Aggregated posts from the best educational blogs » 2009

Archive for January, 2009

PeRSSonalized Medicine: A free tool to track medical information

We’ve recently had a long discussion on Twitter about why many doctors are not open to these web 2.0 tools. There is no question, they don’t have enough time to use these even if they were designed to help them save time and effort.

That’s why we’ve been working hard on Webicina.com to come up with a free tool that helps those users who cannot spend much time online (e.g. medical professionals). PeRSSonalized Medicine helps them track medical journals, blogs, news and web 2.0 services really easily and creates one personalized place where they can follow international medical content without having a clue what RSS is about.

Being up-to-date is crucial for medical professionals, but it takes time and effort. Sitting in a library with a few medical papers is not a proper solution any more. Learning to use an RSS reader is not that easy for those who don’t spend much time online.

PeRSSonalized Medicine is a free tool that lets you select your favourite resources and read the latest news and articles in one personalized place. You can create your own “medical journal” and as we are totally open to suggestions, let us add the journals, blogs and websites that you would like to follow.

perssonalized-medicine

Click on “Personalize It” to hide the resources you don’t want to follow.

You don’t have to register to use it, but if you want to make sure it will save your settings, you can register in a few seconds here.

Now you can follow:

Medical journals
Medical blogs
Medical news
Medical Media including Youtube channels, Friendfeed rooms or Del.icio.us tags

One more thing. The developer behind PeRSSonalized Medicine and the whole Webicina platform is Gerg? Vargyai. Many thanks to him for his ownderful job!

As always, we are open to suggestions so please let us know which resources to add to the database.

Health Blogs Observatory

Ivor Kovic, MD is a unique blogger with a deep interest in web 2.0 and medicine. Now he launched the Health Blogs Observatory based on a great idea, to collect all the medical blogs in order to analyze the health blogosphere.

Health Blogs Observatory is an online research lab devoted to examination of the health blogosphere. It was created by the health bloggers and for the health bloggers.

Main goals of the project are:

To conduct annual surveys of health bloggers, which would be designed, analyzed and openly published by the bloggers themselves

To create the most comprehensive web directory of health blogs

To nurture new ideas and facilitate future research collaborations between health bloggers

Two major characteristics of the Health Blogs Observatory are collaboration and openness. This is why I would like to invite all health/medical bloggers to join the community and start contributing to it by adding their blogs to the web directory and participating in the design of the health bloggers survey.

health-blogs-observatory

You can follow the project on Twitter, by RSS or just track the changes of the wiki.

Posted: January 31st, 2009 under Education.
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Medical Revolution – From Molecule to Medicine

The best way to start a nice Saturday is to watch a few interesting videos.

MEDICAL REVOLUTION The Future, is awarded with two GOLD medals for the short film ‘From Molecule to Medicine’ at the New York Festivals’ International Film & Video Awards 2008. The documentary is selected as ‘World’s best work 2007′ in two categories: ‘Health/Medical Issues’ and ‘Health Care Professional Education’.

The movie exists of 2 parts:
From Molecule to Medicine: explaining the various stages for a pharmaceutical researchers to develop new medicines. Why does it take up to 14 years to develop new medicines, what are the challenges, the risks, the innovation behind it.

The second part, The Future, tells us all about the human body being a vulnerable miracle. How researchers discover bit by bit the secrets it keeps inside, by exploring our DNA / genetic structure. It tells about full body scans, DNA arrays and how personalized medicines will be developed giving hope to many of us, hope for a better future.

(Click here to access the video)

Check the Speaking at TED 2009 page out as well.

Posted: January 31st, 2009 under Education.
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Links for 2009-01-30 [del.icio.us]

Nieman Reports Article
Oh dear - telly and radio untouched by social web? ;-) Freelance or online-only journalists were more likely to say that their work had been transformed “enormously” or “completely.” In contrast, no journalist employed by the television or radio industries felt that blogging had “completely” changed any aspect of their work.
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Posted: January 31st, 2009 under Education.
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Sakai 3 Screencast

Michael Korcuska has a new screencast up showing some of the concepts planned for Sakai 3:

I really like what he’s doing here. These multimedia narratives of concepts still in development should greatly increase the amount and quality of feedback the developer community will get—before the release gets out the door.

By the way, as far as I know, this is working (though not necessarily production-ready) code.

Posted: January 30th, 2009 under Education.
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Top 50 Genetics Blogs

Jessica Merritt has recently come up with a huge list of quality blogs dedicated to genetics. Check it out at US PharmD. I’m honored to be included in the list.

If you’re looking for another great genetics blogs, follow the members of the DNA Network.

Image credit: Ricardo Vidal, My Biotech Life

Posted: January 30th, 2009 under Education.
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Scienceroll Search: Order by Date and New Resources

Scienceroll Search is a personalized medical search engine powered by PolyMeta search and clustering engine. You can choose which databases to search in and which one to exclude from your list. It works with well-known medical search engines and databases and we’re totally open to add new ones or remove those you don’t really like.

Now we added a new funcion. You can sort search results by relevance or by date.

When date is not assigned to a site, it will be listed in the bottom of the list.

We also added two more resources, Google Scholar and the National Library of Medicine.

If you want to add other resources, please let us know.

Guus van den Brekel at DigiCMB just inserted the search widget into his blog.

Feel free to do the same on your blog!

One to Watch – a performance artist

I thought I had posted about this before but I can't find it. This is a post from Michelle Krill in her Finding Common Ground blog. She has a Youtube video embedded there that I think you should watch.

This is a young performance artist in her school who does a wonderful piece for Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday celebration. This is one talented young lady. How nice it is that she was not only capable of doing this, but that she was given the opportunity to do it.

I heard another story recently of a class that was studying a novel together. They had to come up with some sort of project. I forget the details of the assignment. One boy brought in his clarinet. He had written some original music that he thought fit the characters in the story. He would play the short piece and then ask the class which character it was. The class got EVERY ONE of those characters right. I was told that a couple students would occasionally disagree about which character it was about, but (and this is the cool part) they had great discussions about WHY. "That music sounded ...., but the character is ...." Interesting, no?

The moral of the story is this: What if the kids were given the opportunity to show their understanding of your content in ways that were meaningful to them? Hard to know how to grade it, for sure, isn't it? But, do you think that the connection would be deeper? I do.

Posted: January 30th, 2009 under Education.
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Have you used the services of 23andMe, deCODEme, Navigenics, or Knome?

Marcie Lambrix (Research Assistant at Case Western University, School of Medicine) asked me to post this announcement:

Early adopters of Direct to Consumer Genome Scans, researchers at Case Western Reserve University want to talk with YOU!

We’re currently conducting in-depth interviews with early-adopter/consumers of such tests to learn more about an individuals’ decision to us Direct to Consumer genome scanning, what they understand to be the benefits and risks of this technology, both for individuals and society. Our interview question will address how the participant learned of whole genome scanning services, why they were interested in trying the technology, how they feel about the results that they have received, what they have done with the results, and if and how they have used the results to inform their individual healthcare decisions.

To learn more about participating in this study, please contact Marcie Lambrix at 216-368-8753 or via email at mal31 at case.edu

Posted: January 30th, 2009 under Education.
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I Do Not Get Assessment At All Sometimes

I let Chuck, Shelley, and Robert skip the final exam. We logged fifteen concepts in the first semester of Algebra 1 and those students studied them, practiced them, and demonstrated mastery on all of them. Take a break, kids.

But what if I had given them all fifteen of those concepts again. How accurate is my ranking not just of those three kids but of all of my kids? I have ranked everyone on a four point scale on each of those concepts. Will a student ranked at 2 ("major conceptual errors") again score a 2?

In lieu of a 50 question scantron final, I re-assessed every student on every concept, entered the current ranking into Excel alongside the student's old ranking, and took the difference.

Should've left well enough alone, right?

How Accurate Were The Old Rankings?

Okay, so big sigh of relief that, in 313 instances, my old ranking was an accurate assessment of a student's current knowledge. Could've been worse.
Could've been a lot better. That's only 47% accuracy. And in 43 instances, my old ranking was three levels too high. That would be putting a student at a 3 ("minor mechanical errors") and watching the student stare totally blankly at the question on the final forty-three times.

What Does Mastery Mean?

If I have a student ranked at mastery, would she master the same concept on the final exam?

This isn't awful. This isn't great. I don't know at what point I should be unhappy.

Enduring Questions

What do we mean when we say "mastery"? Does that mean a student will score perfectly on the same concept every time? Should I be unhappy that the correct/incorrect balance wasn't 100/0?
What do we mean when we say "retention"? This is a common question of my assessment strategies. "Don't kids forget?" Obviously, I can now answer that question, "yes, sometimes."
What do we mean when we say "grades"? I don't know what kind of results here would prompt me to pack up the shop and dole out monthly, summative unit exams ("Chapter 6 Test") with the rest of my department. The fact is that this kind of precision analysis isn't even possible under a unit exam model, which puts other teachers in an enviable position; the question "do these assessment scores represent my students' current knowledge?" cannot be answered so it goes unasked. The answer, I'm afraid, is that their assessment scores underestimate student knowledge since Chapter 7 clarified many of Chapter 6's concepts but these teachers have no mechanism for class-wide re-assessment. So they lower assessment's grade weight beneath that of homework, instead, and inflate their grades with a few extra credit assignments. Look, I'm open to absolutely anything. I just want my grades to mean something. And I need to respect what few guiding principles for assessment make sense to me.