Recently our community was expressing its #love2eduroam. Powered by the Benjamin Franklin quote, “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn“, GLAD (GÉANT Learning And Development) joined the movement and hosted a series of hands-on eduroam training sessions to ensure an in-depth understanding and application of eduroam technology. They were delivered by a duet of true eduroam champions – Miroslav Milinovic (a GN4.2 eduroam service manager working for University Computing Centre, University of Zagreb (SRCE) and Marko Eremija, (a service engineer at AMRES, Academic Network of Serbia) – with the help of Dubravko Penezic from SRCE, who joined one of the sessions. The trainers travelled from Cyprus to Slovenia and to Jordan, tutoring a total of 61 participants to ensure quality and consistency of the eduroam service.
As a result of these efforts, the participants are now “able to have a better understanding of how the technology of eduroam works” (CyNet event participant) and can “improve provisioning of the eduroam hosted service” (ARNES event participant) within their organisations. Some participants even aspire to take eduroam further as they commit to “participate in translating the eduroam content to Arabic language” (ASREN event participant).
New opportunities, new challenges
The challenges, however, will still remain. What proves to be difficult is to execute the post-training commitment of the application and practice of what was learnt. The trainers agree that one of the hardest questions to answer is ‘Where do we go from here?’ and ‘What do we do next?’ Each organisation, each NREN needs to make choices and make investments in order for the service to be truly functional. In the words of Marko it is only through “the ripple effect… we can make eduroam a completely unique service in the world”. With the help of these hands-on sessions GLAD has now started the wave, and we hope the community will pick it up and carry it forward.
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