Center for Creative Instruction
: Technology Research and Development

The Center for Creative Instruction (CCI) has a variety of activities centered around research and development for the institution. Members of the CCI have been involved in numerous projects over the years investigating medical image analysis algorithms, 3-D modeling techniques, virtual reality, wireless solutions, personal digital assistants, ISDN and remote access, and many others. Typically these projects are initiated to keep in touch with the "latest and greatest" technology and discover how the technology might apply to our medical teaching environment at the University of Toledo.

UT is not only interested in how to best distribute educational information on campus to our students, but also how we can best deliver it to the community and other associated hospitals in the area. The CCI implemented the RealMedia technology as a prime example of how to deliver community education via the web. A variety of audio and video clips are available on the UT Health Science Campus website.

Other areas of research and development in the CCI include finding customized solutions to problems. Some of these have been tackled by writing in-house Visual Basic programs or Perl scripts to make processes easier, or writing Apple Scripts or Java Scripts to automate a procedure. The CCI works closely with several vendors to stay on the cutting edge by joining their developers programs or using developers CD's - Apple Developers, Sun Developers, and RealAudio Developers.

 

Java has become the language of choice for several of the new initiatives by the CCI. Java is an object-oriented programming language that was introduced in late 1995. It allows us to write highly robust and secure applications for several intranet projects that are now in production. Despite all the hype, we are convinced that Java is the language of choice for delivering cross-platform solutions. The CCI will continue to research and experiment with new tools and languages as they change and develop with the Internet.