Attendees: Mike Shaughnessy, Bill Fiske, Lee Rabbitt, Steve Foehr, Jim Halley, Peter Adamy, Pam Christman, Jim Monti, Sharon Hussey

Approval of January 30, 2004 minutes - minutes were reviewed and approved as is. Members agreed that early receipt of minutes and electronic approval would be beneficial.

New Business

• Board Governance
  

  • Advisory group for RINET-MUNI - In order to give a voice to stakeholders, it would be beneficial to set up a representative group to act as either a users or an advisory group. Howard described the State's interest in the development of RINET-MUNI. The RINET Board is concerned that the development be accomplished as part of a planning process with relevant representation and carefully thought out goals and objectives on the part of both RINET and RINET-MUNI . Howard feels that representation from the municipalities will need to be addressed at some point, but that a first step is an advisory committee. He will take the lead on bringing individuals from the participating agencies together to form this committee.

Unfinished Business

Reports

• Staff performance review
  
  • Sharon reported on the performance evaluation for Melanie Turcotte. Members expressed their appreciation for Melanie's courteous and helpful assistance as they grapple with e-rate and SLD questions.
• Update on the Data Warehouse/SIS project
  Lee and Steve reported on progress of pilot project, discussions with Ed Giroux and Ken Gu of RIDE:
  
• RIDE will be issuing an rfp for a consultant to write an rfp for the design and implementation of a centralized student information system.
  
• RIDE is exploring how to distribute existing grant funding to help districts to participate. There is a belief that there will be more money next year. At the same time want districts to begin to buy into SIS
  
• Bill suggested that they design a project and invite districts to apply for grants dependent on participating in the program, This gives them money for the first year and if there is more money in following years they would be able to continue being subsidized, Takes away barrier of startup costs to districts
  
• There are some technical questions and hoping to get answers from a consultant.
  
• The SchoolMax pilot has influenced other districts: Coventry, Bristol Warren, Newport Jamestown, Foster Glocester, Lincoln, North Kingstown expected to buy in. Steering committee wants to bring SchoolMax into RINET by September.
  
• They are also asking for no more than a six week turnaround for the first RFP - want SchoolMax bid result to stand as a legitimate process; becaus five more districts are ready to buy in, any other process will take too long.
  
• Impact on business model - money to districts; SchoolMax might be supportive to help with hardware.
  
• Other comments included:
  
  • SIS systems are morphing into warehouses
    
  • Small committee will work on data dictionary
    
  • Will utilize student identifier developed by RIDE

Discussion

• Electronic Portfolio
  
  • Tools for Manipulating and Storing Educational Content

Tom Rambacher talked to Bill about instructional policy about what type of instructional material is important to collect, to transmit. Discussion included the following comments and questions:

• Any system must sit on top of technology infrastructure
  
• Is this another area where a cooperative approach is beneficial to achieve:
  Commonality
  
• Who are the interested parties; many educators buy from the first person who walks through the door; others don't know that there is any issue; others are very interested, e.g.:
  
  • Bristol-Warren already involved and making commitments
    
  • Gates grant and focus on electronic portfolio; Brown Alliance working with 10 districts;
    
  • Talking about storage and retrieval, management,
    
  • Portfolios - University lots of interest in certain colleges
    
• Need a committee with district representation to determine:
  
  • what is being done
    
  • what do people need
    
  • hosting services may be better centralized

This is a topic right at the top of the list for many. It is a way to electronically collect best practices, evidence of mastery of skills; related to a particular student; tied to standards.

Peter says that portfolio is different for different educations; nature of system depends on objectives. Peter feels that RINET might serve a good role in being at the table to say what is possible.

West Warwick is engaged in process with URI; looking at relational database as platform for portfolio, but it may not be good for longitudinal analysis. For a portfolio system to serve an entire district, must be very easy at front end and very complicated in backend. There is a lot of tension between a system that allows you to do assessment while at the same time focus on the instructional resources. There are different levels of portfolio; at the classroom level the purposes for the portfolio are different; needs to be more flexible; want to look at it from a statewide perspective and from an individual student perspective. Challenge is that it has to be such that the maximum number of teachers will use it and use it in a meaningful way. A good analogy is experience with 'running records' - teachers complied with the minimum requirements initially, as they became more practiced with it they started to use it more productively.

Ultimate objective is to merge assessment and instruction -- at this time assessment is infrequent while instruction is continual; assessment needs to become more continual.

David Niguidula and Hillary developing system for B/W.

• It is a web-based SQL that can be moved to ORACLE
  
• Started out in FrontPage
  
• Must run on a strong, relational background, needs teacher buy-in

RIDE is in the position to take the lead and create a committee. Sounds like we have a number of interested, expert people which could lead to a symposium.

Jim noted that this is related to the discussion about the data warehouse; need to move standards in that are creative. NCLB is one thing, state assessment is one thing, but we want to move way beyond that.

Bill offered to talk to Peter and then shape an invitation to invite people to come talk to us to give us an overview on what people are doing with portfolios.

• What are the cooperative opportunities?
  
• What could RINET's role be with its unique opportunity to be the collaborator?
  
• Is there on opportunity to cooperatively share knowledge, tools?

• Grant opportunities
  
  • Dept. of Commerce - TOP

Sharon described the review of TOP 2003 grant by Muriel Watkins, Department of Commerce who reported that last year's reviewers were very complimentary about the RI Statewide Student Information System proposal submitted by RINET, RIDE, and the SLC for FY2003. Her feedback was very encouraging about resubmitting a revised version of the same proposal.

Important points for consideration include:
* these are very competitive grants
* reviewers are experienced , come back year after year, have
pet projects they want to see funded and some wanted this one funded
* they rated the Proposal very highly, thought RI would serve as
a model for other states to implement on a regional basis. She
described it as a well defined project in a small state ...

Last year's emphasis was to not fund education projects, because TOP had funded many over the years and the DOE was the preferred agency to support education. However, that is changed this year, because the emphasis in on the administration's priorities of Education, Health, and Public Information. To that end, she suggested that we resubmit this grant with more focus on how the outcome of tracking student progress will add to their success in school and increase their skills to take their place in the workforce (stressing local RI industry).

She was aware of the RFP for the centralized student information system and asked about the outcome. Upon hearing that the result was an endorsement for SchoolMax and its adoption by three districts as a pilot project, she pointed out how that would lend credibility to the 'feasibility' requirement for the TOP funding. She noted how that could be reflected in our revised cost analysis and support our choice of technology. In addition, we can use the results of the pilot to strengthen the evaluation portion based on real experience. In terms of feasibility, she also stressed the need for letters of support from the partners to verify outcome expectations and commitment to matching funds.

For evaluation, she stressed the need for an independent evaluator who can speak to the outcomes and review the proposal before it is submitted to be sure that the outcomes are stated in such a way as to be measurable. The evaluator will be required to write a report that documents the project for potential replication by others as opposed to a lengthy report describing a scientifically controlled study.

She also thought we should include in the narrative the fact that RINET was seeded in part by a TOP grant in 1994.

Sharon asked for indication of level of participation in the resubmittal of this grant with the following results:

• Jim Halley will obtain endorsement from the SLC, RISSA, Board of Regents, etc.
  
• Lee Rabbitt agreed to obtain letters of endorsement from districts.
  
• Howard Boksenbaum agreed to approach the State CIO and maybe the Governor
  
• Sharon will request letters of endorsement form our State Legislators
  
• Bill Fiske will obtain endorsements from RIDE - Peter, Ed Giroux.

Lee, Howard, Bill, Jim, Steve will participate in rewriting the proposal.

Who should write the RIDE RFP to hire a consultant to design the implementation?
Need to get stakeholders together to write the RFP.
Maybe the Brown Alliance.

CompuClaim - SBRI (Small Business Rhode Island)

Peter Carson and company submitted a proposal to obtain funding to hire a consultant to design a datawarehouse solution. This solution would be piloted in RI for future expansion throughout the regional Northeast.
May need to sit down with them and clarify their intents based on the language in their proposal
Will they be a partner or a competitor?
CompuClaim and another party (Sherman) are creating a new system for developing IEP's.

Note: Maximus has an IEP built into it called iPlan.

Need to focus on RINET being the host for the datawarehouse.
And that it must be a collaborative effort among RIDE, RINET, and the districts

• NSF - National Middleware Initiative

Steve Carmody contacted Sharon with information related to a funding opportunity related to partnering with Apple in the development of directory and authentication middleware deployment. Steve is involved in the National Middleware Initiative of EDUCAUSE/I2 consortia. He described the NSF interest in the supporting deployers and Apple's interest in the installation of open-source and Apple software on its Xservers in small to medium sized schools. This ties in with other initiatives spawned through the efforts of NMI that include course management, assessment, curricular, resource repository systems.

This middleware could work with provisioning systems such as SIS, HR, recruitment, alumni, etc. by providing identity. Example, if a student in WW is enrolled in BIO101, that student would get attribute values in the OCLC to bring relevant library resources.

Steve will be attending the next worksession meeting on March 19th to provide further information.

• Email services

Lee and Bill described the perception issues related to the RIDE implementation of its email server and the simultaneous global problems effecting the RINET email server.
They have received comments, such as,
'If RINET cannot run mail services correctly, why would RINET be able to manage our warehouse services?'

Very specific issues are:

• RIDE aliases appearing as RINET service - some individuals at RIDE perceive that they are using the RINET alias system while in fact they are using RIDE's ridoe.net alias server. The effective result of RIDE service appearing as a RINET service is confusing. RIDE's ridoe.net server has two problems effecting its performance:
  
  • It is not maintained
    
  • It runs out of disk space and begins losing e-mail
• We believe that RIDE employees want named accounts and that:
  
  • Many RIDE employees do not know that there is a RINET alias system to address this issue
    
  • Some RIDE employees have been given RINET aliases, but they have been assigned to the incorrect account by the RIDE account manager.
• RIDE staff have begun sending large attachments to RIDE listservs. When this occurs, each and every RIDE employee downloads the attachment at the same time (upon arrival) clogging mail downloads for all of RIDE. This is perceived as a slowdown in RINET e-mail beyond the normal slowdown we see due to viruses, worms, etc.
  
• Some RIDE employees have gone over quota and have not been able to reset their quota because their mail clients would not allow them to access their mailbox to delete items. RINET's usual recommendation is to eliminate the client issues by visiting a Web site to delete mail. That Web site is being blocked by RIDE filtering settings. In one instance, the quota checker on the RINET server had failed. In the other instances, the problem was with the mail client.
  
• Inconsistent e-mail client versions within RIDE is causing inconsistent handling of e-mail attachments.

RINET will recommend that:

• RIDE staff abandon the RIDE ridoe.net alias server and use the RINET service,
  
• RIDE staff maintain updated versions of mail clients (especially Outlook users),
  
• a meeting be scheduled with the RIDE account manager, RIDE management, and RINET staff to address a process for creating named accounts, discuss handling of attachments, etc.

Global RINET issues

• Quota problem - RINET email boxes have a maximum limit; if user goes over maximum, no new mail is sent through; remedy - RINET directs people to mail2web; RIDE blocks mail2web
  
• SPAM - although RINET is implementing policies and software to block spam mail, spammers are finding workarounds quicker than system administrators can find solutions. Only solution to the spam is to 'drop it on the floor'. Who has authority to set that policy? Balance between blocking nuisance mail and infringing on personal right to freedom of information is delicate.
  
• Speed of response - volume of spam and virus attacks effect lag time for mail delivery. Recent virus attacks have lengthened lag time to get mail to hours.
  
  • A delay is introduced first by the virus checker for all emails with attachments.
    
  • Length is dependent upon SPAM attacks and virus check interaction
    
  • There are solutions to this issue
    
  • Multiple queues
    
  • Technical solutions are available; individual preferences

We need to encourage RIDE to help employees set email parameters.
Warning to users should be to use attachments judiciously - never send attachments to a list, instead post on a web site for downloading when distributing to many people.

The new server may help

Introduce a policy to drop certain spammers. Have you agreed to that at this table?

We should request URI to identify sites that are common spam sites

Pam would authorize Dave to kill the site. RINET would list the block sites on its web site.

Meeting adjourned at 12:30

Next meeting will be held on March 19, 2004.

Work session

Core relocation
Portfolio initiatives