• Neuropsychology - (To check my mood during my treatment. I think I did okay with this as it was but it’s part of the program for just about everyone)
• Occupational Therapy (To be sure my day-to-day activities and responsiblities could be maximized and potential compensations for any supposed or indentified deficiencies be brought forth)
• Physical Therapy (To be sure my energy level and my body was performing as normally as possible)
• Speech and Language Therapy (To help in areas related to visual scanning, language processing, and deductive reasoning) In actuality my OT and SLT sessions sometimes overlapped and my therapists threw several curve balls my way to be sure I could reach my fullest potential. As self-revealing as that was, it was very effective

There were other experiences that led up to this point in time, but suffice it to say, I’ve been performing well. My supervisor and co-workers have been very supportive. My clientele routinely tell me they can’t tell me any difference in my personality. That’s an inside-the-box, vs. outside-the-box perspective issue. The charts and graphs of my cognitive rehabilitation exercises show that considerable progress was made. In order to justify considerable, the tasks that patients in this program all go through include doing paper-pencil exercises and other tasks that stretch and bend your mind so that new neural pathways can be made and if not, what compensations could be made.

As part of all this, one of my new side-projects I’m taking on is to take some of the assessment tools and exercises I was given as paper-pencil tests and try to digitize them into programs that anyone can do online at home. My platform of choice is likely going to be Adobe Flex/AIR as that is what I’m most familiar with. I’ll keep everyone updated as I progress.

I’ve been introduced to my new work spaces. During my leave I had originally intended to teach for the ASU. Over the summer it appeared that I wasn’t a good fit for that opportunity, so I was directed to apply for a research assistant position. Dr. Brian Nelson has been my teacher twice during my program. He’s a great guy and very enthusiastic about student learning. If only I had teachers like him in some of my engineering courses. But I digress…

Here’s a snapshot of my new work area at ASU where I will be working on a research project dealing with instruction via virtual worlds:

Also, today is the first day of my internship with Hospice of the Valley. I had originally heard of the organization through one of the MCC nursing faculty. She saw some of the stuff we were promoting in the CTL at MCC with an e-learning platform and toolset called “Breeze”, which was a technology that was acquired by Macromedia from a company called Presidia. It basically allows for people with a PowerPoint skill set to create cross-platform rich media presentations to be shared online. So I came on an off day to Hospice of the Valley to do a demo of some of the things we were doing at MCC with breeze, which that led to my contact and opportunity to intern at HOV. It is my understanding that it was my initial visit that led to the company choosing Macromedia Breeze as their e-learning platform of choice.

Shortly after that first visit, Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems. It’s just one bigger fish eating the previous big fish in the software business, it seems. Since it was acquired by Adobe, they’ve named the product “Connect Presenter”. At the time Macromedia was running the show, there was a product culture that got created around the name Breeze. People in the PowerPoint world would often refer to PowerPoint slide stacks as “Preso’s” (PREEZ-o’s) The converted presentations were affectionately named “Breezo’s” as a result.

Adobe has grown tremendously in their acquirement of Macromedia’s technologies. There literally were people who thought that Macromedia walked on water because their media authoring tools and technologies powered what most people saw on their computer web browser: (HTML via Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.) I have to admit, I had some initial concern about what would happen to Macromedia’s technologies once Adobe took over. I’m happy to say that I’m okay with what has taken place. I imagine that most of the company staff remained with Adobe and were around during the transition to new products, and that has led to not only a smooth transition, but also to some absolutely cool stuff like Flex (which was a Macromedia-bred technology and one that I’m still learning), and now AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). Both of these technologies I’m going to try to push to the respective communities which support them to get some e-learning apps developed and hopefully contribute back to those communities.

To close out this post, when Adobe took over they kept most of the product names of the Macromedia line. However, the Breeze product line got transitioned to a new name. They call it Connect Presenter, now. I don’t know, but “Connecto’s” just don’t roll off the tongue quite the same way….