Slovenian Education Network
Vladimir Batagelj, Andrej Brodnik, Matija Lokar
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics,
Laboratory of Education, Jadranska 19, 61111 Ljubljana, Slovenia
http://www.educa.fmf.uni-lj.si/ro/izomre/novice/network.htm
(Ta sestavek obstaja tudi v
sloven{~ini.)
Motivation
In 1994, the Slovenian government started a six years project RO --
Ra~unalni{ko opismenjevanje
(Information Technology in Slovenian Schools). It should contribute toward
problem oriented, more efficient and more friendly school.
The following factors were identified as crucial for the success of the project:
- informatization of curricula
- networking and multimedia
- teacher education
- staff support for the information technology at schools
- establishing the life-cycle of the IT equipment
Internet offers a lot - the whole world; that is too much.
The problem is to find the desired information.
The answer is known - organization.
We expect that a number of schools will in the following years
establish their own servers and offer through them their own
educational materials.
Besides, there will be established servers at individual faculties
and other institutions connected with the educational process
(museums, galleries, institutes, ...).
In October 1995 we decided to start organizing
Slovensko izobra`evalno omre`je
(Slovenian Education Network),
that should provide access to individual servers and material offered
through them.
Schoolnet/Canada is an
example of a similar network.
Principles
Organizing the Network we have to consider the following
principles:
- decentralization: responsibility of server
administrators for local organization and operation;
- standardization: agreement on common solutions to
common problems that simplifies access to the network
services;
- non-mandatory use: the network only provides
services, but it is users' decision to use them;
- logical organization: the user accesses the
information through the content labels (addresses) and it is
system's responsibility to arrange physical connections
(URL). This simplifies changes in services and their relocation.
Benefits
- platform independence
- local use of viewers and servers; their capability is further
improved by use of external tools/viewers (RASMOL, Java, VRML)
- international cooperation
- interschool exchange (exchange of products, materials,
competitions, ...)
- activation of school potentials
- information becomes more public
- distance learning
Architecture
Slovenian School network is built on top of
ARNES
(Academic and Research Network of Slovenia).
Network consists of three levels:
- Upper Level - Ring of Entry Servers
- consists of a small number of entry servers that have
knowledge about the structure of the Network and direct the user
to the proper server/material.
All entry servers are equivalent - they provide the same
information about the Network.
This ensures:
- robustness against failure of an individual
server;
- distribution of workload, since the entry
servers are spread across the whole country and the
user tries to use the closest one.
- Lower Level - Information Providers
- consists of ordinary servers that actually provide the
information. For some time some information
providers will be hosted at other organization's servers.
- User Level
- consists of schools with the Internet access.
Entry Servers
- Entry servers are appointed by the RO Program Committee.
- Duties of entry servers are:
- to keep information about the current status of the
Network and the list of services the Network offers,
and to provide access to these services;
- to offer additional information services;
- to guarantee uninterrupted work, trained staff, and
sufficiently powerful equipment (computers, disks,
communications);
- All entry servers have the same structure of information
about the Network - system services:
- a system service is maintained at a selected
entry server - its staff becomes service's
maintainer;
- maintenance can be delegated to the third party;
- a maintainer has complete responsibility and right
to update the service;
- system services are mirrored at all entry servers.
- Entry servers may offer their own information as ordinary
servers.
- If certain entry server is not fulfilling its duties it loses
its status.
Services of Entry Servers
- catalogue
of educational material (see also
descriptions of selected programs
and
Explorer);
- distribution of educational products; (similar to
c|net
);
- information about national and international
events
related to education;
- list of international
servers
related to education;
- list of books and magazines from the field of education;
- list of addresses of education related people (subscription
is voluntary and explicit);
- newsgroups, conferences, and mailing lists;
- electronic publishing (e.g. Elektronska NiT);
- handbooks, recommendations, instructions,
dictionaries, ...;
- information of the system Infošol.
announcements,
advertisements;
- support for (self)education of teachers
Ordinary Servers
- To become a member of the Network, an ordinary server
applies to the maintainer of the
List of ordinary servers. The application
contains:
- URL of the entry page of the server;
- e-mail address of the server administrator;
- postal address, phone number, fax;
- basic data about the server: type of computer,
operating system, server program, public phone numbers
to access the server, work schedule;
- brief description of the information it offers.
See the proposal of the
application form.
- On the entry page of the ordinary server has to appear the
emblem of the Slovenian Education Network and the connection to the closest entry
server. Somewhere on the server also has to appear the list
of all entry servers.
- Responsibilities of ordinary servers are:
- to inform maintainers on entry servers about the
changes in the offered material;
- in case of a change, to update the list of entry
servers
Some Problems and Solutions
- The alphabet: Unicode would probably be the right
solution, but it is still not the Internet standard.
Thus we will use
Latin 2;
- The growth of the Network is encouraged by:
- preparing of unified tools for the support of
servers;
- organizing competitions and projects for preparation of
WWW compositions and materials;
- sharing of servers - logical servers of schools
without their own physical server are hosted at
some other physical server (computer);
- education of users and administrators;
- changing the role of a school library into an
information center.
- Privacy and protection of intellectual property:
personal data is included into the Network only
with an approval of an individual. Copyrights have to be
respected.
Acknowledgments
In the design of the Slovenian Education Network also participated:
M. Bona~, J. ^a~, S. Divjak, T. Dolenc, and T. Skulj.
Jan 16, 1996 / Jan 15, 1996;
V.B. and
A.B.