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From Broken Bones to Decayed Buildings TO his tools of the trade - surgical navigation equipment, intramedullary nails and plate and screw sets - Dr. Steven A. Olson, an orthopedic trauma surgeon at Duke University Medical Center, has added a simple two-megapixel camera. When a patient is brought into the emergency room with, say, severe skeletal trauma, caused by a car accident or a shooting, one of the first steps for Dr. Olson's medical interns is to photograph the crushed bones and shredded tendons. The medical team then realigns the bones and applies a sterile dressing as a prelude to surgery. In years past, Dr. Olson said, surgeons would have removed the dressing each time they wanted to study the damage to plan the surgery. Now, the resolution of the images taken with the camera is enough to provide fine detail of the injury from various angles. "We can leave the wound covered in the meantime, so there is no continual contamination from exposure to the outside environment," Dr. Olson said. "By using the images, we can make a treatment plan for this patient." Digital cameras - praised as one of the most rapidly adopted consumer gadgets - are finding usefulness in a variety of professions that traditionally have little or nothing to do with photography. "In the consumer realm, our in-boxes are being flooded with baby pictures," said John Maeda, a professor of media and science at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But in the professional realm, it is transforming professional fields because it is so easy to discuss something not simply based on text - which is what we were limited to before." A Teacher's Pet Rebecca Rupert, a language arts and communications teacher at Aurora Alternative High School in Bloomington, Ind., brought digital photography into her classroom with a big splash. Last month, the students in her civil rights literature class went beyond their assigned readings by traveling to Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham in Alabama and to Memphis to photograph their impressions of a region inextricably linked to the civil rights movement. Back in class, the students transformed their snapshots into photo essays, supplemented by text. "Having visual literacy is really important and I try to bring that into my classes as much as possible," Ms. Rupert said. "I want kids to be able to use visual medium to express themselves and to communicate in words what they are seeing - it is another kind of knowing." More schools have incorporated digital cameras across their curriculums. In higher grades, students use them to document science experiments, while younger children illustrate alphabet books by taking pictures of objects familiar to them. Teachers often prepare instruction booklets for their students with easy-to-follow steps illustrated with photographs. Some teachers fret that if digital cameras are not part of a classroom, the digital divide will widen. But they note that digital cameras are one of the most affordable technologies. "Most school budgets can provide some digital cameras for every school, as opposed to more expensive, sophisticated technology," said Sandy Beck, an instructional technology specialist at Forsyth County Schools in Georgia.
http://www.nytimes.com
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