Meeting Notes for 4 June 2008 Status Report - Mihael Certificate Issue Bugs fixed Status Report - Eric Status Report - Tom Jordan Calendar Maintenance Tour of Moodle Privacy Issues / Acceptable Use

Meeting Notes for 4 June 2008

Present: Tom L., Tom J., Mihael, Liz, Eric, Tim Hart, Liz
Absent: : Bob, Dan K, Mike W., Randy, Kris, Joao

Tim Hart is Washington High School Chair and working with Tom Loughran.

Status Report - Mihael

Michael deployed a new version of the Cosmic e-Lab.

Certificate Issue

Mihael purchased one from GoDaddy, a commercial entity that does this. It was cheap - $215 for three years for five sites. He tested it on Firefox and Safari on Mac and Windows. The Root certificate for GoDaddy is in all browsers so this is an advantage for using it with schools. Eric asked: Are we going to get certificates from the Open Science Grid? Are OSG certificates included in most browsers? Mihael: One can get an ESNet certificate, a research Certificate Authority for one year. ESNet is not trusted by most browsers so it would not be useful with schools.

Bugs fixed

Bug 204 and 205 are fixed in the most recent deployment.

Status Report - Eric

Eric will be getting back to Mihael to work on Ligo Execution. It should take care of upload of final plot.

Apropos of security issues he noted that Ligo data is being served from Hanford via the Web (currently served through http). Eventually it will be served through https: This provides authentication on the web. Live data is publicly available. Second trend data is there as well.

Status Report - Tom Jordan

There re still differences in the shower study analysis between the results from the Cosmic e-Lab and Mark Adam's software. Tom is working on getting a description of what the differences are. They spent an afternoon comparing results between the e-Lab and Mark’s.

Calendar Maintenance

We are eager to have a common calendar. It looks like the Google Calendar that Eric set up should be used. Bob generally sends his dates out by e-mail. At one point he used the wiki. We need to get Bob's workshop information on that calendar. There is also a QuarkNet Calendar that Ann at Notre Dame is updating. Tom L. is going to check with Ann and see if she could add i2u2 events to the Google calendar. This would include Bob's workshops.

Tour of Moodle

Moodle is an Educational Content Management System. (php and mysql). It is modular

Eric gave us a tour of the Moodle-based site he used for his physics course at Bard. ( http://moodle.bard.edu/ ) He set it open to guest use. He thinks the functionality might be helpful to teachers who want to provide content related to using the e-Labs. Eric’s idea is that teachers might have their online course here that use the e-Lab. Students can add to discussion forums and upload attachments. There are discussion forums. He sees people having logbooks. We could try it as a prototyping exercise. Tom L. used BOINC to provide a context for his students and maybe he could use Moodle instead. Liz suggested that this might be useful for the e-Lab staff to define structure for their workshops. Fred and Dale do not have a high opinion of it according to Eric, but Eric found it quite useful. It has a learning curve. Teachers already have a lot to learn just to get going with the e-Labs so this may be more useful to teachers who are already quiet comfortable with the e-Lab. We want teachers to master the e-Lab first.

We already have teacher pages: Webalizer should tell us which teacher pages are being used.

Moodle has “summer of code” research students.

Privacy Issues / Acceptable Use

Related to Moodle, we got into a discussion of Privacy Issues / Acceptable Use. Liz thought we had actually implemented an acceptable use policy for schools as Ruth Pordes recommended a few years ago, but Tom said we did not. School districts have their own rules about acceptable use. These might be sufficient. This does not solve the problem of the requirements of the government sites. BOINC has a little red X that allows people to report abusive use. You can give the person who posts it a denial of service. We need to mesh policies of govt. and school.

-- Main.LizQuigg - 10 Jun 2008