The ILLINOIS RURAL HEALTH ASSOCIATION 23RD ANNUAL CONFERENCE, “Building a Sustainable Future”, was held April 24-26, 2012, at the Keller Convention Center in Effingham, Illinois. In rural Illinois, many different mobile devices including iPhones, Androids, BlackBerries, and iPads are the new stethoscopes. Exhibitor immersion in the conference sessions led to discussions of the use of the National Library of Medicine mobile apps and mobile sites in rural communities.  TOXNET, Medline Plus Farm Health and Safety, and Wiser NIH all received high praises from the HazMat teams.

Through a NN/LM GMR exhibit award, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine Library displayed the new NLM exhibit banner, provided NLM pamphlets, gave out the afghan of “The Curious Herbal” as a booth prize, and offered demonstrations on the iPad of the various NLM mobile sites and apps, including Wiser. After seeing the Wiser demo, a family physician immediately downloaded it onto his iPad. Exhibiting and participating in the annual Illinois Rural Health Association meeting continues to be a worthwhile and rewarding experience.

Healthy People is based on a simple but powerful model:

• Establish national health objectives.
• Provide data and tools to enable States, cities, communities, and individuals across the country to combine their efforts to achieve them.
• Create and implement a plan to reach Healthy People 2020 objectives.
• Track your community’s progress.

The slide set is available for viewing and download: Attributes of a Health Literate Organization.ppt

It is tempting, with all these to-dos on an ever-growing list, to just go with the flow and take care of tasks as they pass by.  Unfortunately, that approach, while practical, expeditious, and less stressful, also reduces the return on investment of our leadership role, administrative decisions, and work productivity.

Instead of working on the surface level of moment-by-moment news, daily listerv postings, weekly meeting agendas, monthly report-outs, or annual data gathering, we must put our strategic priorities first. Those other duties provide us with useful content, yield foundational decisions, and assure that our units are responsible organizational citizens, all good outcomes to achieve. But they don’t always help us to collaborate, integrate, and innovate, each of which is essential to the future viability of our organizations.

When organizations collaborate, they leverage scarce resources toward a shared goal that no single organization could achieve. Collaborators layer idea on top of idea, reaching a new level of knowledge that would not have been possible without the energy of sharing diverse perspectives and specialized knowledge. Although collaboration is just as susceptible to bureaucratization as solo ventures, it also creates an urgency to focus precious time together to working directly on the goals and objectives of the project to assure that collaborations are productive.

Integrating shared goals and the initiatives that they generate into the strategic priorities of our organizations encourages their sustainability, and ultimately, their productivity. Organizations’ self-direction, often criticized as “silos”, severely limit our effectiveness in today’s networked world, but before instant communication and access to information were possible, self-direction was an adaptive approach to getting things done. Our shared initiatives are now integral, even key, to the ongoing progress of our organizations and our essential contributions as libraries and librarians to the future scenarios that we envision.

The integral role that we will hold in the future of biomedical and health care services, education, and research cannot be achieved without innovation.  Working on collaborations and integrating those initiatives into the strategic direction of our organizations is a kind of practice of innovativeness.  Our tools are powerful and we can use them to achieve our goals, but only if we understand their potential.  Is it too obvious to state that we should reflect, we have to talk, and we must act?

We aren’t too busy to create a collaborative, integrated, and innovative future for our organizations and ourselves.

~Kate Carpenter

Here is a summary compiled by my colleague at UIC, Ed Garay.

Some key trends:
1) People expect to be able to work, learn, and study  whenever and wherever they want to
2) The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized
3) The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects are structured
4) The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators
5) Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative models
6) There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning

Some significant challenges:
1) Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of higher education
2) Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching
3) Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession
4) Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies
5) New modes of scholarship are presenting significant challenges for libraries and university collections, how scholarship is documented, and the business models to support these activities

Technologies to watch:
* Short-term (12 months):
a) Mobile Computing
b) Tablet Computing

* Mid-term (two to three years):
c) Game-based Learning
d) Learning Analytics

* Long-term (four to five years):
e) Gesture-based Computing
f) Internet of Things (small objects connectedness)

This first set of tech trends comes from Jason Hiner at Tech Republic. He reported on the Gartner Group’s annual symposium where they revealed their list of the 10 most strategic tech trends of 2012. Drum roll, please:

1. Media tablets and beyond – the era of Microsoft and PC domination coming to a close
2. Mobile-centric applications and interfaces – building user interfaces for multiple screen sizes
3. Contextual and social user experience – using information about an end user to improve the quality of the interaction with the device
4. Internet of Things – objects acting as user of other systems
5. App stores and marketplaces – a new term emerges: apptepreneurs
6. Next-gen analytics – mobile devices being able to self-analyze for full optimization
7. Big data – new and exotic technologies are required to manage the extreme volume of data created today
8. In-memory computing – faster response time in analytical operations
9. Extreme low-energy servers – new entrants to the server business proposing a radical way for future servers to work
10. Cloud computing – cloud computing was very recently number one and now is number ten. This is significant that it is viewed as not living up to its hype.

Pete Cashmore, the editor of Mashable, shares his list of the Top 10 Technology Trends for 2012.
As he points out, “Predicting what will happen in 2012, therefore, is a shot in the dark: A year is virtually a lifetime in the digital era.”

1. Touch Computing – we’ll be using our mice less often and increasingly using desktop computers in similar ways to how we use tablets and smartphones.
2. Social Gestures – ‘frictionless sharing’ – where with the click of a button you can share what you are doing from services like Spotify, to social networks (once you authorize it of course)
3. NFC and Mobile Payments – with the success of the Square Payment dongle for iPhone, and NFC (Near Field Communication) in 2011, awareness of this technology will likely make it more popular in 2012…it’s not without a lot of security concerns…
4. Beyond the iPad – the iPad costs $499′ the Kindle Fire is $199. There has been speculation that while the iPad is king today, it may lose the crown in 2012.
5. TV everywhere – with the rise of the tablet, it’s easier to have ‘TV in your hand’ but the cable companies have ways to keep you tethered to subscriptions.
6. Voice Control – thanks to the popularity of Siri and the iPhone 4S, voice recognition and voice search will show up on more devices.
7. Spatial Gestures – personally, I was fascinated with the technology in the movie Minority Report and hope I see it in my lifetime. Microsoft Kinect is an example of using spatial gestures in current technology.
8. Second-Screen Experiences – Cashmore says, “It refers to apps (mainly on the iPad) that listen to the audio output of your TV and display content related to the show or movie you’re watching.” An example from the music industry is Gracenote.
9. Flexible Screens – Can you imagine a phone that rolls up in your pocket, or one that you can slip into your wallet like a dollar bill? Bendable interfaces will be seen more in 2012, though it’s likely to not be fully implemented for a number of years.
10. HTML5 – this fifth version of HTML, could take the place of Flash on many mobile devices.

What are your predictions for 2012?

By the way, this blog post was written on an iPad using touch technology!