Dean Sara Cook and Professor Suzanne Bakken will present their work integrating PDAs (personal digital assistants) in clinical nursing courses. Dean Cook and Professor Bakken will lead us in reflecting upon technical considerations, evaluation, and future visions, and the educational use of PDAs. In partnership with the School of Nursing, CCNMTL has developed a Clinical Rotation Palm Database for Entry-to-Practice students at the School. Students use the PDAs to document their patient encounters so as to build evidence from practice. The digital learning environment uses specific nursing taxonomy to categorize data, requiring students to document their activities by employing the nursing "language" they will encounter once they graduate. The personal digital assistant and handheld computers have been around since the mid-1990s, but only in the last few years have they made their way into higher education. We hope to discuss the applicability of PDAs for students at Columbia University, in the health sciences and beyond.

Speakers: Sara S. Cook, Vice Dean and Dorothy M. Rogers Professor of Clinical Nursing, Columbia University School of Nursing and Suzanne Bakken, Professor Nursing and Professor of Medical Informatics, Alumni Chair in Nursing, Columbia University School of Nursing