Part of my reason for working from home today - beyond the pure ability to do so - was to allow the repair tech from GE to come and fix our oven. Now, we've been without our oven for … oh, four months or more. Turns out you can cook many, many things without a oven. The stovetop and a covered Calphalon wok works as a makeshift oven substitute, and a griddle can firm up some items that may leave the microwave a bit soggy. But frozen mac and cheese just isn't as good without the crunchy brown top you get inside an oven. There is no microwave substitute there.

So, anyway, I stayed at home to get the oven fixed. And Tom, the repairman, arrived with an interesting piece of gear. He had a touchscreen Panasonic Toughbook with an attached credit card reader/receipt printer. The Toughbook, if you haven't seen one, is built like a tank and looks like a secure briefcase. It's designed to handle falls and spills and general misuse. The kind of stuff that an appliance repair technician might do to it. It also has a built-in Verizon broadband connection. If you know me, you know I had to ask about his setup.

Turns out that Tom is one of the few early adopters and trainers for GE with this technology. He's been using it for a couple of years and he is still enthused about what the technology is able to do. Beyond the now immediate scheduling and billing capabilities that the Toughbook gives him, the real advance has been with training.

GE doesn't have a ton of repair reps everywhere in the world. Makes sense, right? Cincinnati has quite a few, as you'd expect. Same with Columbus. Dayton's only got a couple. Akron, one. Fort Wayne, one. You get the idea. Well, if you're going to train the repair people on all the new models (to answer questions like "where's that one hidden screw in the back of the drip pan on a Hotpoint Model RGB532BEW3WH, the one screw that you'll need to remove to get to the gas glow rod?" - can you tell that I was listening to what was wrong with our oven today?) you have to train folks frequently. And to have the repair techs gather in one location is fine for large cities - the distance to the central office is part of their regular commute - but that's a lot of travel for the smaller and rural markets. Either Tom's driving everywhere for one-on-one sessions, or a bunch of techs are traveling hundreds of miles - and losing at least one full day of repairs - to take in a two hour training session. Wasted time, money and fuel.

So while Tom still does in-person training in Cincinnati and Columbus, he'll do an over-the-internet PowerPoint presentation for the one-and-two-tech places. They'll all see his presentation as he gives it live, and they are able to ask questions for immediate response. Instant training at a great cost savings.

And then - and here's where I get excited - they can also go to their secure servers and stream video of how to perform repairs. From anywhere. Tom said they used to see new models in the field before getting training on how to fix 'em. Now, if that happens, he can pop open the Toughbook, instantly connect through the broadband Verizon modem, and see exactly what he needs to do to get to the malfunctioning part. The video can also help prod his memory on ancient models. And, of course, all that media has to be created, programmed, and designed for the web. That's electronic media and media informatics, baby!

I could see Tom's excitement over the potential uses of the technology. How it makes his life - and the lives of the coworkers he trains - easier. The main problem for him was the adoption of the technology by the "older techs" as he called them. Tom is 59. He says that the young guys - those under 30 or 35 - get it. They gobble up the media informatics. The older ones just want to use the computer to print out their receipts. And that's normal. But what we're foreseeing in the College of Informatics is the future where the use of technology is commonplace - where costs are cut but services are improved - through the use of media and informatics. And that's what makes what we're doing and where we're heading in the CoI just a ton of fun.