CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_

Reported by Jodi Ito/University of Hawaii

Minutes of the Network Training Materials Working Group (TRAINMAT)

The TRAINMAT Working Group met once at the Danvers IETF on Thursday,
6 April.

The key items to be discussed were the catalogue of network training
materials, review of available training materials, and using the network
to deliver training.



The Catalogue of Network Training Materials

Discussion of the catalogue included review of the IAFA fields:
addition of new fields, changing the names of existing fields, and
categorization standards for various fields like country and languages.

The group agreed on the addition of the following fields:


     audience:  General User | Administrator | <subject>
     audience-level:  Beginner | Intermediate | Advanced
     handle:  <unique number> (automatically included for any TRAINMAT
     submission)


Discussion regarding ``audience-level'' noted that general guidelines
should be provided to assist the submitter with proper categorization
(i.e.  give general prerequisites to help with classification)

Discussion regarding the ``categories'' field resulted in the division
of training materials into 2 high-level categories:  Documentation and
Training Materials.  The ``Documentation'' level was further subdivided
into 3 areas:  User Guides, Resource Guides, and Trainer/Instructor
Guides.  The ``Training Materials'' level was subdivided into:
Presentation Materials (including speaker notes), Workshop exercises
(including lab configuration information and the actual workshop
exercises), and Self-paced Materials.

There was not much discussion on the country-codes and languages field
except to note that UK might be used for United Kingdom as opposed to GB
for Great Britain and noted the differences between American-English and
English-English.  Debbie Hamilton from DS InterNIC offered to make the
ISO country code table available publicly.

The group agreed with the current keywords for the cost field and that
the field ``organization-location'' should be changed to
``organization-address'' and the ``file-format'' should be changed to
``content-type'' and use the MIME standards.

The entries in the catalogue need to be reviewed for quality and
currency.  Several people volunteered to review ``chunks'' of the
catalogue.  Summaries will be sent to the list.  The group did note that
many templates were not completely filled out and pointed out the need
for an automated template verification process -- upon submission, the
template would be scanned automatically to ensure that key fields are
completed.  Additionally, it was noted that ``searchable'' fields should
have their contents ordered with the most significant bit of information
first followed by the next most significant bit of info (i.e., last
name, first name).  Volunteers to review entries are:


   o Julie Robichaux:  ``chunk'' 10
   o Janet Vratny:  #9
   o Debbie Hamilton:  #4
   o Ed Klein:  #5
   o Jim McKinna:  #3
   o Linda Place:  #8
   o Sally Hambridge:  consistency meter


The Catalogue of Training Materials is available via the Web from the
University of Adelaide:


     http://coolabah.itd.adelaide.edu.au/TrainMat/catalogue.html


It was noted that pointers to the catalogue should be created from the
USV-Web.  People from MidNet have put up a searchable version of the
catalogue:


     http://www.mid.net/TRAINMAT


Using The Network To Deliver Training

The last item on the agenda was general discussion on using the network
to deliver training.  Several people mentioned using the Web to deliver
training which illustrated the need to to have ``states'' incorporated
into the http protocol.  Additionally, Jill is working on having
PowerPoint registered as a MIME content type.  Jill also mentioned that
Joyce has been working on getting a time slot allocated on the MBONE to
experiment with broadcasting training over the MBONE.