A New York Times story here today about the emergency treatment received by New Jersey Governor John Corzine reminded me of reactions my father and brother shared with me about the care Governor Wallace and President Reagan received in emergency rooms. Dad was an orthopaedic surgeon. He thought there was a good chance Governor Wallace would have not become a paraplegic if there had not been a “celebrity delay” before the doctors got underway to treat his spine. My brother, a with extensive family practice emergency room service, said it was President Reagan’s enormous good fortune to have his gunshot wounds treated in an emergency room used to a high volume of crime related trauma. My brother thought an orderly who spotted signs of internal bleeding and rushed Reagan into treatment—reacting to the wound instead of the identity of the patient—may have saved the President’s life.
As we build a virtual world of learning, we must not conceive it as an abandonment of the hands-on experiences that inevitably are learning at its most profound. If we can put more of the routine preparatory learning into computers that deliver it to learners through interaction with screens, we should thereby be able to increase the time and money to support learning through real practice. The Cooper University Hospital where Governor Corzine was taken could be a quintessential participatory learning environment. Apprentices, aides, young service people—these could enter sooner and find more time for participating in real situations for learning if the access to virtual knowledge were available from digital sources.
