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Hi all,

It is now one week past our official deadline for proposals. We agreed to have a one week unannouced extension for a few promised proposals, but that time is now past as well. If you know of anyone else still wanting to make a proposal, please tell them to do so quickly or they will be sure to be shut out of the process.

Here are the final totals of proposals submitted:

Workshops - 9 (and some very interesting ones at that)
Posters - 9
Roundtable - 1

Total Papers - 59
Asia - 23
Europe - 16
North America & Caribbean - 8
South America - 5
Australia - 3
Africa - 2
Keynotes - 2 of 4 abstracts submitted

We have approximately 12 hours available for paper presentations, and about 5 slots for concurrent workshops. So things are full, and perhaps a bit overfull. We will consider either having some concurrent paper presentations (in two rooms), asking that some papers be presented as small group roundtables or posters instead, or perhaps other strategies to accomodate as many presentations as possible, and allow time for discussion without back-to-back presentations. We may lose a few as well if travel funding falls through.

Vesa and I are expecting to have letters out about Workshop acceptance by the end of February, and letters about Papers acceptance out by 2nd week of March. Hopefully this will allow time for everyone to plan their travel.

Happy 2007!

Well, the year of CALMet VII has arrived! Things have been moving forward quite nicely. We have about 15 submissions so far, but many more have been promised, including many of your own. Hoping in the next few weeks we'll see that number grow substantially. Please send your submissions as soon as possible. We are yet to see an update on ASMET or other training topics from Niger from Emmanuel, more info from UNEMET or other Brazilian activities, and Ian Mills and Eumetcal/Intralibrary processes or activities. We all hope you folks can still make contributions!

We now have a full set of Keynote Speakers who have graciously agreed to participate. These are:

SHEN Xiaonong, Director General, Department of Human Resources and Education,
China Meteorological Administration (CMA), Director General, CMA Training Centre.

Dr. Ion Draghici, Director WMO Education and Training

Dr. Andrey Belotserkovsky, Pro-Rector, The Russian State Hydrometeorological University, Vice-Chairman of the Academic Association of Universtities for Hydrometeorology

Ian Bell, Bureau of Meteorology Training Centre, Australia (retired), also lead instructor for WMO Regional Training Seminars

On the final day of CALMet, we also plan a panel discussion on the Past, Present, and Future of CALMet, to be led by Dr. Joe Lamos (COMET), chair of the CAL Working Group and Carola Sundius (FMI).

Other special sessions may be in the works. If you have suggestions, please let the group know. Vesa and Fan Hong, if you have other things to add that I may have forgotten, please let us know.

Cheers everyone,

Pat Parrish

Hi all,

We're nearing the end of our first deadline for CALMet proposals, and our total, as of our last check, stood at an even 0. (Zero is an even number, right?) This is not that unexpected, because we should assume that given human nature most people will reply near the final deadline of 1 December. But it is clear that we will probably be extending the deadline, perhaps into January. The good thing is that it gives us another opportunity to announce the conference and reach more people, possibly.

However, traditionally many of the presentations and nearly all the workshops have come from a core group of dedicated people, many of whom are in this working group. So I think it behooves us to begin our own planning internally, and perhaps to do some collaboration to create the best set of workshops and other conference events. I know many of you already have plans to submit papers or workshop proposals, so if you can manage it, do so by the December 1 deadline. But in the spirit of international cooperation that CALMet represents, we should look for joint opportunities as well.

For example, in conversations with Jeff Wilson in September in Nanjing, we discussed the widespread interest in new Radar training, and how that might become a focus of discussion at the conference. There is also a growing use of Moodle and other course management tools that lends itself to sharing from various perspectives and experiences. In this spirit, we'd like to start some discussion of possible conference events spearheaded by CAL Working Group members, but of course, not limited to them.

1. Radar Training: Many weather services are implementing new or enhanced doppler radar systems, and will need to train new and existing forecasters in their use. A possible conference event might be a panel discussion with a panel drawn from countries who are beginning to plan, or have already implemented, such training. The panel and audience discussion could generate new approaches to meeting radar training needs, or find opportunties for collaboration. You may have other ideas as well as to how a sesson on Radar Training might be undertaken.

2. Course Management Tools: From COMET, Bruce Muller is planning to attend CALMet in Beijing, and has experience running our first Virtual Course (mostly live and at a distance), with the aid of the MOODLE course management system. Bruce could not only share those experiences, but lead a workshop to teach about how to set up and use its basic functions (with help from CMATC in setting up a working lab). While Bruce and COMET could do this workshop alone, it might also benefit from participation with collaborators from other countries who have also used such tools. If there are enough experiences to share, in addition to the workshop, a session of papers on the topic of distance learning course management might be useful.

3. Real-Time Training: There seem to be a lot of collaborative learning activities taking place that use real-time weather discussions with VISITVIEW or other tools. CMA does map discussions each day that aren't directly training, per sae, but probably do deliver a lot of good training. Is this a topic for which it might be of interest to hear about activities and approaches in a longer, focussed session?

These are just a few examples of how we might leverage broad application and interest to create some highly useful events that use international collaboration. Please make other suggestions, or help elaborate on these if you think these are good. Also, if you are interested in taking a leadership role in one of these, or know someone who is, let us know.

Finally, we are back to the consideration of key note speakers. Vesa and I made some very preliminary recommendations a while back, based mostly on giving CALMet community members some focus, but perhaps not placing enough considering on who might make an inspiring address. We welcome other suggestions from the group, with the realization that with travel costs, the keynote speakers should likely either already be planning to attend, or could be invited by one of the national services as a representative. It might also be good if CMA could identify at least one local presenter who could inspire or provoke creative thinking about meteorology training and education.

That's all for now, but let's start using our blog and gettting some ideas rolling for the conference, less than 8 months away!

Hello Everyone,

Our planning for the conference continues, but we still could use your input when you get a chance to reply. Here are a few decisions we are hoping to consider completed soon:

1. Conference dates:
Fan Hong and CMATC have proposed July 2 to July 6 as the week of CALMet 2007. Unless anyone sees a considerable problem with these dates, I think we should allow CMATC to hold these as final.

2. Excursion mid-week:
There has been a suggestion to hold the conference over 6 days rather than 5 (making the dates July 2 to July 7) to accomodate a full day of site seeing (required to see some more distant sites). We propose this excursion day would on Wednesday during the conference. Several of us would look forward to the opportunity to break up the long days of presentations with a day of more informal socializing and sharing. In this option, Saturday might be a full working day, or perhaps one more devoted to workshops or other activities. Vesa has also suggested that the CMATC visit might be on Saturday if we take this approach. Does anyone feel this approach would present a problem? Do you support this?

3. Conference keynote speakers:
Vesa and I proposed a first list of possible keynote speakers, but we would like to hear from you who you would like to deliver an opening talk at the start of each working day. We listed people who have a long history with the CALMet community, and who have not presented keynote speeches previously. But of course we want to ask speakers that you feel will inspire and stimulate creative thinking. This does not have to be decided immediately, but we hope you can start thinking about it.

That's all for now.

Pat

CALMet (CAL Working Group)

Hi everyone,

Fan Hong recently emailed us with this list of planning items. I'll provide my own responses for the group to consider beneath each one.

P.S. Let's start to use the Blog so the discussion is saved.

1. If it is possible I might propose a session to show what we have done in
CMA's distance education, talks plus demos, web and video conferencing.

Yes, Vesa and I already discussed this and we agree. Because we will be at CMA, it would be nice to take advantage of that and learn more about your distance education activities. How much time do you propose?

2. "Creating Activities for Learning." I am not a native English speaker, it
seems to me "creating" emphasize the action, is "creative" better in this
phrase which may mean innovative and so forth?

I agree, except I feel both words are appropriate for the acronym CAL. The workshop is both about how to take action in offering effective education and training, and also how to use creative ideas. Since we can only use one of the phrases in print material (unless we're more creative, I guess), I'm wondering which word others prefer.

3. If I am assumed to organize the opening ceremony as an honor, I might
suggest an opening ceremony chaired either by the conference chair, Pat or
Vesa, or a CMATC director general, plus opening statements by a WMO, and a
SCHOTI and a conference representative respectively, plus an CMA and/or
CMATC official depends on the situation then.

Let us discuss this more. I envisioned you, Fan Hong, as chair of this session, but Vesa and I might add some welcoming words as conference chairs. But I'm open to other ideas.

4. For the sightseeing it may take a whole day off.

This is problematic, but it is quite an attractive idea to have an entire day for siteseeing for a place as interesting as Beijing. However, participants often feel there is not enough time for the conference as it is. Can we be creative and break tradition? Could we add Saturday as a Workshop day (this was recommended in one survey) so that taking Wednesday off for siteseeing would not steal too much time for conference activities? Or could we have the siteseeing day on Sunday prior or Saturday after? Other ideas? Should we keep siteseeing to a half day but into the evening if possible, limiting what we see as a group? Do others feel 4 working days is sufficient?

5. For the visit to the CMA's national met centre, met satellite centre and
Huafeng Group of Meteorological Audio and Video Information etc, if we have
time to arrange, it will probably take half a day.

I'll let others respond. It would be nice not to lose too much conference time, but this might be a very useful learning experience.

6.A banquet/dinner offered by CMATC will be at night so will not occupy the
5 working day.

I am looking forward to this already.

Cheers,

Pat

Hi Everyone,

I'm sending this to the CALMet Blog because its time to begin discussing plans for the upcoming conference in Beijing in 2007. It's great to have that decided and exciting to have the conference in such capable hands.

Under a seperate email, I will send a planning document with some initial ideas the Vesa and I have been discussing. Your comments and suggestions are being requested. After you've had a chance to read the short document, please send comments to the blog so that we can have them archived.

I know its been a while since we've used the blog, and if you're like me, you've forgotten your password and username. Fortunately, that was easy to retreive from Blogger by giving them my email.

Cheers,

Pat and Vesa

Hi all,

The new draft CALMet Website is now live at http://calmet.comet.ucar.edu/. It doesn't have a lot of content yet, but at least it's a new base to add to. And you can help with that.

Here are the sections and things to think about.

Upcoming Conference:
Not much to say until venue is selected and we announce registration. We can host informative pages about the conference and/or link to a site managed by the local organizers.

Past Conferences:
I've linked to what I could find about past conferences. Let me know if there is more to link to. As for the last conference in Boulder, I've linked to most presentations that didn't seem to have copyright issues that would make anyone uncomfortable. Workshops were problematic, but if presenters have materials they can organize we can link to those, preferably on their own Websites. Most presentations presented little problem except for those from Australia. Lots of images there with uncredited sources. (That's what made them so fun.) We can create a letter of some kind for you to sign giving your ok and willingness to be sued instead of us, or you could post them on your end for us to link to. But not everything needs to be linked if it becomes a hassle.

Resources:
Obviously, lots more could be linked to here, and this could become several nested pages. Send me suggestions for obvious links not already there. Anything still valid from Charles' old CALMet site?

Discussions:
When our IT group recovers from several recent server crises, they might be able to get our Web discussion board back up and running. I think that will be better than a blog, since it will be more open, unless you have other suggestions. Also, if anyone has a paper to share for discussion, we need a first "Occasional Paper", if you like that idea that is.

Comments, suggestions, contributions are welcome. We're willing to manage this for now, but the site really belongs to all of us.

Cheers, Pat

Hi everyone.

Below is our draft of the email we will send our three gracious potential hosts for the next CALMet Conference. We would like to get these in the mail Monday or Tuesday of next week, so please take a moment to review the letter and acknowledge that it captures what should be communicated to those offering proposals.

We have three offers to host CALMet VII. These include CMA (Beijing, China), RSHU (St. Petersburg, Russia), and MeteoFrance (Toulouse, France). This is a wonderful position to be in. Perhaps, since only one site can host, we might also be able to also choose the host for CALMet VIII, if one of these three is open to that long term commitment, and keep to only a two-year gap between conferences because planning can commence sooner.

Fan Hong, because your organization is one of the potential hosts, perhaps you can comment on whether the letter provides everything you think you need to formulate a proposal. We also don't want to suggest that the proposal must be a long document with fine detail, but only estimates and possible plans, based on preliminary research. (Perhaps we should say this in the letter?)

--------------------------------------

January 20, 2006

Focal point developing proposal...

Address of institution…

Dear focal point:

On behalf of the CAL Working Group, and as Co-Chairs of the organizing committee for the 2007 CALMet VII Conference, we are very pleased that you and your institution have expressed an interest to host the next CALMet conference. The CAL Working Group is a sub-committee to the Standing Conference of Heads of Training Institutions (SCHOTI), which works in cooperation with the WMO in support of the mission to enhance professional development of the world’s weather services. The CAL Working Group supports the mission by organizing the CALMet Conference. This conference offers workshops and provides a forum for hydrometeorology training professionals and educators to share and learn about new developments and approaches to the education and training of hydrometeorologists, including the use of computers and other instructional technologies.

CALMet VII will be a five day event to be held in mid-summer, 2007. We estimate that there would be between 60 to 100 participants. There is no base funding provided by the WMO or its members. Typically, registration fees are the only source of funding, but in the past some corporate sponsorship has been obtained by local organizers.

As the hosting organization, you would need to provide a conference committee to handle registration, arrange for lodging and conference facilities, plan many of the conference events, and to work with the CAL Working Group to organize the program of presentation and workshops. A more complete outline of responsibilities of the local organizers is provided below, with more detail provided in the attached checklist. In preparing your proposal, please describe general plans and options in the following categories, providing cost estimates to help us estimate required registration fees. We realize that these estimates are just that, and do not reflect a final budget.

Accommodations

· Because many participants come from developing nations, lodging, in addition to hotel accommodations, ideally would include low-cost alternatives like university residence hall rooms. Please provide cost estimates of options in several ranges of cost.

· Accommodations should be very close to the conference facility, near convenient public transit, and/or accessible by hired transit. Those costs might also be addressed.

· Lodging costs will be fully and independently borne by conference attendees apart from their conference registration fees.

Conference Venue

· Conference facilities need to provide space for plenary sessions of 80 to 100 attendees, two individual meeting rooms for paper sessions of 20-40 participants, and at least two computer lab(s) for hands-on workshops of 20-40 participants working in pairs.

· Conference registration fees will cover the costs of renting conference facilities and equipment, if that is necessary. Any facilities or equipment use that you can contribute in support of the conference would be much appreciated in helping keep conference fees reasonable. Please include cost estimates for facilities and equipment, and what can be contributed by your organization.

Travel

· The conference location should be convenient to international travel connections, and able to be reached at a reasonable cost.

Activities

· Traditionally, the hosting organization has hosted a conference dinner the evening of the fourth day of the conference

· The hosting organization has also traditionally arranged at least one group excursion. The cost of excursions is traditionally included in registration fees.

Budget Responsibilities

· Local organizers must have a budget to pay deposits for facilities, etc., in advance of registration fees being collected.

· Traditionally, collected registration fees have not covered the entire conference costs. If this is again case, will your organization have means to make up this difference? In the past, this has been accomplished through organizational funding and through obtained corporate or other sponsorship.

We hope this outline assists you in investigating the details you need for creating a proposal. On behalf of the committee, we look forward to your proposal and to another successful conference.

Sincerely,

Patrick Parrish, Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training (COMET)

Vesa Nietosvaara, Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI)

Here is the body of Jeff's recent email describing his ideas for a CALMet Resources Kit. I felt it useful to preserve that here:

Re the Resources Kit. This comes from one of the breakout groups we had in the CALMET 2004. The website sounds great but we may need to cater for those with no. or poor internet access, or those that would not think to look initially. I am sure we could get WMO ETR Dept to fund the burning and distribution of a set of resource CDS / DVDs to go to each NHMS plus the 25 or so RMTCS.

I am targeting the lower end of the market and would like to provide people with some easy tools they can use to generate explorative, interactive learning experiences, provide some guidelines for building and examples of good powerpoints (including the notes sections). If we could provide some good tools for many of the basic met concepts and then widely distribute it (make it available) we would potentially lift the standard of met instruction globally. In putting together either the website or a CD we will have to be mindful of the metadata issues. My general approach in these things is to put together something as version 0.5 then see how it looks and peoples reactions etc rather than try and plan it all down to the last degree, ie an organic approach rather than a clinical one.

My initial thoughts 18 months ago on the content of a CD was:
* snap shots of many of Tom Whittaker's java applets and how to incorporate them into your own material with some examples
* The AniS applet from Ton Whittaker and tutorials
* The QuizImage Applet from Tom Whittaker and tutorials
* VISITview software from Tom W (and tutorials)
* suggestions for use of powerpoint and potentially any weather fonts or small weather symbols we can grab
* Obviously weblinks to the CALMET general website, COMET, Tom W's Weatherwise, DLSE, COMET multimedia, Virtual Lab ....
* Tutorial for building a PPT using resources from the COMET Multimedia webpage
* Possibly the EUMETCAL XML authoring tools (copyright and level maybe an issue here)
* Some discussion on various types of CAL and what to consider when planning sessions (we should be able to milk old CALMET papers or presentations here)
* Some suggestions on internationalisation and hemispherisation (CALMET 2001 paper from Charles and Daniel)
* Some key or really useful high quality documented learning objects ....

>From the notes of the working group

Collaboration and Co-operation in CALMET

1. Basic documented toolkit including
Presentation tools
Key educational content
Assessment / self assessment / quiz type tools
examples showing use of tools

Goal is to save people re-inventing the wheel, reuse good quality controlled objects.

Hi all. This is just an inaugural posting to kickoff the site so it wasn't blank when you entered. As CAL WG planning proceeds, it will be nice to have our workings archived since we are such a dispersed group. Looking forward to working with you all.