Noel's Blog

Nursing Home Nurse and CNA Staff Training

Noel Rivera — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:09:18 +0000

Do your nursing leaders and staff want to LEARN how to build strong relationships among themselves, residents, and families?

This is a nursing home training program.

This nursing home training program develops quality nurses and CNAs and improves quality of care.

Improve quality of care with this nursing home training program.

Train your nursing home staff.

Train your nurses!

Train your CNAs

Does your organization EMPOWER nursing staff and create structures for advancement?

Does your organization have the necessary tools to ACHIEVE staff development and retention of quality nurses and certified nurse assistants (CNAs)?

Is it important to PRODUCE measurable outcomes such as increased staff satisfaction, reduced turnover, and improved quality of care?

LEAP received the following awards:

2004 Award for Excellence in Clinical Practice from the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging
2004 Healthcare and Aging Award from Pfizer Medical Humanities Initiative and the American Society on Aging
2003 Extendicare Foundation Award for Innovations in Retention and Promotion of Nursing Assistants in Long-Term Care

To speak with one of our LEAP Coordinators or Educators, call (847) 492.6774 or e-mail leap@matherlifeways.com.

Complimentary Organizational Readiness Survey

We invite you to complete your own assessment to identify your community’s learning readiness. Just follow these simple steps:

Print the survey.

Print several copies of the survey and distribute to your leadership team including the executive director, nursing home administrator, director of nursing, assistant director of nursing, and human resources director. At least two administrative team members should each complete one survey.
Fax the completed surveys to LEAP at (847) 492.6789.
You may also mail the completed surveys to LEAP at 1603 Orrington Avenue, Suite 1800, Evanston, IL 60201.
We will mail you a complimentary analysis of your results along with a PowerPoint presentation you may use with your staff to further explore your commitment to learning.

Train your nurses and CNAs with this nursing home training program.

Final Thoughts

Noel Rivera — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:11:24 +0000

This course has taught me many things that I did not know before. I knew about the advances in technology, and how rapidly they have been occurring. What I did not think about often, however, was how this new communication technology affected our culture. We take for granted how quickly we can contact each other, the amount of information we can share, and the effectiveness with which we can copy new media.
The first thing I realized we take for granted is how quickly we can contact each other through various forms of communication. For instance, every day I am able to send a text message to anyone I want by just pulling my phone out and executing the text. If I need to speak to my father to ask him an important question, I can text him right away. Also, I can assume that in all likelihood, he will receive this text within the next few minutes. Furthermore, I expect that unless he is extremely busy at the moment, he will text me back very quickly as well. We can exchange thoughts and a conversation, wherever we are, as long as we are in the wireless network. This is very different than 15 years ago when my father or I didn’t have cell phones. If I wanted to speak to him at work, I would have to call his work and ask for him. He may or may not be in the office at that time, so the chance of me not speaking with him was a real possibility. I would have to wait for him to get home to speak to him. I couldn’t contact him unless it was important because it was considered bothering him at work, as my mom suggested from time to time. Since that was so long ago, I forget the advantage text messaging affords me. This advantage has allowed my father and I to communicate on a much more frequent basis, changing our relationship. We can share our thoughts with each other at any time during the day, which keeps us in the loop about what each other is thinking. This is a very cool ability that many of us take for granted every day.
Another thing new media provides us is the ability to communicate large amounts of information quickly, seamlessly, and cheaply. The ability to send documents, pictures, songs, and other digital files, by the thousands is a tool that we use regularly, and one that has advanced the way we do business. Imagine how much work it would take for a transcriber to copy 1000 pages of information and take it somewhere 2000 miles away. This would take drastically longer than scanning the documents onto a computer and emailing the file to someone 2000 miles away. Another example is sending emails with 20 page projects on them. I can send the project to a whole team, and receive documents from them. For them to copy it and give it to me in person would take much longer. I can download entire books from the internet instead of going to the store and buying a copy. Of course the ultimate form of mass communication is the Internet. A single person couldn’t browse every page on the internet in his/her entire lifetime. There is just too much information.
I can only imagine how, as new media is replaced by future media, different our world will become in the century to come. Communication will reach new heights, inconceivable by those of us who think new media is so great. Will we be able to communicate with chips inside our heads? Will the need to attend class become a thing of the past with holograms of professors in your living room? I can’t wait to see what the future will bring. This is a funny communication device you should look at. http://www.forbes.com/2005/10/20/cx_gd_1024featslide_comm05.html

Second Life Experience

Noel Rivera — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:56:25 +0000

It was not that new for me to be in Second Life. As I mentioned in class, I have had an account with Second Life for about two years. I just wanted to see what all the talk was about. I used it for one or two days, and just didn’t really enjoy what it had to offer. I feel that visiting the real sites for all those places gets to the point faster. My eyes and mouse can do the walking on the internet, instead of having a figure walk around to explore ideas.

When we started our scavenger hunt, I was in contact with only one team member. It was very easy to communicate. We just took turns finding the next jump point and we both jumped. I would imagine it would have been harded with more people. Having used the program before, I did not get anything out of the exercise, but I’m sure others did. Let’s play some more video games!! These are the pictures that I took during our hunt. I believe they represent the first 11 items on our list, not necessarily in the correct order.

Stealing Music

Noel Rivera — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:43:31 +0000

While reading through Lister’s material, it brought my attention to how much of my life I have been personally affected by copies of intellectual property such as movies and music. When I was very young, I remember watching movies on VHS that were recorded with a VCR. Before the advent of machines such as the VCR, things like this were not possible. Lister explains: “The selling of home copying equipment has given rise to a new problem: how to prevent the consumer from infringing the copyright of the owner.”(p 208) Then the US decided to make this legal. Lister writes, “This difficulty first arose with the development of home taping and in the U.S. gave rise to legislation that allowed recording in digital or analogue media for personal non-commercial use.”(p 208)
This then meant that we could copy things like movies for personal use. However, one reason that companies still felt safe is that analogue media wasn’t as good of quality after it was copied. However, with the digital media explosion, the quality could be retained, for the most part, to allow mass distribution of copies. One big example is music sharing software. I used Napster when I was just a kid, and today use another file downloading/sharing program. It is very difficult for the authorities to track and bother with every single person that downloads a few songs. Will the music industry ever be able to completely stop the internet sharing of their songs? Music is not the only thing being shared on the internet. When the cost of the property rises though, so do the repercussions. To prevent theft of such intellectual property such as computer programs, companies have utilized encryption technology to prevent sharing. Every copy is sold with a unique key, without which it cannot be installed. Lister seems to think that this is a very effective tool. I disagree. Anyone who really wants a program can look around and get it illegally. I know from personal experience. When I was in middle school, I had a friend who was very proficient with computers. He was able to copy programs on his computer and give them to me on CD. Mind you, these weren’t even programs which he necessarily purchased himself. He could download the program through a file sharing network quite easily. Any program from Photo Shop to Counter Strike. Then there is the issue of the key. Well, fortunately for us, there are also downloadable key generators that can produce random keys for certain programs. Usually after a few key generations, one would work, and we had the program installed. The point here is that as long as there is new copyright protection, there will always be a hacker ready to bypass it. Because of this, no protection can last forever, but must be revamped and remade to “try” to stay ahead of the hackers. Do you really think that a few programmers at a big company can have the ability to outsmart the whole world of computer users? I don’t think so. Here is an interesting article on the matter. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/business/worldbusiness/19digital.html

Cyborgs

Noel Rivera — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 06:33:44 +0000

Cyborgs
The idea of cybornetic organisms would naturally seem like a new idea to us. But, in reality, the idea of machines having life is a very old one. As early as the seventeenth century, people were relating machines to human beings. Lister explains, “The question of whether humans are little more than natural machines was initially posed, in an explicit form, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” Humans were related to the dominant machinery of the time, which was clockwork. This makes sense in several ways.
One way is that our hearts continuously beat in a similar rhythm. Yes, it speeds up and slows down, but like a clocks strokes, the beats are usually equidistant. So, some people came to believe that humans were actually like clocks ticking. As a clock that needs some winding from time to time, humans eventually stop ticking and die. This idea can also be connected to some ideas about creation and God. Many philosophers, especially BCE, wondered about what element was the source of all living things. Some believed it was fire, some water, air, and so on. This idea of a machine being behind life is just one that hasn’t been heard of so often because the philosophers were not as well-known. Even so, it challenges how we think of cyborgs today. We think of cyborgs as man made to resemble human life. But, with the perspective that humans are really machines, we would be recreating ourselves in a way.
This is an interesting concept. Cloning has always been a hot button issue since it starting becoming a possibility. What if we could clone ourselves as cyborgs? What if we could have eternal life as cyborgs? Imagine the movie Robocop! All they needed in the movie was the brain and spinal cord, the center of the nervous system, and they could replace the entire body with a machine. We already have artificial hearts, bones, limbs, and even prosthetics that can be controlled by the brain. What will the future bring as far as repair of the body is concerned. If one part of the body fails, we will be able to build another one right away. At what point do we consider someone not human then? Is to be human just to have a brain and be able to think? Or is being human having a certain physical form? DNA? There will be a time in the future when someone will be more machine than man, as in the case of Robocop or Darth Vader. Will they be the new minorities of the world? This would suggest that technology truly can shape the way our culture works, even to the point of changing the definition of humanity!
Here is an interesting site about prosthetics: The Future of Prosthetics

Noel Rivera — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:53:54 +0000

Extending Ourselves Over Distance
Lister talks about how our identity can change when using computer mediated communications. This is very true, and to a far greater extent than seen in TV, radio, telephone, or other types of media. This presents a major problem because we can never know who we are really talking to. Yes, people use CMC as a form of ‘extending themselves as Lister explains,”using a McLuhanite argument based on the idea of technology as human extension, we have used technology to communicate our selves over distance.”
Just as we use a phone to extend our abilities, CMC take extension of self to the next level. This is because of the ability to create as many identities as we want. We can have one identity on Facebook, another on My Space, and yet countless others in chat rooms and blogs. Never before has this been possible. Sure, you could call someone and fake a different voice, but depending on on your acting skills, this is limited. On the other hand, when typing on the web, very few skills are needed. A 12 year-old can impersonate a 40 year-old, or the other way around. This ability truly enables us to seek identities for any reason whatsoever, and use them to our hearts desire.
This, however, is not the case all of the time. What if someone is using CMC to deliberately conceal their true selves? In this case, I feel that CMC as a new media does not constitute a technology that extends our selves. For instance, someone committing fraud on the internet might create entirely new identities just for the purpose of stealing money or products. This is very different from someone using an alias or nickname while in a chat room to represent themselves. Another example of CMC not representing extension of self is in the case of the Dateline NBC show To Catch a Predator. Dateline makes a completely fake identity with the sole purpose of deceiving a would-be predator. The show has a person create this identity of a young boy or girl and then goes online and chats it up with older men trying to lure one of them into committing a crime. This use of CMC to change identity is a very worthwhile one, but still shows that some identities created through CMC are even remotely related to a true extension of self technology. Should it one day be illegal to even say you are someone else while on the internet? Here is a real story about an internet identity issue causing a suicide: Internet Identities

http://www.imperfectparent.com/topics/2007/11/18/fake-internet-identities-push-girl-over-the-edge/

Categorization

Noel Rivera — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 05:21:55 +0000

The views on categorization in the reading are very interesting. Yes, the author is bashing the way that we categorize things. I think, however, that the way we categorize things are alright. Lets take Yahoo for example. The way things are put into an organizational scheme are done by a professional that apparently knows how to organize things by ontological value. The author makes an assertion that this knowledge of how to organize is biased by personal experience and assumptions about what is real. I would argue that whoever came up with the scheme did a very large amount of research in the area. They most likely tracked users to find out what content they were really after when searching words like “entertainment” or “literature”. So really Yahoo is just trying to cater to how we, the masses, think. These schemes will get better all the time and exist to make the web user friendly. Without useful categorization, we are left to browse, as in the early internet days, instead of find. The ultimate organizer, I think, is a search engine. Sites like Google take the word you search for and give you results based on how relevant the sites are to your search. Google does this in several ways, including who bid for keywords in the case of sponsored links, and how many times relevant keywords appear on the site. People make careers out of trying to figure out exactly how Google’s categorization system works. Companies try to beat the system or make use of Google’s strategy. For instance, sites load their pages with hundreds of keywords to make sure that their site pops up more often than not, for more keywords that relate eve remotely to what they are trying to sell. However poor current organization and categorization schemes seem to be to this author, they serve a great purpose and make our lives easier. They can never be ideal, but get better every day. A couple questions for discussion are: If these schemes did not exist, how much harder would it be for us to find information on the web? How are web categorization schemes better than more physical ones such as a library’s?
Here is a site that explains a little about how Google ranks work: http://www.switchit.com/news/improve-pagerank.asp

Drunk E-mail

Noel Rivera — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 03:50:52 +0000

The idea of the technological imaginary is in large part correct. However, i think that the imaginary really shapes every invention in our world. Media just happens to be one of them. We are on a constant search for what can make us better people and fulfill our little lives. With new media such as the internet, we can leave our incomplete selves behind altogether and take on entirely new identities. Also, as people, we feel more productive and more whole if we are able to communicate with others more often and in different ways. At least I think so. We are able to acquire knowledge at any time and share it with others. Informed people often feel better about themselves and it has been perceived for a long time that knowledge equals wisdom. We look upon wise seniors as more complete persons and aspire to one day reach that level of wisdom. New media allows us to, or gives us the illusion of being able to, attain greater levels of knowledge and wisdom in shorter periods of time. This means that we can reach that level of wisdom we desire at a much earlier age. The problem with this is as we get more knowledgeable, quicker, than our ancestors, the level of knowledge perceived to be had by a wise person increases. Just like in sports, as we get better at something, the old “good” is now the new “not so good.”
Another thing I would like to comment about is the anxiety that we save ourselves when using non face-to-face communication. The book uses email as an example. This is sort of like calling or texting people We are always less afraid to speak our mind at that moment, even if we are angry or in another state of mind. We have all drunk dialed or texted someone in the past and maybe regretted it. Most of you would think of ex’s or significant others, but what if you sent your boss, who you hate at the time, a drunk e-mail. I know this is a weird subject, but it is relevant. Last semester I read an article about Google’s G-mail. They were working on a plan to stifle drunk emailing to save your ass if you send something that you wish you hadn’t. Read the article about the release of the new tool.
GOOGLE

Blog 1

Noel Rivera — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:05:05 +0000

One thing that we did not really discuss in class while debating the differences between old and new media is consumption. We did talk about increased copying and dispersal ability with new media, but more important is the increase in consumption. What came first, then, is an important question. Has consumption of media, especially new media, increased due to more production and dispersal of new media? Or, did dispersal and production of new media increase to meet growing consumption demand?
I believe the answer is somewhere in between. Martin Lister discusses the meeting of consumption and production. He points out, as we did in class, the fact that there are no longer rigid differences between consumers and producers. Any person that you see on the street can create digital media that we just might come across on the internet. We can then produce media that they might consume. This new era of mass numbers of producers goes hand in hand with the increase in consumption.
With such high consumption rates of various media, many firms have taken advantage of the situation. This can be very cost effective in certain cases. Companies that want to reach as many people as possible with a message must find the medium with the best ROI. Sites such as youtube.com grant these companies a unique opportunity for advertising, public relations, and other needs. With the cost of making one skit or commercial, a company can have its video viewed one million or more times. For the same number of people to see the ad via other media such as TV or radio would cost far more money. Not only do people watch these videos once, but because they are often funny in nature they watch them again and again. Then people let their friends know that they found a funny video. Instead of the message reaching consumers in a passive state such as a commercial during their favorite show, consumers actually actively seek out the advertisement. A marketer’s dream come true! Should sites like youtube, then, try to get in on the profits reaped by these ads? This is an interesting question.
Here is a link to one such ad on youtube. MIller Lite ad
Here is a link to a site that discusses ways to market on youtube. It also talks about various companies that use certain strategies. Corporate Eye

Hello world!

Noel Rivera — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:53:51 +0000

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!