“Logistics are a big issue right now in New Orleans,” says Luis Miron, professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “Most of the schools are waiting for books. Textbook suppliers did not anticipate the demand, so students are working without materials.” Digital delivery of classroom materials could solve this problem and create a new model in New Orleans. But providers need to move fast if they want to help.

A total of 53 schools are open in New Orleans this year, says Miron. Thirty-one of these are “charter schools” that operate independently from local boards and are run by school-board-approved community groups. Charter schools set their own courses, activities and rules, and they hire their own teachers. Clark and 16 other schools are part of the “Recovery School District,” which is operated by the state. Only five schools are operated by the New Orleans School District. The disaster has created an unprecedented experiment in public school administration as principals and teachers scramble to meet students’ needs.

WDSU-TV, Channel 6 in New Orleans, is currently running a series of detailed profiles of every school in the Recovery District. The videos talk about book shortages, bathrooms that don’t work, and other shortcomings, but they also indicate that things are improving. Clark High Principal Charles Michel reports that the school has Internet connectivity. The students’ biggest complaint is the sandwiches they get for lunch – they are sometimes frozen — but Michel says they’ll be able to serve hot food as soon as the refrigerators get hooked up. He expects the refrigerator people to show up any day now. The textbooks could take a year.

Three and two-day forecasts for Hurricane Katrina turned out to be remarkably accurate, according to panelists at the Katrina Summit. Yet the limits of computing speed make faster-moving storms harder to forecast, and therefore more dangerous. This is one reason why there are so many government grants aimed at increasing the speed of computers. Faster computers will allow forecasters to issue warnings that are earlier and more specific, saving lives and dollars.

“There are several choke points in current forecasting methods,” says Dan Reed, director of the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “When you release an evacuation order and it turns out to be inaccurate, you run the risk of lessening compliance with future orders because people will think you’re crying wolf. You’re also making the evacuation bigger and more expensive than it needs to be. And when an evacuation order is not followed, that can be disastrous.”

“When an evacuation order is not followed, that can be disastrous.” School buses in a flooded parking lot in New Orleans, September 1 2005. Photo: Phil Coale, Associated Press (AP).

To view the entire work, click here.

The Kauffman Foundation decided to fund centers that give New Orleanians tools and advice for starting new businesses. But one of their major activities in the first few weeks was arranging for housing. “You can’t work in isolation down there, because you’ll run into barriers you can’t overcome,” said Williams. “You have to collaborate.

“We’re trying to engage people in a process that will make life better than it was before Katrina. Things in New Orleans were not that good before the storm.” Williams recalled a late afternoon drive when he was saddened by the sight of families gutting their damaged homes. “And then we came to an area where the lights were on,” he said. “It was still pretty rough, but at least they had lights. We got out to talk to a man there, and he said that his block had not suffered any flooding. This was the way things had looked before the storm hit. We had not noticed much of a difference.”

As the speakers kept talking about collaboration and trusting your neighbor, it dawned on me that this was not just the standard feel-good conference rhetoric. These qualities actually are essential to the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast. Inflexible, bureaucratic organizations like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been ineffective. Nimble, adaptable organizations like the State of Illinois’s mobile hospital have accomplished remarkable things.

“Katrina After The Storm” was put together by a University initiative called HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science Advanced Collabratory). The content ranges wildly, from entrepreneurs talking about their business models to graphic artists talking about their comic books, and it doesn’t always fit together well. The technology linking all the sites together also has its rough edges. But the stories out of New Orleans are gripping, people are meeting up, connections are being made. One thing is clear: nothing gets done down there until people make connections that cross industry and academic boundaries.

I have come here to find leads that digital educators can follow to get their wares into schools in the Gulf Coast. Most of the presentations don’t deal directly with schools, but many of them have common themes. One common theme is the power of information. For example, homeowners in flooded neighborhoods of New Orleans freaked out when they heard that planners were talking about turning the lowest-lying areas of the city into parks. You would too, if you thought that someone was going to prevent you from rebuilding your home. The rumor isn’t true – nobody is going to be forced to give up their property — but it did a lot of damage to the planning process because the right information wasn’t distributed first.

“Information flow and communication are critical elements of the planning process,” said Robert Olshansky, an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at UIUC. “If you manage information well, it builds trust. If you don’t, it makes people suspicious.”

Through wireless networks and videoconferencing, the group pondered how to get the right information into places that barely have electricity and running water. “The only way we knew that medical helicopters were bringing us patients was when we heard them coming,” said Dr. James Gregory, a trauma surgeon in Champaign who helped move a 100-bed mobile hospital into a basketball stadium in Baton Rouge in the days after the storm. “In any large-scale catastrophe, the first thing to go is communication. You have to plan for that.”

In the conference’s opening panel, llinois doctors and nurses who staffed a mobile “surge hospital” in Baton Rouge shared lessons from their experience. Left to Right: Anne Fox from the Central Illinois chapter of the American Red Cross; Sharon Dotson, a nurse at Champaign’s Carle Community Hospital; Dr. Bernard Heilicser; Dr. James Gregory; and Dr. Neil Winston, moderator.

Several presenters described heroic efforts to get communication systems up and running in the days after a disaster hits. Dan Reed of the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill described an ingenious contraption – a weather balloon tethered to a pickup truck with a transmitter in the bed – that instantly gives wireless Internet access to anyone who has a sightline and the right laptop. Sascha Meinrath of the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) described a successful effort, done on a shoestring budget despite various bureaucratic obstacles, to set up a wireless communication network in a storm—damaged area of Louisiana (see his presentation “Wireless Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina”). It became clear, as the descriptions of devastation bore down on us, that it will take a long time to get broadband access to schools throughout the Gulf Coast. After all, many of them did not have good access before the storm hit.

Dr. Gregory, who directed medical response for the Navy in the first Gulf War, reminded us that the key to getting things done in difficult conditions is to stay flexible and KISS, which is an old Army acronym meaning Keep It Simple, Stupid. “We gave volunteers a slip of paper when they boarded a bus that was going to take them into the disaster zone,” said Dr. Bernard Heilicser, an emergency surgeon from south Chicago who co-directed the hospital with Dr. Gregory. “It described what they were going to do that day. That was the only way we had, and it worked.”

The mobile hospital ended up treating 15,000 people and one rescue dog. To see Dr. Gregory talk about his experiences, click here.

The Katrina Conference’s website has a live webcast, a podcast, a blog, and more. It’s worth a visit.

The four-day summit “Katrina: After the Storm – Civic Engagement Through Arts, Humanities and Technology��� is scheduled to take place Sept. 27-30 at various venues on and off the U. of I. campus. Sponsored by the Office of the Chancellor and several campus units, the free summit is being organized to engage the public in critical conversations about issues that arose in Katrina’s wake, including social justice and equity, broken connections and the need for community healing.

The summit is also part of the “In|Formation Year,” a yearlong program that promotes the human and humane dimensions of technology, initiated by the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), an international consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, social scientists and engineers.

Summit organizers have invited participation from artists, writers, technologists, scientists, humanists, teachers, healthcare professionals, social entrepreneurs and community members in the hope that their collective experiences and expertise will inspire innovative approaches and solutions to the problems Katrina revealed.

Using advanced multicast audio and video technology, the summit also will connect members of the U. of I. and local communities with virtual communities at many venues. The venues are Bethune Cookman College, Daytona Beach, Fla.; Boston University; Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta; Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Fla.; Florida International University, Miami; Jackson State University, Jackson, Miss.; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; and Renaissance Computing Institute, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Lectures, panel discussions and other activities will focus on topics ranging from understanding and predicting dangerous weather, disaster preparedness and deployment of mobile hospitals to re-imagining public schools and the role of social entrepreneurship in rebuilding communities. Other program highlights include performances by New Orleans poet Kalamu ya Salaam, the socially conscious hip-hop group Primeridian and poets Deborah Grison and Tyehimba Jess, a U. of I. professor of English. Also, ongoing throughout the summit will be “MiX TAPEStry: A Hip Hop VR Experience,” a collaboration between the U. of I. Krannert Art Museum’s Collaborative Advanced Navigation Visual Arts Studio (CANVAS) and Duke University that will give children hands-on experience with virtual-reality technology while learning history.

Allison Clark, associate director of the Seedbed Initiative for Transdomain Creativity at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and chair of the Katrina summit, said the program was inspired in part by a previous campus initiative – the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Quilt, which carried the theme “A Single Garment of Destiny – Our Common Threads.” __“The quilt was created to remind us all that communities are a patchwork of different people and cultures stitched together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its part,” Clark said. “We are reinforcing that theme with our summit. We believe that community is stronger than Katrina or injustices that threaten community well being. We see technology as the thread that can bring people together into virtual communities even when they are forced apart physically.”

The summit opens with “A Cajun Fais Do-Do C-U Style” beginning at 6 p.m. Wednesday Sept. 27 at the Virginia Theater, 203 W. Park St., Champaign. The event will feature a screening of excerpts from “Perseverance: Putting It Back Together One Day at a Time,” a documentary ethnography project about one man’s determination to rebuild his home in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, produced by U. of I. graduate student Maria Lovett; a panel discussion, musical and spoken-word performances, and an opportunity for the public to record personal stories.

Following two days of presentations and performances, the summit culminates with “New Orleans Rising: A Town Hall Meeting,” from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Sept. 30 in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) auditorium, 1205 W. Clark St. Urbana. The meeting was engineered with the vision of bringing together participants from Champaign-Urbana and sites across the country to share ideas for creating strong communities that can effectively manage future disasters.

While participation in all events is free and open to the public, advance registration is requested. More information about the summit, including registration instructions, event times and locations, sponsors and partners, is available on the Web at www.katrinasummit.uiuc.edu.

In December 2005, NSDL and the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) offered free online professional development workshops for K-12 science and math teachers in hurricane-damaged schools, and also for teachers who were serving students who had been displaced by the storms. Textbooks and other basic materials were scarce, so teachers were shown how to find materials online, and also how to sign up for various distance learning opportunities.

This year, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and NSDL have teamed up to offer a series of free webinars to anyone who registers for them. The first of these, in mid-May 2006, was about hurricanes and was based on resources from DLESE. After an introduction to the technology, 59 participants from 23 states learned about ocean surface temperature, wind patterns, and the other ingredients that make hurricanes possible. They also visited pages on DLESE that measure these phenomena. Participants were given several chances to interact and ask questions. At one point, volunteers were given latitude and longitude coordinates and used personalized markers to plot the course of a storm across the Caribbean while the group watched.

“It was a big hit,” says Susan Van Gundy, Director of NSDL Education and Outreach, who co-presented the material with Robert Payo and coordinated the conference. One participant said, “”I really enjoyed hearing the presentation instead of just reading information.” Another said, “Learning about the digital library system search engines was great – and it is marvelous that they are free.”

The webinars continue; a session on September 26 is devoted to birds, another on October 11 is on skeletons, and a third on November 30 is on plate tectonics. Plans are also in the works for webinars by the Shodor Educational Foundation, Exploratorium, and others. The series continues to extend fresh educational resources to Gulf Coast schools that are still recovering from the storms of 2005 — but anyone can participate, as long as they pre-register.