Entries tagged with education - Channel 10

CES 2009 Matthew MacLaurin on Kodu

Larry — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:06:00 GMT

Matthew MacLaurin is the man behind Kodu (formerly Boku), a Xbox game designed to help children learn the basics of programming launching on Xbox Live this spring. Kodu is both surprisingly simple and incredibly complex, allowing a child to make a simple game, or an adult to rapidly prototype a far more complex game.

Matthew sat down with me to talk about Kodu, where it started, and how to create a programming language that can easily be coded using an Xbox controller.

Teaching Kids To Program: Small Basic

sarahintampa — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:41:00 GMT

Microsoft recently introducing a new programming language meant to teach kids how to program: Small Basic. The project aims to make programming fun by providing a small and easy-to-learn programming language in an environment that’s customize for kids, or any novice programmers looking to venture into the programming world. Small Basic is derived from the original BASIC programming language and is based on the .NET platform. The reason it’s “small” is because it only uses 15 keywords and minimal concepts so as to not be intimidating to those just starting out. You can check out the project over on DevLabs site and you can also download a Small Basic Introduction PDF.

Using Games To Teach: G4LI Unveiled

sarahintampa — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:59:00 GMT

Microsoft is teaming up with a handful of universities to study if and how computer games can be useful in education for teaching students math, science, and technology. The research project has Microsoft working with NYU as well as City University of New York, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Parsons the New School for Design, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Columbia’s Teachers College and NYU’s Polytechnic Institute. The test subjects in this study will be middle school students.

Why middle school? According to Ken Perlin, an NYU professor of computer science, in middle school many students “become discouraged or uninterested and pour their time at home into gaming. We think gaming is our starting point to draw them into math, science, and technology-based programs.”

The research study will be called the “Games for Learning Institute.” The budget is $3 million. Microsoft will be paying half with the universities chipping in for the other portion. The study hopes to discover what makes games compelling and playable and what elements make them effective for learning…that is, even they are effective for learning. The games used in testing will be deployed along with curricula to 19 NYC area schools where results in the classroom will be tracked. (via Wired Campus)

Gigs in Gaming: Part II

Laura — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:29:00 GMT

Every gamers dream is to eventually work in the gaming industry. Wouldn't it be great to help concept and build the games you get to play? Well, if that's your goal then getting a college degree in game design is a step in the right direction. Bellevue University is one of the schools that offer this program. The great thing about Bellevue is that if you don't feel like picking up and moving to Nashville, Tennessee- you don't have to! Bellevue University’s Bachelor of Science in Gaming and Simulation degree is a professional-level degree completion program offered completely online. Watch this clip for more details on gigs in gaming.

Baby Smash!

Laura — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:02:00 GMT

Who says computers are for grown ups? Scott Hanselman is about to show you that not only can babies learn from and enjoy a laptop...but developing for them is just as rewarding. Check out THIS

Silverlight 2 June Webcast Series

sarahintampa — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:36:00 GMT

Lindsay Rutter is going to be doing a series of webcasts on Silverlight 2 in June, starting on June 16th. The topics will include learning about deep zoom, learning the WPF UI framework, learning about adaptive streaming, and more. In total, there will be 6 webcasts in all. To register for any of these free webcasts, just click on its title in the list below below:

Look What You Can Do with Silverlight 2 (Part 1 of 6): Overview of Silverlight 2 and the WPF UI Framework
June 16th, 2008 1pm EST
Look What You Can Do with Silverlight 2 (Part 2 of 6): WPF UI Framework Continued
June 18th, 2008 2pm EST
Look What You Can Do with Silverlight 2 (Part 3 of 6): Introducing Deep Zoom
June 20th, 2008 1pm EST
Look What You Can Do with Silverlight 2 (Part 4 of 6): Web Services Support
June 23rd, 2008 1pm EST
Look What You Can Do with Silverlight 2 (Part 5 of 6): Testing Framework
June 25th, 2008 1pm EST
Look What You Can Do with Silverlight 2 (Part 6 of 6): Adaptive Streaming
June 27th, 2008 1pm EST

(via BufferOverrun)

WorldWide Telescope Launched

sarahintampa — Tue, 13 May 2008 01:53:00 GMT

Today, the WorldWide Telescope has been made available to the general public. You may remember the WorldWide Telescope as the technology that made Scoble cry, but even without that hype, the project stands on its own as an amazing platform for scientific exploration and discovery. This virtual telescope is actually comprised of terabytes of imagery, collected and combined from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world. Using Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine, you can use the telescope to pan and zoom through the night sky, moving in and around planets, stars, and even galaxies. Of course you can view the moon and the planets with WWT, but the imagery from this telescope also lets you do things you've never been able to before from your computer - like watching stars being born or galaxies collide.

For both scientists and educators, the WorldWide Telescope will help to teach astronomy, computational science, and even provide opportunities for scientific discovery. For users of the telescope, there are rich media tours to that offer narration, music, text, and graphics to guide you through the night sky. It's like going to the planetarium without leaving your home! You can also make your own tours to share with others - a feature that teachers will really enjoy.

I've been playing with WWT tonight and it really is amazing to see the galaxies in their actual positions in the universe and be able to zoom and move them around on the screen. There are several different collections of images to explore - constellations, Hubble images, planets, and many more that I wasn't familiar with but were just as amazing. Click on one of the items from the collection zooms you right to the object in the sky. WWT is rich with technology that will appeal to astronomers, but it's still simple enough for the everyday user.

The telescope is based on technology that came out of Microsoft Research, an area of the company that has operated for 16 years which focuses on long-term, broad-based projects such as this. It's built on work that began with Jim Gray’s SkyServer and contributions to Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

You can view the WorldWide Telescope now from here: www.worldwidetelescope.org.

Cluster computing for the classroom

JonUdell — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:35:00 GMT

Kyril Faenov is the General Manager of the Windows HPC product unit. Before founding the HPC team in 2004, Kyril worked on a broad set of projects across Microsoft, including running the planning process for Windows Server 2008, co-founding a distributed systems project in the office of the CTO, and developing scale-out technology in Windows 2000. Kyril joined Microsoft in 1998 as the result of acquisition of Valence Research, an Internet server clustering startup he co-founded and grew to profitability by securing MSN, Microsoft.com and some of the world's other largest web sites as its clients.

Rich Ciapala is a program manager in Microsoft HPC++ Labs, an incubation team within the Windows HPC Server product unit. Rich joined Microsoft in 1992 and has held a number of different positions in technical sales, Microsoft Consulting Services, the Windows Customer Advisory team and the Visual Studio product team.

Links

Microsoft HPC++ CompFin Lab

Kyril Faenov and Rich Ciapala discuss a new HPC++ Labs project that enables students to run computation-intensive experiments involving large amounts of financial data.

JU: What Rich just demoed, which we'll show in a screencast, is how a financial model can be deployed to a server that acts as a front-end to a compute cluster. It's a nice easy way for students to use a model developed by a professor, select a basket of securities, run a very intensive computation on them against large chunks of data, and get answers back in an Excel spreadsheet. The bottom line is that the students can run an experiment using a level of computing power that was never before so easily accessible.

KF: Yeah, because of the complexity involved in deploying systems like that, acquiring the data, and curating it, a lot of universities don't have this kind of infrastructure in place. So for a number of students who haven't done this before, this will make it available for the first time. For others who have, it will make it quite a bit easier.

JU: Now these are not computer science students who are learning about high performance computing, and about writing programs for parallel machines, these are students who are learning about financial modeling, and this just makes a tool available to them that can accelerate that.

KF: Precisely. Most of our HPC customers are scientists, or engineers, or business analysts, not computer scientists. They're folks who use mathematics, statistics, differential equations ... sometimes not even math directly, but applications that encode these mathematical models to do research, or engineering, or risk modeling, or decision making. To them it's just a tool, and they want to use it in the way they use PCs today, as transparently and straightforwardly as possible.

JU: What's the situation today for most people? In the case of the covariance model Rich showed in the demo, if it weren't being done like that, how would it be done?a

KF: You can do it in Excel, or MATLAB, or SAS, on the workstation. So you'd acquire the data, and use your preferred tool ...

JU: ... and wait a long time ...

KF: ... and wait a long time. And if you want to do a significant amount of data -- like a year's worth, for a large number of stocks -- it might not even be possible at all.

Or you might load it up into a server, but then you have to figure out how to write an application, how to deploy it out to the server, then figure out how to submit the data to the model, pull it back, integrate into the visual analytic process.

This multi-step process is exactly what our HPC customers are running into. They're expressing the models and doing the design on the workstation, using any number of tools. They do the analysis of the results, and visualization, on the workstation. But large-scale computation runs somewhere else. It might be in their organization, it might be out on the Internet, but it's a very disjointed process.

JU: There are clusters out there in academia, and there are people doing these kinds of things, but the point is that hasn't been woven together yet.

KF: That's right. In 2004 the U.S. government published an assessment of U.S. competitiveness in high performance computing. The first recommendation was, and I'm quoting:

Make high performance computing easier to use. Emphasis should be placed on time to solution, the major metric of value. A common software environment that spans desktop to high-end systems will enhance productivity gains.

That's what we're starting to see in the HPC community. Not just getting the systems running as fast as possible, but figuring out how the workflow, the creative element of the scientific process, can be optimized.

JU: So, Rich and I talked about the particular model used in his demo is in a class called parameter sweep, which he distinguishes from the more distributed and chatty kinds of applications. In this case, you can send a batch of data down to a node, it can think about it for a while then give back an answer, and there doesn't need to be much communication. Is that the optimal scenario for this architecture?

KF: Actually, it's optimized for a broad range of HPC applications. In fact, the major goal of the first release of the product, Compute Cluster 2003, was MPI-style [message passing interface] applications. There are a lot of these in engineering and in the environmental space. You're modeling some kind of physical process, and you build a mesh or grid that takes a large physical process or body, partitions it, does computations on local areas, but then has to frequently exchange data across the partitions. Think about a car crash simulation. You might partition the hood of the car into a lot of pieces, every one computed separately, but as the deformation is happening the forces need to be exchanged. Or weather modeling, where heat exchange happens across partitions.

JU: There's a high degree of data interdependence.

KF: Exactly. When you you have an interdependent problem, you use MPI for that. We worked with the team at Argonne National Labs that releases the open source reference implementation of MPI, and we've adopted that in our product, optimized the performance and security on Windows, and integrated it into the stack.

JU: Right, I knew about the MPI layer in the cluster product. But it seems that the system we're looking at here, for professors to enable students to experiment with financial modeling -- that one is targeting the other class of application

KF: Right. There is a large class of what we call embarrassingly parallel problems, a lot of statistical analysis falls into that category, and media rendering, where you have a lot of independent tasks. And that's what we have here, because every pair of instruments that needs to be compared is an indepdendent task. What you need to do is spray those tasks across a cluster. We have a solution that makes that much more approachable.

JU: So in this case, that entails mapping the input parameters to a set of work items.

KF: Correct.

JU: OK. And outside the financial domain, where else will this style be popular?

KF: We'll see this in a range of disciplines. This particular example uses data from an external source -- in this case, the stock market -- and it's looking for patterns of correlations between different signals. This paradigm is broadly applicable. If you think about, for example, clinical research, where you have data coming in from hundreds of patients, where the data includes many parameters about their health condition, and you're looking for disease markers or drug reactions -- you're doing correlation analysis among the diffeerent signals.

Or you might have data coming in from sensors deployed in oil and gas pipelines for safety monitoring, or environmental sensors, everywhere you have instruments producing high volumes of data, where you need to find patterns in data, and optimize the scientific process of developing models that produce insight into the data.

JU: Would you say that these embarassingly parallel problems are low-hanging fruit?

KF: Very much so. And there's another class, Monte Carlo simulation, a method used very effectively across a range of industries to statistically explore different scenarios, for risk analysis and predictive model. It's used in financial services, like insurance, but things like process management in factories can also use it, or logistics chains.

JU: So for the current example, give us a sense of what skill set is required of the professor in order to create the model and make it available to students. There's some .NET programming involved, right?a

KF: Rich, do you want to take this?

RC: Well, you pick your .NET language of choice, and your development environment, which may be Visual Studio. We're making the data available in terms of LINQ, so you need some understanding of that, although for the queries typical of these applications it's fairly basic. And in fact, since it's integrated into the language and you get things like syntax completion, it's probably easier than writing SQL.

JU: There's a framework provided, what does that include?

RC: It does two things. First, it forces you to define the interface for your model in such a way that you can easily build, for example, an Excel front-end to send input and retrieve output. Second, it shows you exactly where you need to do the splitting of the tasks into work items, where you do the spraying of work items to the cluster, and where you put the code that does the covariance and correlation calculations.

KF: The professor focuses on writing the analytics parts, and doesn't have to worry about the fairly complex workflow skeleton that submits the data to the cluster, partitions the work, accessing the results, and then performing the final reduction.

JU: So can focus on creating the pivot table, or using MATLAB, which is where I'd rather be spending my time.

KF: Yes, in a domain you're expert in.

JU: So, who are the guinea pigs for this system?

RC: Our first two are the University of Washington, which did the model we demonstrated, and the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.

JU: Kyril, I know you have big ideas about where this can go. Why don't you paint the picture?

KF: When we started the HPC team at Microsft, we realized it's an actively evolving space. But Microsoft is fairly new to it. Without the benefit of 20 or 30 years of experience, we felt we needed to do something that would help us develop expertise and build up an understanding of not just the technology, but also the usage patterns. So we worked with, and funded, 10 universities worldwide, and that's been very helpful.

We've also created an internal team whose mission is to do incubation. The goal of this team is threefold. First, to prototype and demonstrate the end-to-end solutions that our HPC customers will find beneficial, and what Rich has demonstrated is an example of that.

Second, to help us explore the trend that we see as HPC becomes more and more data-driven. There's still the world where you run simulations, of car crashes or weather. But a lot of new applications are mining data for insight, and doing it in a computationally intensive way. That changes the formula for how HPC is used. In many cases it's becoming impractical to put clusters in customer locations, if you have to ship terabytes or petabytes of data around. Data repositories are starting to act like black holes, if you will, that are pulling computation towards them.

JU: I'm sure that's true in the climate area...

KF: Climate, biology, astronomy, geosciences, everywhere that you start accumulating tremendous data sets. We think there's going to be way that Microsoft can help customers optimize how these services are built, because there's no established architecture today.

JU: Jim Gray was always talking about how it's becoming necessary to Fedex hard disks around the world because there's no other way to move the data to the computation. But instead you're proposing to move the computation to the data.

KF: That's right. We want to incubate a few of these high-value data-centric services, and demonstrate the best practices for doing that while providing free access to academic institutions. That'll help us understand what's involved in operating these services, and potentially we might imagine Microsoft running a few of them.

Then the third goal for the incubation team is to flow the requirements for doing these things into software, so that customers can do this as easily as possible themselves. One of the challenges today is that there's a dichotomy between these very large-scale Internet services being built -- by Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and others -- but they're in their own world. Customers can't take a slice of that infrastructure and deploy it in their environments.

At the same time, we keep on building off-the-shelf software that people install on their infrastructure, and we're just now learning what it takes to run HPC services using that software. So we want to make sure there's a tight coupling between the team that builds the prototypes and runs the services, and the team that implements off-the-shelf software, such that we run our services using the products that we build. And at same time, we want to make it a turnkey operation for customers to stand up these services themselves.

JU: That's a key point, so let's underscore it. We're seeing the emergence of a small set of what I call intergalactic clusters, which are one-of-a-kind things, and they are not replicable. They do interesting and powerful things, but you can only do things with them on their terms.

Your notion is that you want to maintain parity, and ensure that you can always replicate what's happening in the cloud if you need to.

KF: Exactly. For example we just talked about the gravitational pull of data. Imagine you have an astronomy site that accumulates a petabyte. You can try to put it on one of these intergalactic clusters, but that's maybe not what you want. Maybe the most optimal thing is for you to stand up a 1000-node cluster with each node having a terabyte of disk. We want to enable that. We want to be able to tell our customers: Here's how we run this large-scale data-driven HPC applications, and here's how, within a day or two, you can stand up one of these yourself.

JU: So you even see some potential consumer applications for this, don't you?

KF: Sure. Think about search. We can only find answers to questions that have already been answered. But imagine if your questions require novel insight to data. For example, Microsoft HealthVault is starting to accumulate a lot of health data.

JU: Right, so what are my cancer survival prospects given the specifics of my case, and in light of a large body of data about other people?

KF: Or help me do a predictive analysis on my risk of flood or hurricane damage, not for the region in general, but for my house, given the weather and geographical information that's available, and maybe given a few sensors that report data specifically for my house.

To enable these applications, you have to create a platform that makes it possible to curate data, and develop applications that run on top of it. What you see in the service we just demonstrated is a first example of that.

JU: OK, thanks guys.

A demonstration of cluster computing for the classroom

JonUdell — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:33:00 GMT

In this screencast, Rich Ciapala demonstrates Microsoft HPC++ CompFin Lab, which integrates Microsoft HPC Server, a central market data database, and Microsoft productivity products to provide university courses with an online service to publish, execute and manage computational finance models.

Be a Certified HTPC Pro

Larry — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:22:00 GMT

Sure you know your component from your composite and your CardSpace from your CableCard, who doesn't, right? But if your day gig is setting up A/V equipment, how does a potential employer or customer know that? And you probably thought that Microsoft Certified Professional exams were for those monad scripters on Channel 9, well - not so. Microsoft has MCP exams for technologists too.

Right now you can register to take the beta of the Windows Vista Connected Experience: Home Theater for Technologists exam and get a professional accredidation that shows you know how to design and build a solution for home theater systems based on the Windows Vista platform. The cost for these exams is normally $125 and can be taken at any Prometric testing center like other certifications, but since this is a beta you can take it for free. Yes, you will get a certificate if you pass, but because this is a beta you won't know right away if you passed or not. It's a great deal and you have nothing to lose so give it a try.

To take the test, just use this code: PAGHT.

Jon Udell and Matt MacLaurin on Boku

Larry — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:52:00 GMT

Boku is a programming development "game" for children that comes out of Microsoft Research (we took a look at Boku at TechFest '07.) It allows children, ages 5 and up, to apply programming elements and rudimentary scripts to characters in the Boku world.

Jon Udell spoke with Matt MacLaurin from Microsoft's Creative Systems Group and discusses more about Boku, the challenges of the project, how it works, and the importance of providing children with an expression tool for the critical thought required for programming. Read more about this interview on JonUdell.com or jump over to IT Conversations to listen to the full podcast (37 min, 17MB).

Where Are The Men (in education)

AlfredTwo — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:45:00 GMT

I'm from an education family. My mother was a teacher and my wife is a teacher. But in my family teaching is not just a women thing. I have a male cousin who is a kindergarten teacher. My son teaches special education students in an elementary school. And while I taught high school for 8 years I also taught in a couple of middle/elementary schools for a year. In one school I was the only adult male in the building. Many of my students had never seen a male teacher before.
So I can relate to this article. The number of male teachers is at a 40 year low. The last time the numbers went up at all there was a draft on and some men entered teaching to escape going to war. No such luck today. Why is this a problem?
In part this is a problem because young boys need role models. With so many children growing up in single parent homes many young men, especially in poor areas where education is most needed and least appreciated, do not have an adult male showing them by example that education is important. To many young men education and learning is "a girl thing."
In an ideal world kids and adults alike would be gender blind. Let me know if you find a world like that.
There article points out some of the problems. Low starting pay is one of course. But there are other systemic problems. We have a society that looks funny at male teachers. Trust me I have seen that first hand. A male teacher has to watch himself every second of the day in ways that women do not.
When a little first grader runs up to a teacher to give them a hug a male teacher knows from day one to look around to make sure someone can see that they are doing nothing improper. While you may want to return the hug your first thought is "how will it look if I touch a child?" It takes a lot of the joy out of the experience.
Now to be sure there have been men (and women too) who have taken advantage of children. But all the data shows that kids are at many times the risk of abuse at home than at school. But, well, no one wants to think about that. Better to beware the stranger.
We need more teachers but especially we need more male teachers. I'm not sure many understand that there is a problem though.

Teaching to Learn

AlfredTwo — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:11:00 GMT

I read a very interesting take on the Teach For America program today. (Article here) Briefly Teach for America recruits some of the top US university graduates and gets them to make a 2 year commitment to teaching in resource poor schools. Most of them do rather well but leave teaching after two years. While some see this as a failure others see the two years not as an attempt to recruit career teachers but to allow these "best and brightest" to learn about education from the inside so that they can and will better support it as they go on to other careers. I see some real merit to this idea.
As someone who have been in industry and been in the classroom one thing I have noticed is that a lot of people in industry have no real idea of how education works. Oh they value it a great deal and they are well aware of the problems with the education's systems output. But they have little understanding of the process itself. That does not stop them for making suggestions of course. This goes in spades for elected officials, most of whom have legal not education backgrounds.
Business people tend to think that all organizations are the same. If one can manage a soft drink company one can manage a computer company. If one can manage a company or a military organization one can manage a school system. Well that isn't as true as people would like to think. It is less true, much less, that one can transfer business knowledge to running a school as a business.
Having more people in business and government who have actually spent time in the front lines of education can only help in the long run. As more and more Teach For America "corp members" move up through government and industry we may well see changes in how they interact with education. This seems like a good thing to me.

Department of Learning Prevention

AlfredTwo — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:05:00 GMT

Earlier today (on my Computer Science Education blog) I reported on a teacher who was seeing some interesting and positive results by letting students use tools (computer software tools) that are often blocked or banned in schools. As the day wore on though I heard about the other side of this coin.

Ben Chun reports in his blog how his attempt to demonstrate how DNS works to translate domain names to IP addresses was foiled by the fact that his students are locked out of the command prompt. This is a pretty typical lock down I have found. Anyone know "a DNS/reverse-DNS lookup utility that is free, doesn’t require administrative privileges to install (and preferably doesn’t need to be installed), and can do both forward and reverse DNS lookups." If so drop by his blog and leave him a comment.

On a related note a friend of mine told me about a school local to him where they are using very old software to teach C++ programming. The tech people are afraid that if they allow students to learn how to program on the modern computers that are attached to the network students will "hack into the OS core and do evil things." Yeah, sure, ok. Can I get their resumes? Thanks!

What has happened that we are so afraid to teach students things that are useful and powerful? Are schools dropping machine shop out of fear that students will make knives and zip guns? Are we dropping baseball out of fear that students will use the bats to beat each other senseless? Are we dropping chemistry for fear that kids will open their own Meth labs?

And yet somehow schools feel the need to place a governor on the learning of technology. I have to wonder - who is the problem? Is it the students who want to learn or is it adults who don't want to learn?

Getting Kids to Think About Their Internet Identity

AlfredTwo — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:44:00 GMT

The job of schools, in my opinion, is to educate and to enable. So I don't like a lot of rules especially when they consist largely of lists of things not to do. Rules all too often prevent thinking. Telling students "don't do" is the opposite of enabling them to actually do things. Unfortunately a lot of what passes for Internet Safety training is all lists of "don't do this." So I struggle with how to do it right.

Yesterday I read a post by Vinnie Vrotny, the Director of Academic Technology at a small private preK-12 school in Winnetka, Illinois, that seems like a huge step in the right direction.

Vinnie struggles with some of the same issues I have and has decided to try a new tactic this year. Explaining the Internet user policy and talking about Internet safety falls in his lap at his school and he is tired of focusing on the negative messages. So he is going to talk to students about how they appear on the Internet.

What will people find when they look up the student in a search engine for example. And he is going to talk about consequences and try to get the students to think about what they are doing. As Vinnie says:

I am hoping that this gets students understand that everything that they do has a consequence. Some are trivial, but others may be more long term and potentially damaging to their reputations and meeting goals that they have set for themselves. I am trying to develop a message that is sticky, that students will hear and remember, and hopefully take seriously.

Explaining things to students and trying to get them to think! Sounds like a great idea to me.

Note: Crossposted from my personal blog at MSN Spaces

Arkansas Children's Hospital: IT Innovations Enhancing the Care of Hospitalized Children

bcrounse — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 18:26:00 GMT

Every so often we do a program in my House Calls for Healthcare Professionals series of audio and video-casts that really seems to hit the mark in demonstrating the value of Microsoft technologies in the healthcare industry. I want to draw your attention to one such program.

Arkansas Children’s Hospital is cutting edge when it comes to developing solutions on Microsoft technology. First, take a look at my Blog entry on this topic to get some background and then download or listen to our audio-cast with ACH to learn more about CarePoint and other solutions. This program is especially compelling because one of my guests is a patient at the hospital; a 16 year-old boy who has cystic fibrosis and has spent more time in the hospital than most of us can ever imagine. Find out how Microsoft technologies including Xbox 360, Media Center, Visual Studio, IE, and many others have come together to make hospital stays a whole lot more enjoyable for patients, their friends, and family at Arkansas Children’s Hospital.

Here is where you can stream the audio-cast or download it to your MP3 device

Arkansas Children's Hospital: IT Innovations Enhancing the Care of Hospitalized Children
This program is also available in MP3 for download.

Program Guests:

David Higginson is chief information technology officer at Arkansas Children's Hospital (ACH). He earned a degree in accounting/finance from Liverpool University and qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant. He began developing computer systems at the age of 10 and later combined his computer and financial expertise when he began developing systems for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the British Post Office. Since moving to ACH in 1996, Mr. Higginson has developed numerous award-winning computer systems with the help of his team of 14 developers, who have created more than 400 systems in less than five years.

Penny Ward is a registered nurse who joined Arkansas Children's Hospital in 1993. Since 2002 she has been a Nursing Director for the Adolescent and General Medicine units and for the Dialysis and IV teams at the hospital.

Christopher Holstead is 16 years old and has cystic fibrosis. He has been admitted to Arkansas Children's Hospital many times and has seen how the hospital has improved the patient care experience.

Additional resources

Healthblog - additional information and screenshots of ACH CarePoint patient entertainment/education solution

Arkansas Children's Hospital

Windows XP Media Center

Xbox

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft Corporation

Schmall Science

Laura — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:15:00 GMT

They may be called Schmall Science but it's definitely a big idea. This group has decided to make science and learning hands on and fun for everybody. Honestly it made me want to be a kid again just so I could take apart my brothers broken down Chevy sitting out in the back yard and put it back together. Check out this clip and see where you just might be able to find the next Schmall Science workshop.

Microsoft's Unlimited Potential program lands in India

Tina — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 00:36:00 GMT

Microsoft is going to start testing a new education PC called IQPC as well as launching an education channel on its MSN Portal. They will be testing the PC in India sometime next month. This is all part of Microsoft's "Unlimited Potential" program that Bill Gates announced in April. The program aims to use technology to increase the awareness and the reach of education to those previously left behind. The education channel will be accessible through the IQPC and internet cafes. Microsoft hopes to have the program implemented country-wide this November. For more information check out InfoWorld.com. Here's another article on the Unlimited Potential program.