CertTutor.net UPDATE, August 30, 2002

CertTutor.net UPDATE—brought to you by the Windows & .NET Magazine Network and CertTutor.net
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Security Administrator Web Site
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(below COMMENTARY)

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August 30, 2002—In this issue:

1. COMMENTARY

2. NEWS & VIEWS

3. CERTIFIABLE

4. ANNOUNCEMENTS

5. RESOURCES

6. INSTANT POLL

7. NEW AND IMPROVED

8. CONTACT US

1. COMMENTARY
(contributed by Morris Lewis, [email protected])

This week, I share some thoughts about a new training experience I had on Tuesday, when I led my first Web seminar. Afterward, it occurred to me that dropping into instructor mode wasn't difficult, even though I was alone in my office. In many ways, the experience was like conducting a seminar at a large conference, because when you're in front of 100 or more people, developing any kind of eye contact or one-on-one connection with more than a handful of people can be difficult. In fact, the experience was so much like teaching in a classroom that I found I had to stand the whole time—it just didn't seem right to sit down while teaching.

Sitting in on a similar seminar as a participant earlier in the summer showed me that online seminars seem more like attending a conference than sitting in a classroom. At a conference, you often have to wait until the end of a session to ask questions, whereas in a classroom, you can raise your hand when questions arise. At a conference, you might have a printout of the speaker's slides, if anything, but in class, you have a copy of the courseware and can read along as the instructor speaks. A conference can host hundreds of people; a class tends to have fewer than 15 students.

From my experience both as a lecturer and a student at a Web-based seminar, at a conference, and in a classroom, I can say that whether a particular environment offers effective training depends on the learning style of the student and the structure of the curriculum. For example, each Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) course has a specific set of goals. These goals guide the instructor in the order of the topics and how much of each topic to present at once. In contrast, conferences typically have session tracks that follow a similar theme but rarely foster the kind of structured flow of ideas that regular classes do. Students have to "stitch" together all the different pieces of information from a group of sessions and fill in the missing parts on their own.

If you're just beginning to learn about a new technology, beginning and overview sessions can be good ways to build a foundation to which you can add with later classes. If you're a more advanced student, conference sessions can often enhance your understanding of a complex topic. People who are somewhere in the middle—between beginners and experts—often get lost at conferences because they don't find enough structure in the curriculum to help them understand how different parts of a technology relate to one another. I believe that advanced students tend to benefit most from going to conferences and that beginning- to intermediate-level students tend to find classroom instruction more valuable. The question, then, is whether Web-based sessions can become more like classes and less like conferences.

One change that would make the Web experience more like the classroom experience would be to make sure that courseware is in the hands of the students while they listen to the lectures. I'm not convinced that electronic courseware content is as effective as printed materials. Most of the common learning habits we picked up in school don't work without hard copy—writing notes or highlighting important sections is difficult or impossible. And giving students the ability to look ahead often helps them understand the relationship between concepts. Many of my night-class students preview the sections before they come to class to help them relate what they find in the book to what they hear in the lecture.

An advantage of the classroom over the Web is the close proximity of the students to the instructor. Duplicating that "closeness" on the Web has been difficult. For my seminar on Tuesday, I used the telephone to deliver the audio portion because teleconferencing is a much more mature technology than streaming audio. For example, most teleconferencing companies can let individual listeners speak to the rest of the group, a feature that Web-based streaming audio is still missing. Perhaps sending chat messages to an instructor and then using teleconferencing to let everyone else hear the answers is the way to duplicate the give and take that occurs in classrooms.

What's certain is that the Web-based approach has two significant advantages over the classroom: the ability to reach many, many more people, and the fact that those people can be almost anywhere in the world. Conferences can handle thousands of attendees, while regular class sizes are typically limited to 20 people or fewer. If a company wants to train dozens of employees, it might have to pay for several regular classes as opposed to one or two Web-based classes. As I discovered during my session on Tuesday, the Web lets me deliver lectures to many more people than would fit in a classroom, without the hassle and cost of transporting them to the one location. The savings in travel costs and lost productivity associated with going to a class or a conference should make adapting to a new way of learning worth the effort.

The delivery method, however, is irrelevant if it isn't effective for the students. My experience left me excited about Web-based delivery of training, but ultimately you must decide whether this new kind of classroom is right for you.

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2. NEWS & VIEWS

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) announced that it's updating its Level 1 exams and will offer the new versions in beta. For more information, see the LPI Web site.
http://news.lpi.org/stories.php?story=02/08/08/7084850

3. CERTIFIABLE
(contributed by Jonathan Bischke, [email protected])

Welcome to Certifiable, your exam-prep headquarters. Here you'll find questions about some of the tricky areas that are fair game for the certification exams. This week's questions cover topics for Exam 70-216: Implementing and Administering a Microsoft Windows 2000 Network Infrastructure.

Question 1
You work for an ISP, and you're in charge of allocating public IP addresses to clients. The ISP, NerdsAGoGo, has the following clients that require a specific number of IP addresses:

NerdsAGoGo has only the following subnets available:

Which of the following allocations should you make so as to use the fewest number of IP addresses? (Select all that apply; you can only allocate subnets once.)

For the correct answer and an explanation, go to
http://www.certtutor.net/articles/index.cfm?articleid=26477#answers

Question 2
You work for the ISP NerdsAGoGo. You have a list of IP addresses of hosts on the ISP's network that have been hosting FTP servers that distribute content of questionable artistic merit. The Association for More Aesthetically Pleasing Art has convinced NerdsAGoGo to do something about these FTP servers. Your job is to disregard any qualms you have about censorship and track down these servers.

You look through the list of IP addresses and try to determine which hosts are from subnet Unicron, which has the range 10.250.213.128 /27. The hosts are as follows:

Which of these hosts are on subnet Unicron? (Select all that apply.)

For the correct answer and an explanation, go to
http://www.certtutor.net/articles/index.cfm?articleid=26477#answers
and scroll down to "Answer to Question 2."

Question 3
You're looking into different subnetting schemes for your ISP, NerdsAGoGo. You're trying to break up the C range, which has the address 210.56.100.0 /24. One client requires 54 hosts on one subnet, a second client requires 114 hosts on one subnet, a third requires 25 hosts on one subnet, and a fourth requires two subnets with 12 hosts each. Which of the following subnetting schemes should you implement to satisfy these client requirements?

For the correct answer and an explanation, go to
http://www.certtutor.net/articles/index.cfm?articleid=26477#answers
and scroll down to "Answer to Question 3."

4. ANNOUNCEMENTS
(brought to you by Windows & .NET Magazine and its partners)

Windows & .NET Magazine Network Road Show 2002 is coming this October to New York, Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco! Industry experts Mark Minasi and Paul Thurrott will show you how to shore up your system's security and what desktop security features are planned for Microsoft .NET and beyond. Sponsored by NetIQ, Microsoft, and Trend Micro. Registration is free, but space is limited so sign up now!
http://www.winnetmag.com/seminars/roadshow

"The Insider's Guide to IT Certification" eBook is hot off the presses and contains everything you need to know to help you save time and money while preparing for certification exams from Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and CompTIA and have a successful career in IT. Get your copy of the Insider's Guide today!
http://winnet.bookaisle.com/ebookcover.asp?ebookid=13475

5. RESOURCES

CertTutor.net Live! is the Internet's number-one training and certification discussion board. Each week, CertTutor.net Live! receives thousands of posts about Windows XP, Windows 2000, Cisco, and more. We've selected one of these posts to feature here in CertTutor.net UPDATE. To join in the conversation at CertTutor.net Live!, register at the following URL:
http://www.certtutor.net/registration/index.cfm

(contributed by Gregory W. Smith)

Responding to a question from Senior Guru , Tutor puts on his teaching hat, and this thread quickly becomes a must-read.
http://certtutor.net/forums/messageview.cfm?catid=41&threadid=34325

Keep up with CertTutor.net Live! by subscribing to the CertTutor.net Live! UPDATE, a free weekly newsletter that highlights the best posts from the discussion forums. Subscribe at the following URL:
http://www.winnetmag.net/email/index.cfm?code=up&id=23

See the O'Reilly & Associates Web site to read a collection of free books online.
http://www.oreilly.com/openbook

6. INSTANT POLL

The voting has closed in the CertTutor.net nonscientific Instant Poll for the question, "Do you turn to online forums to help you with your work and studies?" Here are the results (+/- 2 percent) from the 239 votes:

The next Instant Poll question is, "Have you bought an eBook to help you prepare for an exam?" Go to the CertTutor.net home page and submit your vote for a), Yes, b), No, but I plan to, c), No, and I have no plans to.
http://www.certtutor.net

7. NEW AND IMPROVED
(contributed by Carolyn Mader, [email protected])

Transcender released three new CertificationTrainer videos. CertificationTrainer for exam 220-221 covers material for the Computing Technology Industry Association's (CompTIA's) A+Core Hardware Exam. CertificationTrainer for exam 220-222 covers material for CompTIA's A+ Operating System (OS) Technologies Exam. CertificationTrainer for exam 70-218 covers material for Microsoft Exam 70-218: Managing a Microsoft Windows 2000 Network Environment. CertificationTrainer videos, available in CD-ROM format, combine instructor-led clips with on-screen demonstrations and real-world examples. For pricing, contact Transcender at 615-726-8779.
http://www.transcender.com

8. CONTACT US
Here's how to reach us with your comments and questions:

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