two examples of what is possible: Titus and SCOOL.

Titus is a French application that allows geographically distributed users to collaborate and simultaneously view selectively filtered levels of a satellite-generated image and to share control of the program itself. In this project, Titus was used sequentially by students to webcast satellite photos of their respective top sights in Washington, New York and Paris, and to study and compare vegetation, water sources and anti-pollution measures. At each point in the presentation, control of the system was resident at the location being presented.

"You didn't show us where I live," Mrs. Clinton chided a Washington, D.C. student who failed to point out the White House as he noted other landmarks for an Internet audience during the presentation. "I want to make sure it's still there while I'm gone."

Student Cloud Observation On Line (SCOOL) is an American project that encourages individual students to recognize how they, their school and data from orbiting satellites such as the optical, land-mass images from LANDSAT are connected. In this case, downloaded NASA data allow students to determine when a LANDSAT or other satellite is making observations directly over their schools. When the satellite image of the clouds and ground cover near the school is downloaded, students make simultaneous, local, ground-based observations to validate the satellite information. Thousands of students from 117 schools in 12 countries currently contribute data to SCOOL.

León explained that "the 18-month goal of this project is to interact simultaneously with 5,000 schools across the nation. We are six months into the project, and we can already support 1,500 schools online, with students listening to audio content from NASA Ames and asking questions in live chat windows."

The LT Channel allows educators and the general public to participate in courses, workshops, seminars and other events that probably would not be available to them without leaving their schools or homes and going to a specialized Net access site. The LT Channel originates from ARC and is a service of the Quest Project, which produces many NASA educational websites supported by the LT within the High-Performance Computing and Communications Program.

In addition to sharing NASA on the Internet and making available a huge reservoir of science data, another central focus of the LT channel is to provide training to educators, wherever they are located. Many teach at local schools just now connecting to the Internet, commonly with low-end technology such as 28.8 Kbps modems operating across phone lines. And for those schools accessing at even slower speeds of 9.6 Kbps, a real-time transcription of some programs on the audio channel are presented in an all-text chat window. For those without a pipeline into the reservoir, even a straw will suffice.

The Titus and SCOOL activities are the fruit of an ongoing educational collaboration between the U.S. and French space agencies, giving French and American students access to scientific data from both agencies. Students also work together via the Internet to share information and collaborate, as well as interact with NASA and CNES personnel.

Mark León, who spearheaded the technology for the event, states, "Although this has been an impressive demonstration for the VIPs and press, our intention was never merely that. Our design was, and is, to demonstrate that superior, curriculum-enhancing content can be accessed by the vast, worldwide range of educational institutions, instructors and students. It is available even to those whose access to the treasures of NASA-on-the-Net is limited to one pair of twisted-copper wires and a telephone modem." The proverbial straw, as it were.

"The LT's communication of science is something that belongs to all students and citizens of the world, and we are building the technology that will put the information in their hands. We will have succeeded when events such as those carried out here today are performed routinely in every educational setting and are considered unremarkable and ordinary," León concluded. For more information, see the Learning Technologies Channel's web page.