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Paideia

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind are convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

Politics

The Paideia project is an ambitious education program created to train the next generation of VISTA experts. The dearth of VISTA-related training programs over the last decade combined with the large number of experienced VISTA hardhats now retiring has created a generation gap that threatens our community's ability to meet the growing demand for medical informatics. A key component of our strategy to address this problem is to pair master hardhats with new apprentices. These teams can tackle real-world programming jobs while training their students to aid and one day become peers to their teachers. This approach not only trains new programmers but also strengthens the skill base of existing hardhats by helping them trade skills and advice while working on demonstration projects (much like the classic craftsmanship approach to education).

Paideia is the VISTA Expertise Network's flagship project. The Network designed this program to cross organizational boundaries to partner with other open-source medical-technology organizations (such as WorldVistA and the VistA Software Alliance), public academic institutions (such as the University of Washington's Health Informatics and Health Information Management program), public health agencies (like the U.S. Indian Health Service and the Department of Veterans Affairs), and individual healthcare practices, clinics, and hospitals (like Oroville Hospital in California). By networking these organizations together through internship, recruitment, public service, and outreach, Paideia can address and reverse the VISTA expertise brain drain and help the VISTA community resume growth and development.

Paideia creates the necessary conditions for a VISTA renaissance. Following VISTA's unusually productive management model, Paideia's new generation of VISTA experts will gradually acquire authority over the software and bring to fruition the many ambitious projects unfinished or unstarted during the last decade.

VISTA Craftsmanship

Paideia is a learn-do-teach model of education. The lectures, readings, and exercises expose students to VISTA-development concepts and strategies. The hands-on projects (which are created by students and released to the community) create automatic and efficient habits and student confidence. Mentoring other students, writing Vistapedia articles or chapters of new textbooks, and teaching Paideia courses both complete students' comprehension of VISTA development and also increase our community's capacity to train the following generations of students. We are aiming for a snowball effect, in which today's students become tomorrow's teachers.

The Paideia Project only directly aims to create the next generation of VISTA journeymen, because the only path to mastery requires years of on-the-job experience for which there are no shortcuts. In the past, VISTA education was almost entirely on-the-job, with occasional spot training to strengthen specific skills. Front loading that process of mastery with in-depth strategic education will significantly reduce the time it takes to create the next generation of VISTA journeymen, priming the pump to get our next generation of journeymen started into the years of experience they will need to achieve true mastery.

Each apprentice, journeyman, and master engages in all three Paideia activities (learning, doing, teaching), with different degrees of emphasis reflecting their different levels of ability, and with different corresponding roles to play in the community.