Tough call on Conference Day 2: many parallel sessions, including several on elearning and pedagogical models, and some on bioinformatics and informatics in health, in addition to all the other strands taking place at this massive event. Since I’m representing KMi and the OU on both the elearning and health informatics fronts, I have no problem flitting back and forth. Also, my first keynote address took place in the elearning strand at 10am, so I wanted to participate in the full session.
But in the afternoon, there was another twist.
Don’t laugh, but I found it tough to choose between “Hospital Sin Papeles, una experience de Baleares” (paperless hospital in the Balearics) vs “Concepciones y experiencias en la implantacion de un entorno virtual de aprendizaje en la Universidad de las Ciencias Informaticas” (Conceptions and experiences in the implantation of virtual surroundings of learning in the University of Science and Informatics). I really enjoyed my visit to UCI in late 2004, and wanted to hear more about what was happening there. On the other hand, since I felt I knew what was going to be said in the elearning strand(s), I figured it was worth hot-footing it over to the health informatics strand. I was not disappointed.
Luis Allegre, of the Servicio Balear de Salud, gave a pretty slick presentation. It was done using a custom interface rather than PowerPoint, with embedded ‘atmosphere’ video clips and lots of embedded hyperlinks to allow the presenter to hop around to relevant portions of his talk, which he did without confusing the audience (a danger in purely web-centric presentations, if they are not carefully choreographed). Content-wise, we were treated to a brave new world of high-efficiency health informatics, linking multiple hospitals at multiple sites in the Ballearic Islands, and allowing patients, doctors, nursing, administrators, other healthcare professionals, and others to share everything from MRI scans to patient prescription updates across every imaginable device from the grid-based supercomputers that handle the 3D imaging to the mobile phones that are patient-data enabled. It was a nice gig – my Spanish was not up to the full task of understanding all the audience questions (this room was too small to merit simultaneous translation), but others did question the proprietary tools, and I know there are other presentations here looking at semantic web services and other ‘holy grail’ solutions for interoperability. Nevertheless, a very nice piece of work.
I stayed for a hardcore bionformatics presentation just for the challenge, but it proved extremely difficult to follow. It was clear from the snippets that a young PhD student, Maria Guirola, of the Centro Nacional de Bionformática, Cuba, had put together an advanced constraint-satisfaction engine that derived 3D protein structures by first generating all topologically possible structures based on known physical properties of the relevant atoms and their bonding properties [no, my spanish ain’t that good... this was clear from the cool 3D diagrams and the snippets of undergraduate biology I can still remember!], and THEN whittling down those possibilities based on empirical chemical data. Good stuff!
I popped back into the elearning strand, where Daymy Tamayo Ávila and others from UCI were talking about a range of things from Moodle-based implementations to comparative analyses of rival learning management systems (disclosure 1: I hate learning management systems, always have, always will; disclosure 2: some UCI colleagues complained that using Moodle had resulted in their creativity being stifled; this was a hotly debated issue throughout the day). Nevertheless their experiments were well thought out and they were fully conversant with state of the art projects. In the next presentation, David Leyva talked about some ongoing semantic web experiments that seemed quite neat… he only got to do the rough online, so I’ve arranged to meet up with some of these guys later in the week.
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