Teaching How to Troubleshoot

Spring semester is over. I've turned in the grades for the graduate technology course I teach to school library certification students. The padawans are starting up summer project work.

There's one project we do annually for the Physical Therapy department. The PT students take 9 medical conditions for which quality of life can be improved with strength-building exercises. Here are some of the topics: End-stage Renal Disease, Cancer-related Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, Childhood Obesity, Down Syndrome, Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. The PT students present current research and exercise strategies to 2 audiences respectively, professional and consumer.

The basic strategy is to videotape the speakers presenting off of paper notes. With accompanying PowerPoint slide durations timed simultaneously, we can then synchronize the slides to the speakers. Videotaping the speakers away from the project slide presentation allows us to avoid lighting problems. We then composite the videos together with the slide shows. I manage the instructional technology padawans from videotaping through to the video creation in Flash format. We post the videos for Arcadia University-affiliated clinical instructors to learn from and recommend to patients. We replace them every year with new presentations created by the next year's student class.

We just finished videotaping the presentations for 2010. We'll create the final 18 presentations throughout the summer. Every year we improve on the videos with more streamlined procedures, better quality, faster throughput. And every year we have to troubleshoot the new procedures.

In 2008, we composited the final presentations using QuickTime Pro. A related problem is that we had to use the videos with the exact original videotaped dimensions. QT Pro isn't flexible enough to zoom in or otherwise alter the video's appearance. For instance, if we didn't zoom in enough on presenters of smaller stature, we ended up with videos of mostly background. Also, if the video file sizes got too big, e.g., much larger than 1 Gb (or some 20 minutes of presentation), QT Pro was unable to process a final video image. We had to turn large .avi files into more modest .dv files or even smaller .mov files to be able to accomplish the compositing.

In 2009, we began using Final Cut Pro. Because our processing skills were so elementary, we synthesized clunky techniques through sophisticated software. More specifically, we turned PowerPoint presentations with timed slides into video files to composite with the speaker videos. Whenever we found timing errors, we had to program in the new slide durations in PowerPoint, create new slide videos, then composite them together again with the speaker videos. I won't go into how drop-frame time coding (a default setting in FCP that we didn't even learn about for another year) made those slide videos unpredictable in length thus further complicating the composition process.

This year, we finished videotaping on Monday and Wednesday and already had trouble that we didn't have last year simply downloading the video files from the digital camera's memory cards. The file formats are .mod. Last year we learned how to convert them to .mov files that FCP could handle. This year 25% of the files could not download without error messages.

Guessing that those files were unlikely to have been corrupted over the 2 days it took to bring them from the video site to computer lab, I guessed that the operating system on our iMac simply couldn't manage those few files. I wondered if Windows XP could do any better on a pc. And indeed it could; we downloaded the 4 troublesome files to a pc, transferred them to the server, then transferred those files to the iMac. No problem. Best of all, the downloads that took multiple hours to the iMac (alright, no doubt there are other issues with our OS) became file transfers lasting 15 minutes total. (Fine, if we worked at it, we could probably fix all the issues with the iMac, but why? This system worked fine and didn't make the process that much more difficult.)

My issue over these 3 years has been that I've been the sole person able to identify the problems and conceive of solutions. Sure I manage the lab, but I am not a computer superhero. I'm a reference librarian who has learned technology from padawans who have graduated and moved on, by experimentation, by googling effectively for solutions, and by standing back and considering the bigger issues. I suspected this year that the iMac's OS couldn't handle some otherwise perfectly decent video files. I considered another OS, albeit on a different platform. And then I tried out a hunch that worked out.

If I had left the file downloading to the padawans, they would never have completed the task. They might even have attempted to re-videotape the speakers with no guarantees the resultant files would have downloaded any more successfully.

If I have no fantastic technology skills, I often wonder whence comes any problem-solving abilities I have. Maybe fantastic technology skills come less from mastery of the technology and more from the ability simply to stand back and think, to see the picture from a little bigger perspective.

I talked through my entire thought process with the 2 padawans to help them think more. The challenge is to help them learn how to problem solve, too. Just.

PHR or Something Like It

When I started library school at Drexel University in 2003, it rapidly became clear how well suited I could be to being a librarian.

This statement is a setup to what makes me who I am as an academic librarian, so it requires me to step back a bit and recount my background. (Incidentally, I hinted about planning to write this post back several months ago near the inception of this blog. Now is definitely the time to do it. Bear with me.)

Educational and Professional Background
When I was a student at the University of Chicago, my first campus job was in the catalog digitization unit of Regenstein Library. Throughout my 4 years at UC, I worked across the library system. I briefly considered getting a library degree, but really had my heart set on medical sculpting. I wanted to use my hands to make medical models. I attended graduate school at University of Illinois at Chicago which had a program called Biomedical Visualization (medical illustration). The mind I developed for imagining the physical, relationships, and ideas, I continue to use. I received a Master of Associated Medical Science degree and came to the Philadelphia area to pursue a profession in applied materials science developing molding and casting processes for contract research. Yeah, there's more to that, but that's enough for now.

After 10 years of contract research, I got downsized and decided to change tacks. I went into non-profit administration and learned a great deal about customer service. Four years into that line of work, I decided to reconsider my whole professional game plan. Reevaluating my science background, my customer service experience, and my past jobs in the academic library, I concluded that academic librarianship would be an ideal new course of study.

Faith Background
There is also an ecclesial component in all this. A believing Christian from childhood, I became heavily involved in the leadership of Chinese Christian Church and Center, a Chinese church in Philadelphia's Chinatown. In fact, several of my years in the non-profit sector I spent at this church working as the office administrator. As administrator, I refined my organizational, communication, and public relations skills. As a lay leader, I developed new settings for applying all those skills.

Synthesis
In library school at Drexel University, these disparate pieces began coming together. I began to realize that I like seeing the big picture behind anything I undertake. I began to observe connections that drew together my fantastic liberal arts education at University of Chicago, my medical sculpting training, my research work, my administrative work, my lay leadership work, and now my information science training. And I happily took all that into my first and current library job at Arcadia University.
End tangent. (Don't forget this background information, though; I will undoubtedly refer to it again and again.)

Patient Health Record
For many months my pastor has been discussing the idea of how to develop church members and regular attenders. I called him to toss around his ideas and began shaping the idea myself of how to evaluate members and attenders. I understood what he said about church leaders needing to assess people as soon as they showed some signs of commitment to the church. I thought that any kind of assessment would have to get logged on a standard form of some sort that the evaluating leader would be able to share with any other leader. My library school medical informatics class abruptly came to mind and I realized that I was describing a patient health record.

When patients first visit their primary care providers, their family physician must perform a medical evaluation to determine their present state of health and any medical needs they might have, known or unknown. When patients return, their physician must use their medical records to assess their continuing health and treat their developing conditions. They amend their records and add appropriate ongoing documentation. When physicians identify conditions that require the intervention of medical specialists, they obtain permission of their patients and forward the necessary documentation to the specialists.

Spiritual Health Record
In the faith setting, members and regular attenders become patient analogs. With their permission, pastors, lay leaders, fellowship leaders, and Sunday school teachers (all primary care providers in their own ways) must perform spiritual health evaluations. They must use standardized evaluation criteria and document their observations in conventional formats. With permission, they can share the information with other spiritual care providers. When members and regular attenders have needs that require the intervention of spiritual health specialists, e.g., marital counselors, those specialists can consult the spiritual health records generated from the PCPs.

In a variation that rather incongruously blends health records with medical training documentation, those same records can determine members' or regular attenders' fitness for special training so that they can themselves be equipped to become spiritual primary and specialty care providers.

Professional Health Record
This all has a connection to the professional world because of a conversation I had with my brother-in-law while on family vacation together. I was sharing with him the challenges of equipping my instructional technology lab student workers, i.e., the padawans, to function more professionally. I equated that to the challenge of myself developing and improving my professional managerial skills. And everything came together. Those patient records and spiritual health records became professional health records. Those patients and faith-community members became professional trainees. And it was good.

The challenge is how to craft a professional health record that standardizes professional health with the systemization of a patient health record. This will not happen overnight anymore than the development of the patient health record did. But once one does come into existence for my padawans or for me, whether because I find it or create it, I expect the merit to become as equally self-evident as for the now ubiquitous patient health record.

Troubleshooting technology

At Arcadia University, reference librarians work with instructional technologists in a unit within the Library Department called Instructional Technology and Library Research Services. The details of why this is and why it's a good idea are for another post. The significance is that besides being the Sciences Librarian, I'm also the student supervisor for instructional technology.

With final presentations fast arriving (it's Week 13 of 14), we're actively managing poster printing. These posters are the big ones you see at professional meetings that students have prepared based on their research.

The lab where the padawans work (read padawan as student apprentices--only the Sith have apprentices) is in the library physically. The large format printer is in Information Technology in a neighboring building. This makes life interesting because we have to monitor the progress of printing remotely. Although you can see from the printer window if a print job has failed, you don't necessarily know exactly why. So far the only causes I've known of are empty ink cartridges or a spent paper roll. I haven't known of more causes because this year is the first that I've done this supervision and, thus, been involved with the printing process.

One phenomenon that I did notice as we monitored printing remotely is that there are other users printing other projects that aren't posters. You can see them interspersed with the presentation poster print jobs we send.

Here's the lesson. It is important to get to know the relevant processes before giving full control to a padawan--or anyone else for that matter. After all, knowledge is power.

I'm sitting next to the printer now because there are no padawans on duty. Normally I'd be in the library but the printer report indicated that there was a failure. I could have called an IT student apprentice (they must be Sith over in IT) to check on the printer status, but I figured I'd just look myself.

What I found was a lab full of design students. My poster print job was failing because the design students were trading out paper rolls from poster paper to drawing vellum. I watched a student change the paper back but still had the poster print job I was handling fail twice more. I looked at the printer and noticed it querying for the user to load the paper even though she already had and had then left for the day. I removed the poster paper and reloaded it. Then I realized that she had never changed the printer's paper setting. She had changed the paper to poster paper, but the setting was still for vellum.

If I had been sitting in the library, I would never have realized that the other print jobs I was seeing in the queue could be contributing to failed print jobs. So now I know of 3 possible reasons why a print job can fail that I can notify the padawans to be aware of.