F.R. "Fritz" Nordengren, MPH

To fully understand the imapact of the Villahermosa flooding, there are two visual points of view worth sharing today:

The 705 km view, 438 miles above the earth, is provided courtesy of Aqua at the Goddard Space Center in the form of a satellite images of Tabasco taken on October 18, 2007 and  November 3, 2007. (links to the higher res images are on the link above.)

The second point of view is provided by Jennifer Szymaszek for The New York Times, who’s images capture a street level, or prehaps more accuratley, a roof level view of living in the flooded capital city.

Learning partners,

I hope by now you have subscribed to the Learning Partner Update (this email) by RSS feed; it keeps your inbox lighter and lets you review the content on your terms and schedule.

This month, I’ve added posts about RSS and some left over notes from the presentation on finding images for presentations and using Flickr™.

In the hopes of encouraging interest and engagement in both our 12:10 tools and the upcoming College of Health Sciences Research Day, I want to share a feature within Fickr™ that can turn a static image into a great working discussion tool . Flickr™ has built it tools that lets viewers draw a box around part of an image, and the type a comment. Keep in mind, as we shared in the presentation Flickr images can be public to the world, or controlled access to limited people.

So, build your poster for presentation, take a photo, post it to Flickr™ (or if you build it within a software tool like PhotoShop®, Illustrator®, or PowerPoint®, you can output it as an image to upload to Flickr, and colleagues can review and add comments. This Fickr™ image is one example of how this is done.

Nervous, want to try it before you use it? You can follow the link to a sample poster I upoaded from PowerPoint® (thanks Carla) by saving it as a .jpg file and then posting it to my Flickr™ account. You can see both the poster and comments. While you are there, make a note or comment (they are two different things).

This week’s drawing will be from all the folks who
put comments or notes on the image.

As a final note, I found this entry in a blog by C. Wess Daniels, a doctoral student at Fuller Theological Seminary. He discusses his work on a Education Technology committee for the school after it received a grant to put technology in the classrooms.

Even deeper is the issue of whether technology aids or harms learning. People will take their sides quickly on this issue. Should we allow computers in the classroom? Should we make all the professors learn powerpoint? Should all classrooms be wired for the web? One thing to keep in mind is that technology has ordering power. A majority of fundamental questions now revolve around whether technology is useful or not, it orders a majority question and decision we make as educators in the Western world.

One thing we discovered in this discussion about pedagogy and technology was: Technology often times controls the pedagogy, rather than the pedagogy controlling the way technology is used. (emphasis his)

Plus six is an idea.

It’s more common sense than insight, and more practical than inovative. It’s recognition that in global scale tragedies, like what we’re seeing in Villahermosa, while the immediate need is huge, there will continue to be a need in six months. Catholic Online leads with a story today that describes what we all know will happen:

Filthy water recedes from the city streets. Lights and telephones flash on. Globe-trotting TV crews fly on to the next story.

Plus six is an idea of a small scale disaster response organization who targets a key social or public health NGO or clinic in the disaster area and seeks a non affected, partner agency to build and grow long term exchange and to aid in the recovery effort. It builds on the legacy of NMNP

Thoughts anyone?

In reviewing submission guidelines for some conferences, I am struck by some obvious advice: the title needs to be catchy. And who among us hasn’t at times written a poor title for what was probably a good presentation?

But even good advice is sometimes overlooked, or goes unheeded. That became clear to me after the last 12:10 Lunch and Learn about new ways to access and use images in presentations, the title didn’t live up to the topic. Several of those who chose not to attend, later told me said “we know how to put an image in powerpoint”. Opps. Bad title.

The October 12:10 conspiracy was to help discover and explore item 11 on the 12/10 list: exploring Flickr. And along with that we explored that the old difficult way of finding images to use in presentations has some free and better alternatives.

So as a brief recap, here are some of the key points.

The old way — of buying stock image disks, looking through pages of stock photo albums and directories, and considering whether the use of an image constituted a violation of copyright law have evolved.

The new way includes the use of tools like flickr™ (www.flickr.com) or Picassa™ and searching for images on nearly any topic or theme.

These resources make use the images shared by millions of people and the idea of tagging – a friendly folksy way of labeling content. This blog makes use of tagging and the resulting tag cloud on the right of this page. Tag clouds are intuitive for many people.

Flickr also makes it possible to only search photos licensed under Creative Commons, a new way to look at the sharing and restriction of use of intellectual property. Now, authors, publishers, researchers, scholars have a way to allow some use of their work without involving detailed licensing agreements, or disputes over ownership.

November’s 12:10 will be a very brief introduction to using audio online and in presentations.  I still have half a month to come up with a good title.

The lead from The Economist

THE scale of it all is difficult to imagine. At the flood’s height, over four-fifths of the state of Tabasco, in Mexico’s south-east, was under water, damaging the homes of nearly a million people. Villahermosa, the low-lying capital, was inundated after the Grijalva river burst its banks. Canoes hit the roofs of buildings as they evacuated residents; higher ground became disjointed islands in a lake studded with tree-tops. Hundreds of people remain huddled inside the majestic cathedral in the town’s centre. Outside the state governor’s residence, tens of thousands queued day and night for bags of powdered milk, cereal and drinking water. There are over a hundred shelters in Villahermosa alone, the largest of which houses 4,000 people.

Most towns in Iowa have fewer than 4000 people.