It is time to close down my other blog, begun with the OB Anesthesia core curriculum lecture series that ran for 6 weeks and finished on October 6th. I started a blog with some additional materials, also some outlines of what we had discussed.
There were two other faculty members with administrative privileges. One sent me an encouraging comment. The other wrote a very nice reflective piece on professionalism that was triggered by an experience during her oral board examination.
I invited all the CA1s and CA2s and got nary a comment. Most residents did not accept the invitation even after repeated friendly encouragement.
Why? I wonder if it was the need to establish a google account -- I don't remember now, but is it necessary to establish an account to access a wordpress blog?
Maybe it just sounded like a waste of time. Perhaps it was -- but I thought there was some interesting stuff on it, including links to videos and some suggested reading material.
Maybe they are just more savvy than I -- and appropriately loathe to commit themselves in writing. I noticed that many of the residents who did accept the invitation to view the blog did so with an email address other than their official (name deleted) .edu address.
My intent was to moderate comments, ensuring that no brand was threatened and no patient identifiers leaked into the blogosphere, even though it is a closed blog, accessible only by invitation, and hidden from any search engines.
The core curriculum module comes back around in 18 months -- I plan to improve it -- and I plan to trot out the blog again and see what happens. Maybe I will put one on Blogger and one on WordPress and see which bait the little fishies nibble at.
Maybe supplying the residents with avatars with fake nose and glasses wasn't such a bad idea?
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
Social Bookmarking Sites
Social Bookmarking sites
I like the way the WEb 2.0 tools are building and starting to interact in my mind. I started a blog for my subspecialty rotation I am responsible for, and invited 2 other faculty authors and some residents as readers. I started a Google reader, and started throwing some feeds into the Internet Explorer RSS gadget (so that's what's under that STAR tab on the window for Explorer). Social bookmarking -- fabulous. I am tired of throwing alot of stuff into Endnote for later reading or for use in projects. I am ending up with a a lot of ENdnote libraries, some at home, some at work. (Yes I know you are supposed to have one big library -- been there, tried that, got the T-shirt, didn't fit, didn't work for me, don't even talk to me about it) CiteULike or Delicious or other may be the trick. Also could use to model how I look at the literature -- share bookmarks with residents on the subspecialty blog. Not that I am the patron saint of literature review, but I think that my little tricks might be useful to residents and could convey some interest and excitement in the field.
Today I skimmed an article on changes in GABAA receptors in postpartum -- might account for depression. Experimental model in some knockout mice. I don't think I will start doing mouse research, and I am not a psychiatrist, but having that reference handy when looking at changes in sensitivity to anesthetics and to pain in pregnancy would be a good thing. Put on a booking site, add the right tags and lo! I might even be able to find it when I want it.
No comments ventured yet on the subspecialty blog. Probably a scary thing for the residents. Who knows what could happen to you? I may have to assign avatars wearing fake noses and glasses to each resident.
I like the way the WEb 2.0 tools are building and starting to interact in my mind. I started a blog for my subspecialty rotation I am responsible for, and invited 2 other faculty authors and some residents as readers. I started a Google reader, and started throwing some feeds into the Internet Explorer RSS gadget (so that's what's under that STAR tab on the window for Explorer). Social bookmarking -- fabulous. I am tired of throwing alot of stuff into Endnote for later reading or for use in projects. I am ending up with a a lot of ENdnote libraries, some at home, some at work. (Yes I know you are supposed to have one big library -- been there, tried that, got the T-shirt, didn't fit, didn't work for me, don't even talk to me about it) CiteULike or Delicious or other may be the trick. Also could use to model how I look at the literature -- share bookmarks with residents on the subspecialty blog. Not that I am the patron saint of literature review, but I think that my little tricks might be useful to residents and could convey some interest and excitement in the field.
Today I skimmed an article on changes in GABAA receptors in postpartum -- might account for depression. Experimental model in some knockout mice. I don't think I will start doing mouse research, and I am not a psychiatrist, but having that reference handy when looking at changes in sensitivity to anesthetics and to pain in pregnancy would be a good thing. Put on a booking site, add the right tags and lo! I might even be able to find it when I want it.
No comments ventured yet on the subspecialty blog. Probably a scary thing for the residents. Who knows what could happen to you? I may have to assign avatars wearing fake noses and glasses to each resident.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Misadventures in HTML - or, Technology as Tar Pit
Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it.
I messed up my blog yesterday. I wanted to be able to show the first few lines of all my posts, to entice readers (maybe that should be "reader" singular!) to read them. I found directions for how to do this. It involved entering in some hypertext. The directions said to enter in the code at a certain point in the Html. It should have been a sign to me of things to come that I could not find a location that matched what was shown in the directions.
Never fazed, I proceeded. Are you, gentle reader, familiar with the line, "often in error, never in doubt"?
After entering in to the Html, there were instructions of altering the Post Template, which I found and entered in: "Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it." As you can see above, that part works.
However, the Html in the Style Sheet did not. I had wisely saved the initial template to my hard drive, and uploaded this and tried to retrace my steps. However, the new template had undergone a sea change into something very slightly strange and wonderful -- the last 10% of pictures was lopped off.
Don't send me any more directions -- I am taking the Html Anonymous Pledge - having grasped the first of the 12 steps -- recognizing that I have no power over Html.
So, here is the beginning of my post. And here is the end of it.
I messed up my blog yesterday. I wanted to be able to show the first few lines of all my posts, to entice readers (maybe that should be "reader" singular!) to read them. I found directions for how to do this. It involved entering in some hypertext. The directions said to enter in the code at a certain point in the Html. It should have been a sign to me of things to come that I could not find a location that matched what was shown in the directions.
Never fazed, I proceeded. Are you, gentle reader, familiar with the line, "often in error, never in doubt"?
After entering in to the Html, there were instructions of altering the Post Template, which I found and entered in: "Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it." As you can see above, that part works.
However, the Html in the Style Sheet did not. I had wisely saved the initial template to my hard drive, and uploaded this and tried to retrace my steps. However, the new template had undergone a sea change into something very slightly strange and wonderful -- the last 10% of pictures was lopped off.
Don't send me any more directions -- I am taking the Html Anonymous Pledge - having grasped the first of the 12 steps -- recognizing that I have no power over Html.
So, here is the beginning of my post. And here is the end of it.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
RSS feeds - how I might use them in education
There are some rough edges around my use of RSS Feeds. First, let me confess that I read the good library newsletter introduction to RSS that came out some months ago. I subscribed to a reader, set up some feeds, looked a couple of time, and rapidly moved onto to my next emergency deadline. That is to say, I dropped it.
I like the google reader better than what I remember about the previous reader. However, a lot of sites that I would like to subscribe to put me automatically into the Microsoft feed system on this computer. I would like to have it all through the google reader but have not yet figured out how to do this.
Possible educational uses of feeds and readers:
Could I look through feeds and forward them to residents on the rotation?
Of course I could use them to keep up with my own field. (Smile).
One of the journals I wanted said it had a ETOC but I could never get anything besides just a link to the editorial, not to the entire table of contents. Weird.
I find that the more I write, the less I sound like Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) pontificating on Sex and the City. That is a good thing.
Face Time
There is a new item on the conference room schedule. Once a week, a small group of resident meets with a faculty member for "education sessions". However, among the faculty, in conversation and in email, these sessions are referred to quite seriously as "face-time".
The development of this term this summer sheds some light on how we grapple with new ideas about education.
Frankly, sometimes our learners have seemed less than enthused about proposed additions to the education programs. A whiff of outright hostility emerged in response to the idea that tests might be included in the new technology, and educators would be able to track individual performance and time invested in the learning modules. We were puzzled. We were expecting more in the way of huzzahs. Do the new learners want no risk, 100% return, and edutainment?
When I ask the learners about this response, they talk about the amount of tasks already assigned to them. They have a lot of teaching responsibilities in the form of short powerpoint presentations to their colleagues, on which, despite frequent urging to reuse last year's presentation and keep it simple, many of them put in hours and hours of labor. They present at journal clubs, submit cases and abstracts to resident regional conferences, and also at professional meetings. They are not interested in having something else shoved onto their plates.
I detect another, more important, issue here. Many of the educational activities we as faculty get excited about are those that learners can do on their own, without faculty presence. A great deal of benefit, flexibility, and accomodation of multiple personal and learning styles as well as standardization of educational experiences can be achieved in this way. But there is a point at which the learner may begin to wonder how much of this is driven by faculty desire to spend less time with learners.
We seek the grail of "active learning". I was molded (and anesthetized) by a lifetime of learning experiences handed down from a podium, as were most of my colleagues. I may be in medicine because so much of learning was hands-on, problem-solving, and the answers mattered so deeply to actual people: I stayed awake! I would describe many of my learning experiences in medicine as apprentice-like, and I hear comments from colleagues that imply many of us still operate with that mental model. (See one, do one, teach one).
So when the residents and others began chanting "active learning! active learning!", educational technology to provide independent learning was very attractive. And there was less and less comfort with apprentice-style learning perhaps without full awareness of the discomfort, and definitely without identifying a better way to do it. So, as we previously threw out almost all lectures as too "didactic", perhaps we faculty were disconnecting from the learners. No longer saying, do what I do, but, you need to be responsible for your own education -- go figure it out.
So in response to a frustrated question of "what DO they want" we decided that maybe the residents still wanted us, not the technology. They need us to help them make the connections in what they are learning that will lead to expertise. They want our guidance to become experts.
They want "face-time".
It doesn't say it on the schedule, and the conference room that is reserved shows the listing as "educational sessions", but the faculty refer to it orally and in email, as the weekly scheduled "face-time."
The development of this term this summer sheds some light on how we grapple with new ideas about education.
Frankly, sometimes our learners have seemed less than enthused about proposed additions to the education programs. A whiff of outright hostility emerged in response to the idea that tests might be included in the new technology, and educators would be able to track individual performance and time invested in the learning modules. We were puzzled. We were expecting more in the way of huzzahs. Do the new learners want no risk, 100% return, and edutainment?
When I ask the learners about this response, they talk about the amount of tasks already assigned to them. They have a lot of teaching responsibilities in the form of short powerpoint presentations to their colleagues, on which, despite frequent urging to reuse last year's presentation and keep it simple, many of them put in hours and hours of labor. They present at journal clubs, submit cases and abstracts to resident regional conferences, and also at professional meetings. They are not interested in having something else shoved onto their plates.
I detect another, more important, issue here. Many of the educational activities we as faculty get excited about are those that learners can do on their own, without faculty presence. A great deal of benefit, flexibility, and accomodation of multiple personal and learning styles as well as standardization of educational experiences can be achieved in this way. But there is a point at which the learner may begin to wonder how much of this is driven by faculty desire to spend less time with learners.
We seek the grail of "active learning". I was molded (and anesthetized) by a lifetime of learning experiences handed down from a podium, as were most of my colleagues. I may be in medicine because so much of learning was hands-on, problem-solving, and the answers mattered so deeply to actual people: I stayed awake! I would describe many of my learning experiences in medicine as apprentice-like, and I hear comments from colleagues that imply many of us still operate with that mental model. (See one, do one, teach one).
So when the residents and others began chanting "active learning! active learning!", educational technology to provide independent learning was very attractive. And there was less and less comfort with apprentice-style learning perhaps without full awareness of the discomfort, and definitely without identifying a better way to do it. So, as we previously threw out almost all lectures as too "didactic", perhaps we faculty were disconnecting from the learners. No longer saying, do what I do, but, you need to be responsible for your own education -- go figure it out.
So in response to a frustrated question of "what DO they want" we decided that maybe the residents still wanted us, not the technology. They need us to help them make the connections in what they are learning that will lead to expertise. They want our guidance to become experts.
They want "face-time".
It doesn't say it on the schedule, and the conference room that is reserved shows the listing as "educational sessions", but the faculty refer to it orally and in email, as the weekly scheduled "face-time."
Monday, August 18, 2008
First Post as Assigned: Pros and cons of blogging in health science education
After launching the maiden bloggage, I recall that there was an actual assignment. Pros and cons of blogging in health science education.
Pros: you might catch more of the misunderstandings and muddiness that people have about things they are learning about.
You might get early comments about educational materials that are going well or not going well.
It could create a safe place for learners to expose their areas of ignorance, which is the best way to heal them -- under the light of day. It is always sad when you are 4 weeks into a learning program and discover that a bright student has failed to "get" some really fundamental point, that has hampered learning all the way through the rest of the experience.
Some people think better when they are writing -- it is a good way to learn, but few of us either have the patience to let the grubby flow go by without cleaning it up, and have no venue that is safe enough for us to think it out while writing.
Cons: As learners might expose their ignorance, so teachers might expose their arrogance. Learners would be careful about this exposure for fear it could harm their evaluations or recommendations. First impressions can be hard to eradicate, and some educators are not as sensitive to the issue of personal bias as they might be. However, on a big blog, teacher arrogance might get called down...would that be effective? If it established an expectation that that behavior is not encouraged...if it lead to reflection.
One of the residents suggested that we develop a tips and tricks document on the web for a clinical rotation. As I thought about that, it was exciting to me to think about people posting questions, seeing other's questions, and raising all this to a higher more thoughtful level. That experience of "yeah, I wondered about that too" is valuable.
But then, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed the value was in the questioning, communicated with others, and putting together the answers. Once the tips and tricks were assembled, it would be just another dusty passive learning document. Multiple pages of information that no one would bother to read. The greatest value by far would be to those who put it together. As the document grew from group of learners to the next group, and became more and more daunting to read through, the value would decrease.
So should you make each group put together its own tip and tricks? Seems redundant, doesn't it? And I don't think much of reinventing the wheel...but what if you modified the T&T page. Saved all the answers and waited for the questions to be posted. Or squirreled around with the information and put in misinformation and put it in to be cleaned up -- what is wrong with this picture? It can be daunting to be presented with a blank slate -- having a document to edit can get those thinking juices flowing...
I think the biggest con may be vulnerability, particularly to those who evaluate you. If we could establish an expectation that we expose our ignorance in order to learn...modelling life-long learning behavior....as an educator, pick a topic you want to learn more about and bring your learners along with you for the ride...seems like these would be of value.
Pros: you might catch more of the misunderstandings and muddiness that people have about things they are learning about.
You might get early comments about educational materials that are going well or not going well.
It could create a safe place for learners to expose their areas of ignorance, which is the best way to heal them -- under the light of day. It is always sad when you are 4 weeks into a learning program and discover that a bright student has failed to "get" some really fundamental point, that has hampered learning all the way through the rest of the experience.
Some people think better when they are writing -- it is a good way to learn, but few of us either have the patience to let the grubby flow go by without cleaning it up, and have no venue that is safe enough for us to think it out while writing.
Cons: As learners might expose their ignorance, so teachers might expose their arrogance. Learners would be careful about this exposure for fear it could harm their evaluations or recommendations. First impressions can be hard to eradicate, and some educators are not as sensitive to the issue of personal bias as they might be. However, on a big blog, teacher arrogance might get called down...would that be effective? If it established an expectation that that behavior is not encouraged...if it lead to reflection.
One of the residents suggested that we develop a tips and tricks document on the web for a clinical rotation. As I thought about that, it was exciting to me to think about people posting questions, seeing other's questions, and raising all this to a higher more thoughtful level. That experience of "yeah, I wondered about that too" is valuable.
But then, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed the value was in the questioning, communicated with others, and putting together the answers. Once the tips and tricks were assembled, it would be just another dusty passive learning document. Multiple pages of information that no one would bother to read. The greatest value by far would be to those who put it together. As the document grew from group of learners to the next group, and became more and more daunting to read through, the value would decrease.
So should you make each group put together its own tip and tricks? Seems redundant, doesn't it? And I don't think much of reinventing the wheel...but what if you modified the T&T page. Saved all the answers and waited for the questions to be posted. Or squirreled around with the information and put in misinformation and put it in to be cleaned up -- what is wrong with this picture? It can be daunting to be presented with a blank slate -- having a document to edit can get those thinking juices flowing...
I think the biggest con may be vulnerability, particularly to those who evaluate you. If we could establish an expectation that we expose our ignorance in order to learn...modelling life-long learning behavior....as an educator, pick a topic you want to learn more about and bring your learners along with you for the ride...seems like these would be of value.
Maiden blogage
Blogging is best when it is an interaction, not a rant. How best to trigger comment from others? And not just any comment, but the desired comment -- which would be intelligent, interesting, and creative -- provocative without provoking -- edgy without being unnerving. Conversation is best when one completes, rather than competes, with what the conversational partner is saying. Is that enough for the blog?
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