High School: Visit to Another World

I've been working with our local software developers' trade group to create a "virtual tech academy"; creating content for an online learning platform which can be deployed over the internet to rural schools throughout our state. The target is a replacement course for our antiquated one-course "computer science" requirement that is written into our state education standards for high-school students. The current requirement is heavy on Microsoft Office-type skills, and doesn't begin to explain the depth and reach of computer science and IT that we want to convey to students.

After an aborted attempt to have my local high-school pilot the project, we were fortunate to find a more rural union high school willing to be our host. The development team consisted a CS professor from a local college, and a teacher and a librarian/media teacher from the school. They have been working on this throughout the year. 

The school has an enrollment of 4250 students, 94% white with 6% African-American, Asian or Hispanic. Median household income is $68973 almost 20K over the median income for the state. However, 9% of the students qualify for reduced/free lunches. Ninety students receive English as a second language services, and they speak over 30 different languages. 

Today I was invited to sit in on the final class which was devoted to ethics and computing. This is the first time I've been in a high school class in years. The class, taught in a seminar style with only 9 students went well. The students were very engaged. There were several interesting ideas thrown around. 

Cell phones and social applications like Twitter and Facebook allow students to stay connected in almost real-time to friends and family. Some of the older people in the room (ahem) described how going off to college cut off communication between a college freshman and their family in the days when long-distance phone calls were expensive, and a single land-line phone might be shared by an entire floor or dorm wing. Our college professor theorizes that new college roommates don't really get to know each other for a semester or longer, because they are tethered electronically to their high-school friends and family. I recall I tried to call my parents once a week or so, but we kept our conversations short. I transferred my "life" and loyalties to my college environment within a matter of weeks, and developed several life-long friends during the first month or two at college. 

I asked whether students felt they had adequate access to computers at the school and they said that they did. We held our class in a well-equipped computer lab, and there are several clusters and labs throughout the school. 

When we asked how students would like to have their own laptop, like in Maine, I was surprised to find that they were less than enthusiastic. They were worried the machines would be underpowered. ("old Macbooks...."). They were worried about breakage and theft. The librarian/media person said that maintaining laptops is a nightmare during a project where they were loaning out laptops from the library. 

We asked about the digital divide. They all had computers and internet access at home. In a survey of the ninety incoming freshman, roughly 85 did have DSL or cable  (and a computer at home to use). Of the five others some had computers but no access (too far away for a connection), and two had no computer at home. 

They all agreed that they could not do their homework without access to the Internet. Their teachers provided alternatives and time for work during the school day for those students who didn't have access at home. 

They love Twitter... but they think is "stupid", and expect that they'll be bored with it shortly if they aren't already. 

They don't want to give up their textbooks (!) Even though they have electronic access to many of the course materials online, several still said they appreciated having a textbook, "especially for math".  Kindles haven't made it here yet. 

I couldn't help peeking.... the school uses Novell Zenworks as a desktop management tool. They use Moodle which interested us, because we're looking to roll out versions of the courses that we develop on a platform which is based on Moodle. 

Odds and Sods

New Honda Insight

Who knew that a car review could actually be funny? Too bad it is about the hybrid Honda Insight 2.0. I actually owned a 2001 Insight for about three weeks, but found it to be so tiny that I thought it wouldn't be at all practical.  Exchanged it for the now "classic" Prius (sedan, not the egg) from 2003, and I'm hoping the Prius will last forever. I did walk around a new Insight parked in a lot last weekend, and marveled at the size (large and Prius-like) and the Ford-like slatted chrome grill. And the current version of the Accord looks like a Saturn.  What happened at the Honda styling studio?      

ATA Conference

I should probably have more to say about the American Telemedicine Association Conference that I attended earlier this month, but my participation was somewhat clouded by the fact that I was suffering from über-jet lag and a stomach bug throughout. I found the venue, Las Vegas, weird and distracting. I spent most of two days at the conference itself. Comparing it with the previous year in Seattle, it seemed more subdued, perhaps we're all taking a breather in the down economy. Perhaps the most interesting thing was a thorough demo of the Intel Health-Guide device. This is now deployed in pilot projects. My own presentation, with video clips, went over well with our audience of perhaps fifty or so. Other presenters with whom I appeared showed frightening projections of alzheimer cases, child abuse, and situations of multiple co-morbidities (a fancy way of saying that a patient suffers from several major diseases at once). This reminded me of the current economic collapse as people prognosticated five years ago that the sub-prime lending was going to have a ripple effect throughout the American economy with effects that nobody would possible believe, like the bankruptcy of one or even two of the major auto companies. Well, health care in the U.S. is in the same position. In both cases, sub-prime lending, and employee-based health care, the consequences are (would have been) entirely avoidable, but people and government have to recognize when a business model has become unsustainable and have to have the fortitude to effect radical changes to that model.

Adobe Forms

With grants.gov and many federal agencies, Adobe PDF files rule. After experimenting with some intermediate ideas like PureEdge forms, which require a downloaded application, and which is restricted to the Windows platform, NIH, at least, has settled on a combination of javascript forms and Adobe forms and PDFs for assembling complex grant applications of  30-50 components.  Our state government has not caught up, and I found myself translating some Microsoft Word documents (not even Word forms) into Adobe forms and the process has gone pretty smoothly.  There are all sorts of good things to this evolution to PDFs, and the Adobe Acrobat and Reader programs should be high on the approved tools list for any kind of workflow that requires forms. 

Tech Friday: Video-The Right Tool For The Job

Two Stories: 

I

I've been participating in a entrepreneur boot camp of sorts which requires us to create slide show presentations to introduce our company. Because the leader is using an older Dell laptop with Microsoft Office 2003 installed, we are required to create these presentations to run on PowerPoint 2003 on her laptop. After the presentations have been created, our team was asked to record a voice-over to accompany these slides. This was recorded using Audacity on a Windows machine using a Samson condenser microphone with a USB interface. We did it in a couple of takes, and listened to the playback. All seemed well, although the team expressed some trepidation at attempting to synchronize the playback of the audio with the individual slides, a finicky process which would take some hours.  So the question is, why not use the sound recording function in PowerPoint 2007, (Windows) or Keynote '09 (Mac)? 

II

We've been engaged in a study comparing a 15 week exercise program delivered in three "modes", 1.) a live class at the 'Y', 2.) an interactive version delivered over the internet using multi-point two-way videoconferencing, and 3.) a DVD version of the program.  As part of our telemedicine project we had a contractor create a version of our program for delivery on DVD. We shot great footage with professional audio, lighting, and camera work. The footage was edited to create a 15 week version of our program.  Once the raw edits were created, we sent them off to a DVD guru who used one of those $1,200 authoring programs to put it together.  The result was OK, but non-intuitive. The users of the DVD basically hated it and several dropped out of the study.  

Now, a year has past and the study subjects who participated in the live session and those who took the interactive tele-version of the program want to have a DVD version of the program as a reference so that they can continue their exercise. We decided to provide them with a free DVD, using clips recorded from the telemedicine session. I combined these using iMovie '09 and the result is better than the original professional DVD. (!)  I subsequently bought David Pogue's Missing Manual book on iMovie and iDVD and am looking forward to re-doing our original DVD as well as create some promotional material for sharing on the web.  

Now, video editing isn't my favorite pastime, but it is certainly no worse than grant-writing, and if the results are near-professional, then why not take advantage of what has really become a disruptive technology? 

On the other hand, here is an example of Eva Sollberger's Stuck in Vermont video blog. Eva is a one-person video production company. She shoots, edits and publishes. This particular episode is about 6-8th graders creating their own news show.  It sure beats Channel 5 eyewitness news. 

 

Top 50 Healthcare 2.0 Blogs

RNCentral has posted a list of the 50 (fifty!) Healthcare 2.0 blogs, where Healthcare 2.0 is loosely defined as the transformation of health care delivery from a top-down process ordained by physicians, hospitals, and insurance companies, to a shared process involving patients, with  large dose of IT (electronic medical records, telemedicine, patient social networking) added in.