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Paideia Academy 2007

VISTA Expertise Network invites you to join us for the first Paideia Academy
An intensive MUMPS and VISTA training event in Seattle, Washington
Academy: Friday to Sunday, 30 November to 2 December 2007, University Heights Community Center
Mentors' Forum: Thursday, 29 November 2007, VISTA Expertise Network office

Paideia Academy Frequently Asked Questions

What is Paideia Academy 2007?

Paideia Academy 2007 is a three-day educational workshop that launches a three-month distance-learning course. Participants gain an extended weekend of high-quality MUMPS and VISTA education and forge personal teaching relationships to help them through the full three-month program. The most important feature of the academy is the extremely high ratio of apprentices to mentors (about 1:1), who sit beside and work with their trainees through each class. This approach not only offers excellent individual instruction but also builds relationships between members of future professional working groups. Paideia Academy 2007 also launches a permanent calendar of VISTA training programs called the Paideia Project.

What is the Paideia Project?

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 reaching retirement age has created a generation gap that threatens the community's ability to meet the growing demand for medical informatics. A key component of our strategy to address this problem is to pair senior hardhats with new trainees. These teams can tackle real-world programming jobs while training the new members 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 a conventional technical meeting).

Paideia is the VISTA Expertise Network's flagship project. The Network designed it 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. 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 assume responsibility over the software and bring to fruition the many ambitious projects unfinished or unstarted during the last decade.

How Does Paideia Work?

Most technical workshops suffer from dense information downloads that leave students overwhelmed during training and then deserted afterwards. Teaching under Paideia differs from this traditional workshop "learn and leave" approach. Instead of discrete, disconnected chunks of training, the Paideia program continuously integrates students' new knowledge in a structured apprenticeship format that builds on that knowledge with three crucial ingredients that increase over time: follow-on study to integrate what students learn, hands-on practice to apply knowledge, and relationships with top VISTA experts to help them develop their knowledge and practice toward a career.

Paideia Academy 2007 combines a workshop format with follow-on study. We start by offering three days of in-person, hands-on training led by a shared instructor and with an individual mentor for each student. After the workshop, the course shifts to weekly conference-call lessons given by the same instructor, with the same mentors continuing to work with the same students to help with exercises, homework, and general questions. This distance-learning course lasts three months to cover its subject thoroughly and then flows into follow-on courses that lead subject-by-subject toward VISTA expertise. This continual flow of learning and application not only helps students remember what they learn but also increases their understanding of subjects over time, driving toward ever-increasing personal mastery over the subject.

Paideia integrates hands-on practice by alternating learning with practice in a rapid cycle; everything students hear or see or discuss they then practice and experiment with. As the course progresses, the sophistication of the students' practice smoothly increases until by the end of the course the students are routinely handling professional-level tasks with minimal guidance. Students not only learn about but also participate in all the tasks a VISTA professional is expected to do within the course's subject matter. Graduates of the course not only can handle those tasks, they already have, making them eminently qualified for follow-on paid internships. Apprenticeship projects are rewarding (paid or worthy volunteer) work that does good for existing VISTA sites: service, employment, and learning rolled into one bundle. Providing real-world application and economic incentive helps to make lessons matter for both the students and the experts who train them. Not only do we teach people, we get work done, promote less expensive healthcare technology, and create good jobs while we're at it.

Paideia integrates human networking into training by having existing professional VISTA hardhats mentor the students. By having the same mentor work with the same student for the duration of a given course, we both ensure the mentor gets to know the student well enough to offer personalized help and also give the two time to develop a working relationship together. By changing mentor-student pairings for future courses, we give students opportunities to meet more VISTA hardhats, increasing their exposure to the professional network they are gradually joining. As the sophistication of student projects increases over time, the mentor-student relationships shift to create actual, functioning workgroups, not just a classroom situation. As their skills increase, students begin to participate in more complex paid projects requiring multi-person teams, again increasing their exposure to the human network and giving the existing community the opportunity to get to know them in turn.

Course after course, quarter after quarter, as students advance in the Paideia program, their understanding of VISTA subjects increases, their track record of meaningful projects increases, the value of their Rolodex increases, and their employment and pay increases. Unlike graduates of most academic degree programs, Paideia graduates do not walk away hoping they can remember enough of what they studied to somehow find a job somewhere to begin building a track record of work experience. Graduates of the Paideia apprenticeship program are journeymen who have not only learned their subject but also built up a professional track record and worked with some of the best VISTA professionals in the community. That is, Paideia apprentices graduate to journeyman status with not only a degree but a career and a community.

Who Can Take Part in Paideia Academy 2007, and What Will They Gain From Doing So?

The instructor for the course will be the Network's executive director, Rick Marshall. The coordinator for the course, Owen Hermsen, is the Network's assistant director; he will also be participating as a student. His assistant coordinator is Linda Richardson Yaw, who will help the academy run smoothly. All other participants may either learn or mentor. The subject for Paideia Academy 2007 is the MUMPS programming system in which VISTA is written. Those who have mastered MUMPS may mentor; anyone else may learn.

Students need not bring any programming experience whatsoever or may be conversant in dozens of languages but not MUMPS. Some students may actually have past MUMPS experience but still feel they have not truly mastered the language. Others may feel they have mastered MUMPS itself per se but lack the computer science necessary to make the best possible use of it. In the interest of outreach, a few students will be allowed to attend just to try out the program for the weekend, but the academy is particularly aimed at those interested in continuing on with the rest of the course and follow-on apprenticeship program.

Mentors need not bring any more mastery than that required for the subject at hand. For example, longtime Mumpsters with no VISTA background at all can mentor for this first course. Given the course's unusual simultaneous approach to teaching MUMPS and computer science, mentors are also likely to learn something new in the course of helping their students. Mentors in this first course make no commitment beyond this course and may adjust their future participation however they like. They may choose to mentor students in future offerings of this or other courses covering subject matter they have mastered, or they may choose to become students in future courses that cover subject areas they want to learn about.

For the duration of each course in which they mentor, however, they must make the commitment to help and track their student's progress and to keep regular office hours when their student can reach them with questions. Although primary responsibility for each course lies with the instructor and each student, the quality of mentorship will directly affect the quality of students' educational experience. In addition to the weekly conference call and office hours for helping their student, mentors will have the opportunity to spend more time with each other and the instructor on calls and email discussing progress and helping make course corrections where needed. Using the Paideia discussion list, mentors will share curricula and compare notes on projects. Mentors will also have access to training materials on the web published by Vistapedia. This aspect will be worked out further by the mentors as a group during the first day of the academy, Thursday, 29 November 2007.

Mentors have a special role in this first Paideia Academy event, recruitment as well as teaching. Recruitment is crucial to the success of the entire training program. Apprentices are the lifeblood of the Paideia project. Professionals who believe VISTA needs a new generation of experts to survive or who just want help training their own employees will benefit from recruiting apprentices for the program.

How Will Classes be Organized and What Will be Taught at the Academy?

Mentors and students will join a mailing list, pair up before the course begins, and sit together throughout the course. Each day is organized into four hour-and-a-half blocks, with half-hour breaks in the morning and afternoon and an hour break for lunch. Each block starts with an hour of interactive lecture by the instructor working with a projector to illustrate concepts and demonstrate techniques, followed by a half hour of hands-on practice by each student-mentor team working on their own laptops. Since the goal is not to present the material but to teach the students, we will feel free to deviate from this default structure whenever the students and mentors agree to do so.

The course itself begins with a brief introduction to VISTA and MUMPS, including an overview of the history and capabilities of each, before proceeding into the three-day detailed introduction to MUMPS. The primary goal for the extended weekend is to cover every aspect of MUMPS (data types, coercion, evaluation, indirection, data structures, control flow, block processing, scoping, contracting, input/output, multi-processing, and advanced topics such as error and transaction processing) at an introductory, hands-on level; its secondary goal is to briefly introduce each aspect of basic software engineering (reading, troubleshooting, testing, verifying, writing, documenting, versioning, repairing, optimizing, refactoring, distributing, and installing/upgrading). The follow-on distance-learning course will revisit these subjects in greater detail, building on the workshop's coverage by inverting the priorities; the distance course will be organized around software engineering tasks and strategies and will use them as an opportunity to refine students' understanding of MUMPS.

The exercises during the in-person academy will largely be simple made-up examples optimized to illustrate the topic at hand, but as students' sophistication increases during the distance-learning course the exercises will increasingly be drawn from real VISTA packages, expecially Fileman and Kernel. We have every confidence that by the end of the course, students will have contributed real code to the VISTA community.

When and Where Will Paideia Academy 2007 Take Place?

The event takes place on three days over the last weekend of November/first weekend of December, from Friday, November 30th to Sunday, December 2nd, 2007. Mentors are invited to attend Thursday, November 29th as well, both to plan the broader scope of the Paideia project and to help design lessons for the weekend.

The academy (Friday through Sunday) will be held in Seattle at the University Heights Community Center in Room 106. The forum (the mentors' pre-meet on Thursday) will be held at the VISTA Expertise Network office. More information about University Heights Community Center (including directions) is available at its homepage

What Will This Cost?

In an effort to attract new apprentices and trainees, we have kept the fee to attend to an absolute minimum: $100 per person for each attendee (teacher or student), just to offset the costs of holding the event (room rental, additional facility costs, etc.). To keep the price that low, all parties provide their own transportation, room, and board.

How Do I Sign Up?

Contact Owen Hermsen, VISTA Expertise Network assistant director and coordinator of this event, either by email or by phone at 206-200-5562. Interested mentors and students are all welcome.

How Do I Get More Information and Participate in Discussion Beforehand?

Join the Paideia academy Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/paideiaforum. This is the place for discussion, planning, and announcements. Thanks!

Welcome to Paideia! Together we can create a new generation of VISTA experts who can not only close the generation gap but make VISTA a more powerful tool for improving healthcare than ever before.