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VOLUME 45, ISSUE 44
Monday, March 24, 2014
Badgers spring into action Courtesty of UW Alt Breaks
Students partake in alternative breaks to help reduce unmet humanitarian needs Rachael Lallensack Print Campus Editor Offering an opportunity to interact with unique communities and people across the country, 120 students participated in Wisconsin Union Directorate’s Alternative Breaks program over spring break. The Alt Breaks program coordinates trips every winter,
spring and summer that provide participants with the opportunity to travel, serve and change lives, including their own. Through Alt Breaks, University of Wisconsin students have the option to travel to places all around the country on a low-cost budget while donating their time and labor to a variety of volunteer services. Student were offered the opportunity to travel to Detroit, Michigan; the Appalachian Mountains; Everglades National Park in Florida; Naples, Florida; Nashville, Tennessee; Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina; New Orleans,
Louisiana; New York City; Boston, Massachusetts; and a few other areas, according to the WUD Alt Breaks website. Volunteering efforts ranged from Habitat for Humanity, homeless shelters in well-known cities, wildlife sanctuaries, community recovery projects, environmental restoration and various educational purposes, the website said. “As students we tend to get really caught up in what we’re doing and [Alt Breaks] gives us a reminder of what we’ll be doing after graduation and how we’ll be able to make an impact in the community that
we’re in,” Alt Breaks program assistant director Kim Ebner said. Maja Ivanovic, a UW sophomore studying neurobiology and psychology, is deciding whether to pursue either law school or medical school post-graduation and said her experience through Alt Breaks gave her invaluable insight for her decisionmaking. Ivanovic recently returned from an Alt Break in the small Appalachian village Gilbert in West Virginia. Deep mining and service mining industries directly affect the health of individuals in this town of less
than 500 residents, she said. “I thought it was a unique opportunity to meet people who were very unlike me and had a very different upbringing,” Ivanovic said. “It was a way to have a fun spring break, but also positively impact people’s lives as well as learn something from it.” Through an organization called Restoring Eden, Ivanovic and nine other UW students worked with a researcher from the School of Public Health at Indiana University to survey the local people about their living conditions, health problems and quality of life, Ivanovic said.
One of Ivanovic’s biggest takeaways from the experience was how friendly and welcoming the people were. Many of the families welcomed them into their homes, showed them around or offered them food and beverages, she said. Ivanovic’s partner while conducting surveys was an international student from China who she says she probably would never have met on campus had they not been paired up for Alt Breaks. Alt Breaks has been an active organization on campuses nationwide for almost 30 years
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Vet School eyes Google Glass Technology captures surgeon’s perspective as innovative tool for student instruction Rachael Lallensack Print Campus Editor
Courtesy of Ara Alonso Through the Rafiki Club, UW students communicate with Kenyan women through letters, helping them improve their English skills.
Snail mail: from UW to Kenya Professor-led programs empower women, connect students to new cultures Emma Palasz Herald Contributor In Swahili, the word “rafiki” means “friendship” and one University of Wisconsin student organization with the word in its title allows members to gain exactly that. Rafiki Club, a student organization on campus, allows its members to learn invaluable lessons about friendship, culture and life through letter writing correspondence with Kenyan women. The club collaborates with a program called Health by Motorbike that Ara Alonso, a UW professor in the Department of Gender and Women Studies, was inspired to create in 2009. Health by Motorbike aims at training health
workers to help enhance programs to promote health for women in isolated communities in Kenya and Tanzania, Alonso said. Rafiki Club enhances communication between women receiving the benefits of Health by Motorbike and students involved in Alonso’s organizations, she said. Alonso now takes regular visits to Africa with UW students from both Health by Motorbike, where they train health workers with knowledge learned at UW and translate it in a culturally-sensitive way, and Rafiki Club, where they get the opportunity to meet some of the women they have bonded with through their letters. In Rafiki Club, UW
students are each paired with a woman from Kenya with whom they communicate through letters about once every one or two months, Alonso said. Not only does it strengthen the bond between students and Kenyan women, but it helps the women practice English, she said. “For the women in the village, [Rafiki Club] is very crucial,” Alonso said. “English is power in Kenya … Only people in power can speak and write English.” About 30 students are involved in Rafiki Club, co-president Kelsey Scherer said. When it first became a student organization in 2010, there were only five members, Alonso said. Rafiki Club is important and impactful
for both UW students involved as well as Kenyan women, Scherer said. She accompanied Alonso on a trip to Kenya in the summer of 2012. “[The women] love their Rafikis,” Scherer said. “They take us in as another kid. They keep all of our letters and they hang our pictures on the walls in their house.” Scherer said when she visited Kenya, many students were able to spend a night at their Rafikis’ houses, which were mostly mud huts with dirt floors. Nevertheless, the women welcomed the students, cooking for them and letting them sleep in their homes, she said. Alonso said having a pen pal in Kenya is both an exciting learning
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In an effort to find a method to record surgical videos from a first person point of view, University of Wisconsin’s School of Veterinary Medicine is one of the first schools to implement Google Glass technology. Last semester, Tyler Gregory, an instructional designer at the School of Veterinary Medicine, was approached by several clinical professors to assist them in recording surgical videos from a first person point of view, which gave him the idea to use Google Glass. Google Glass is a wearable, voice-controlled device that resembles a pair of reading glasses and displays information directly in the user’s field of vision. Clinical Assistant Professor, Jason Bleedorn, began recording his surgeries using Google Glass technologies earlier this year. “The genesis was mainly to try to capture the surgeon’s perspective for teaching students, residents and other trainees,” Bleedorn said. In the past, Bleedorn said they had various pictures and videos from cases taken by a person leaning over his shoulder, or even more cumbersome, he would have to step back, allow someone to take a picture, then return to his surgical procedure. Bleedorn said he wanted something that he would be able to control himself and allow him to get genuine footage during his procedures. Bleedorn is currently working on constructing an online learning module
that will allow students to follow every stage of his work with a patient from initial examination to surgery, Gregory said. The process involves compiling photo, video and Google Glass footage and converting them to teachable resources, he said. Both Bleedorn and Gregory said they are optimistic about ways this technology can be used in a surgical setting. They said they see potential in the technology for use ranging from filming video for student instruction to using it as a direct part of the treatment by displaying X-ray images on its screen during surgery, or even as a way to broadcast real-time footage to locations outside of the operating room. Bleedorn works specifically with small animals and said when he operates only about two or three residents can be scrubbed in at a time. The only way students can view the surgery as it happens is through live-streaming footage through a camera mounted in the ceiling, he said. Despite his initial apprehensions, Google Glass captures wide-view, highdefinition footage rather than narrowly focused, low quality video, Bleedorn said. Being able to broadcast the footage he captures from his own perspective would provide a better service to his students, he said. However, with every new form of technology, the early phases include rapid software updates and bug fixes and Bleedorn and Gregory said the technology is promising, but has some flaws. “There’s still some fine-
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