Wiihabilitation

For our tutorial this week we got to look at the Nintento Wii and answer some questions with regard to how it is being used as a rehabilitation tool by Occupational Therapists. Its pretty impressive. Here are the questions:

Q Why do you think Wii Gaming has appealed to people who are not traditional video game player?
The Wii appeals because it is easy to use, involves active movement and is fun. Players get to participate in sports such as ten pin bowling, wakeboarding, boxing, which may be new, or familiar to them. I imagine alot of appeal has to do with the lack of violence in the games.

Q What is the relevance to Occupational Therapy?
Used as a rehabilitation tool the Wii is very relevant to Occupational Therapy. It is important for therapists to keep updated with new technologies and incorporate them into treatment where appropriate. Occupational Therapists have moved on from basket weaving.

Q Investigate the other applications offerred by the Wii. How else could it be used?
One of the reasons Wii is so relevantas an Occupational Therapy tool is because of the many practical applications. It's software includes programmes such as "Cooking Mama" where the playes simulate real life cooking skills such as slicing meat, peeling an onion, breaking an egg. The link below show a patient practising to climb stairs. These are real skills that patients are able to practice in a safe controlled environment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtLDRN--CeY

Overcoming Adversity Movie

Hey, well here it is finally, WHEW what an effort that was. But it was worth it 'cos now Shaz is famous - a star is born! There was a bit of work involved in making the movie. After uploading the movie sequences from the camera to the computer we then had to make the movie which involved using Windows Movie Maker which can be downloaded free, and is easy to use. So we selected the sequences we wanted, dragged them into Movie Maker, edited them if they were too long, added transitions between the shots -check them out they are pretty stylie well no actually they are majorly overdone, but it was fun trying all of the different effects! Then we added the title and credits which was just a matter of following the instructions on Movie Maker. The only problem we had was the music!! We spent a while trying to figure out some good music that suited the movie and decided on "Road to Nowhere" by Talking Heads, so managed to get that added to our movie and everything was going according to plan until we tried to upload the movie to youtube. Oh no we hadn't understood the copyright laws and as a consequence our video has uploaded but without the music :( Nevermind, as our tutor pointed out it's a learning exercise - and we learnt. I'm just glad we don't have to redo it!!!!

Final Tutorial Embedding videos and Flickr badges

It's nearly the end of our semester! Yipppeeee. For our final tutorial we are required to provide a technical description of the process of posting video entries (vlogs) and digital photo badges onto individual blogs. The best way I can think of to do this is to let the experts speak - they explain it far better than me.

Tutorial Six: The internet and online communities

This week we were required to search the internet for an online community that interested us. I chose "Living and Raw Foods: The largest community on the internet for living and raw food information". The web address of this site is: http://www.living-foods.com/index.shtml

The focus of this community is twofold: firstly it is to inform the world about the benefits of raw food, following a premise that many health problems result from a diet that includes chemicals, preservatives, artificisal additives, pesticides and cooking. It's second focus is to support and inform its members keeping them updated with the latest resources and information.

This comprehensive site offers recipies and articles relating to raw and living foods. It has a central location page for resources for example it lists restaurants from around the world that offer raw and living foods, relevant books and magazines, support groups and organisations that support people in maintaining a living/raw food lifestyle.

The site is interactive with online discussions, and a realtime chatroom. People can contribute by posting notices, asking questions, supplying articles.

I imagine people would choose to contribute to this community because it draws those with similar thinking and beliefs together. It is a place where people can seek to expand or pool their knowledge, and gain or give support to others.

An example of the types of topics being discussed include:

1) Living and Raw Food Discussion eg

Can you eat kiwi skins? You know the fuzzy brown part? If so are there any essential nutrients in it? Seems silly for me to skin them before eating

2) Juicing, Juicers, Blending and Blenders Discussion eg

Hi, I just bought a citrus juicer and have been juicing oranges, tangelos, etc. averaging about 12 ounces a day. a bunch of oranges i have are going bad soon and im juicing them, meaning today i had about 20 - 24 ounces? is that too much acid?

3)Recipe Discussion eg

Hi guys,could you please advice on how to dehydrate tomatoes please ?

Hmmm interesting discussions but are there potential ethical issues that may arise in this community? Well I think so, there is no accountability, anyone can give advice, which may or may not be accurate so information may need to be verified from a reputable source.

There are benefits this sort of online community holds over the traditional notion of community that is based on proximity. For instance:

• People from around the world can contribute to this site, allowing a large diversity and volume of information.
  


• It brings together people who may live in towns and cities without raw/living food communities, enabling large numbers of people to connect.



• The alternative nature of this community means it may be difficult or limited to meet others with similar ideas regarding food.

Having said that, benefits of traditional communities include:

• The ability of members to physically meet everyone within its community



• Physical resources eg books for borrowing



• Inclusive of everyone regardless of computer skills
  

YouTube - Wii Therapy at Immanuel Rehab Center

YouTube - Wii Therapy at Immanuel Rehab Center

Tutorial Five Research

This week, besides shooting the film, (see previous blog), we are required to research a website related to Occupational Therapy. My chosen site is the website for the New Zealand Association of Occupational Therapists http://www.nzaot.com/index.php

The site "provides support, services, representation and networking opportunities for Occupational Therapists". Obviously, the site is used by Occupational Therapists, who are able to join as members, however it also offers the public information about Occupational Therapy, and what Occupational Therapists actually do.

The site has valuable information on career development, conferences, workshops, vacancies, and publications to name but a few.

For me, this will be a very valuable site - I didn't even know it existed - I'm sure we would have been told about it early last year, but it possibly hadn't meant much to me at that stage!! There are even links to some OT blogs, so I'll have to check those out.

Tutorials Four and Five Video Production

For these two weeks we are looking to plan, produce and upload a 30 second film on YouTube........ hmmm not so sure about this..........watch this space, or maybe better not to!Hopefully it won't turn out to be an unintentional comedy ha ha.

Well its now Thursday night and we produced our film today. Due to the extremely tight timelines we had, it was important that we had planned our film well. We did this by initially agreeing on a idea for the film and then breaking that idea down into sections. We used a storyboard (which is similar to a comic strip) and for each section we worked out the exact sequence of events that we were going to shoot, the lighting and the most appropriate type of shot eg panning or close up.

Using the storyboard forced us to be more thorough in our planning, it was also really useful having the storyboard with us when we went out to to shoot, everyone knew what was happening, and where we were up to. By having the sequence and plan down on paper we were also able to shoot quite quickly which was a huge advantage because the camera we were using was low on batteries and memory space. After a few technical hitches we finally got the footage we required and have uploaded it from camera to computer. Apparently next week we will be editing and uploading our video onto Youtube.

For those of you who don't know Youtube is a videosharing website where users can upload and share videos (Wikipedia, 2010). According to About.com (2010) users are also able to to rate videos, add comments and subscribe to their favourite producers.

Youtube can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/

References:

Wikipedia. (2010). Youtube. Retrieved March 19, 2010, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

About.com. (2010). Youtube explained: Overview of Google video sharing tool. Retrieved March 19, 2010, from: http://google.about.com/od/moreaboutgoogleaps/p/youtubeprofile.htm