Can we use grids for education?
Grids have been used for physics, maths, biology, and climatology so why not for education too?
Known as eLearning, using computing technologies for education can be as simple as accessing a school timetable online, through to running virtual communities for sharing and creating knowledge.
eLearning is often based on technologies which are difficult to scale-up or share with multiple users. They also tend not to distribute computing power or storage, making data- intensive fields, such as medicine, hard to teach.
Grid computing model could offer a solution to these problems. By sharing the processing power and storage space of many learning devices, eLearning could address tasks such as medical image processing, which require significant amounts of computing power. Sharing resources would be of particular benefit for mobile learning, where learners use portable devices with limited memory and processing power.
Teacher Becky Parker, at Simon Langdon Grammar School in Kent, UK, is putting this into practice. Her students are collecting, uploading and analysing information about cosmic rays in space in a project called CERN@School. Over time Becky hopes to expand this CERN@school network across Europe collecting potentially terabytes of data from hundreds of schools. By using the grid to analyse all this data, her students will be able to delve deeper into the universe.
However e-Learning with grids is not without its challenges. Students or learners first need to develop the skills required to use eLearning tools. This could be a problem for grids, which are sometimes rather hard to use. e-Learning also, of course needs both students and teachers to have access to technology meaning that these activities are not yet available to all.
