A Brief History of Lower Extremity Amputation
I recently stumbled onto a Web site with slides about the history of lower limb amputation. Apparently this is a talk intended for medical students given by Bob Vander Griend, MD of the University of Florida at Gainesville. The content is quite interesting and mostly accurate but the occasional dark humor in the narration may make some listeners uncomfortable.
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In addition to stepping through the slides, there is an option to hear the entire presentation using the free RealPlayer software from RealAudio. I have a DSL line in my office, so I'm not certain if it works as well from a dial-up connection, but I found the Internet presentation very effective.
Once I had the RealPlayer installed, it was a simple matter to click onto the icon for the first slide and the presentation was automatically streamed directly to my laptop in real time. I listened to the very clear audio, which was apparently recorded during a live presentation of this lecture, and the slides automatically changed at the appropriate moment. Forty-five minutes later, the last slide appeared and the talk ended. You can try it for yourself by clicking over to www.medinfo.ufl.edu/other/histmed/griend.
I found the slide images a little small and it was obvious that sometimes the narrator was using a laser pointer or indicating something in the lecture hall but not on screen. But, theses minor flaws could be easily remedied by redoing the slides specifically for Internet presentation with these images.
Once broadband connections become more universal, it should be simple to add streaming video clips and to have more interesting transitions between slides or within slides, to provide live links to related presentations, and to make the whole experience more captivating. All in all, this is a very good example of how a live presentation can be captured and posted online using today's technology, and it should be of interest to many readers of this Corner.