Collaboration Tools

Café Conversation: Chocolate and Silkworms

/ cngarrett / 1 Comment

You can find me just about every morning at the Café Pacifica having my just-plain-old black coffee and not-so-plain conversation with the early crew – my cafe “homeys”. From time to time, I hear the most amazing stories, one of which I want to share here.

 

 

What is the connection between chocolate and silkworms? The  connection is awesome learning!

One of my crew, Deb, volunteers at a middle school, and works with students in the special education program. The teacher for this very fortunate group finds creative and engaging ways to help her students learn. Here are two examples of her “stealth” education:

Chocolate

Students are assigned to bring in their favorite family chocolate recipe (just the recipe – not the actual yummy). After a few days, students are invited to verbally share a little about their recipe in “Show and Tell”. Next, they are assigned to write a short report about the recipe – where it came from, who makes it, when the family enjoys this treat (holidays, birthdays, rainy days, whenever), and what the student likes about this variation on the chocolate theme.

Then the recipes are converted into arithmetic problems. You are having a party and you are going to have 12 guests. The recipe makes enough for 6 people. Rewrite the recipe doubling all the ingredients. A worksheet is distributed for homework – color in the measuring spoons or measuring cups for  each ingredient.

Another activity has students trading recipes – find someone who has a recipe similar to yours – find someone who has a recipe very different from yours.

Finally, students go to the home-ec room and make some of the delicacies. I hear that other students from the school flock to the chocolate sale table to purchase goodies from the special-ed students.

Silkworms

The same group of lucky special education students spends an entire year caring for and observing silkworms. When the silkworm shipment arrives, learners divide into small groups. Given all the supplies needed to set up their silkworm farms, students work with guidance from the classroom volunteers to make happy homes for their voracious and productive pets. The small groups are tasked with feeding and harvesting, maintaining a weekly log, and keeping the silkworm environments happy and healthy. Students keep individual journals, and occasionally share their journals with each other.

In addition to the types of engaging activities with the chocolate project, silkworms add learning topics such as biology, ecology, and EEK! even sex education and reproduction.

Our Challenge

I hear you thinking, “Nice story, Chris, but what does this have to do with graduate school?” I argue that these rich types of learning opportunities have everything to do with graduate school. What if we were to identify the desired learning outcomes, consider focus and level of complexity, and then design activities and assignments that are meaningful, relevant, and multi-dimensional?

And, oh by the way, fun is a good idea, too.

So if it’s not chocolate or silkworms, what have you, are you, or might you do for some “stealth learning”?

From eLearning to WeLearning

/ cngarrett / 3 Comments

When you think about online education, what comes to mind? I often hear things like:

  • I don’t like online learning — I like to be in the classroom where I can interact with other students.
  • I’m too social for online learning — online learning is too isolating and lonely.
  • Online learning is boring.

How about you? Share your preconceptions about online learning by commenting on this post.

Online learning is also known as eLearning (electronic learning). But let’s consider a different proposition. What if we engage in WeLearning rather than eLearning, or even iLearning?

iLearning (“I” Learning) — I want or need to learn something. I get on my computer or smart phone. I “Google” or use some more scholarly search tool to look up the information I am seeking. I choose from the available sites and information that seem to meet my learning needs. I learn what I need to know, and I might even discover related topics I didn’t expect would pique my interest.

eLearning (one example) — My employer requires periodic training on topics sucs as sexual harassment, human subject research, or HIPPA. I receive an email message informing me that I must complete the training online by some specific date. I log in and work through the units — slides that cover the material, with an occasional multiple choice question to check my knowledge.

WeLearning — I elect to take a course online. The course is billed as collaborative. I log on the first time and am asked to post my introduction. I read and reply to a few introductions posted by others, and our conversation begins. Soon, we become a community of learners. We are expected to use forums to sustain ongoing dialogue. We are expected to post assignments and then give and receive feedback among our scholar colleagues and faculty. We may be required to complete group projects. We learn with and from one another.

There is a time and a reason for each of these models, and many more. Designing Clinical Research for Students and Residents ONLINE is WeLearning.

CTSI Embarks on Fully Asynchronous Online Learning Journey

/ cngarrett

August 1, 2011 marks the official start date for Designing Clinical Research (DCR) for Students and Faculty. The majority of scholars will assemble on Monday and Wednesday mornings in the traditional lecture hall at the Parnassus campus. Twenty self-selected learners will take the course completely online via the UCSF Collaborative Learning Environment, AKA Moodle.

The online course site was made available to students at noon on Tuesday, July 19. At 4:14 pm that same day, the first student logged in, explored the site, and posted an introduction. By 6:00 pm, two more students showed up and began to interact with each other. Remember! The course does not officially begin until August 1.

This course about research also doubles as research. Co-faculty, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, MD, PhD and Deborah G. Grady, MD, MPH along with researchers, Sarah Wilson, MD and Lawrence Haber, MD, as well as instructional designer and online learning consultant, Chrisanne N. Garrett, MAED will study the first offering of the online course. This small pilot study aims to answer the following question: how do learning outcomes, including knowledge and skill acquisition, and learner satisfaction compare between health science students who take the online DCR course and students in the traditional course?

The DCR course is structured to foster the development of students’ ability to write a clinical research proposal. For the final assignment, students write a five page proposal of their research study. We plan to take the twenty proposals written by the online students and compare them to twenty proposals randomly selected from the traditional course. Two K Program scholars, blinded to the author of the proposal, will read all forty proposals and rate the proposal based on the NIH scale of 0-9. We will then compare the scores of the online students to the scores of the traditional students. Additionally, we will collect formative and summative evaluation data from the online learners on both learning progress and satisfaction with the online learning environment.

This blog will serve as an ongoing report on the online course and, ultimately, on the results of the research study. Your questions and comments are most welcome.

“Using Prizes to Spur Open Innovation”: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Explore Potential Approaches

/ Katja Reuter / 1 Comment

This week’s NIH conference “Crowdsourcing: The Art and Science of Open Innovation” could be a hint that the research agency is seriously considering new ways to take advantage of the “processing power of lots of willing brains”.

ScienceInsider published a summary report that states:

NIH Director Francis Collins would soon sign papers that would ensure NIH is compliant with the America COMPETES Act, which gives federal agencies the authority to offer cash incentives for researchers to tackle high-risk, high-reward research questions that have eluded more traditional funding platforms, such as grants and sponsored research.

The America COMPETES Act was first passed in 2007 and was reauthorized in December. Under its authority, federal agencies outline a problem they’d like solved on Challenge.gov, then open the competition to individuals or teams, evaluate the results, and award a money prize to whoever turns in the best solution.


Blogging about peer-reviewed research

/ Anirvan Chatterjee / 1 Comment

The aptly-named Research Blogging service aggregates blog posts about peer-reviewed research.They scan supported blogs for references to published papers, aggregating the content, and supporting structured links to references. While the tagging and citation addition process seems still a bit too manual and brittle for my tastes, it’s clearly scaled, with bloggers publishing about 17 posts a day in 7 supported languages.

Research Blogging looks like a great way to explore post-publication review and discussion—but would they open up their data so that it can be mashed up by third parties? Imagine being able to read a publication, and see not only articles that cite it, but blog posts as well.

Read more:

LabLife.org – A Model for a Future Research Portal at CTSI, and perhaps even UCSF?

/ Katja Reuter / 2 Comments

This site is interesting because it helps researchers perform a variety of tasks and supports their online community. At the same time, it provides clear paths to access more information without overwhelming the user. And btw, the goal of the site is easily comprehensible.

LabLife is free for academic labs. We recently learned that UCSF postdocs are using it frequently. And they’re not the only ones, according to LabLife over 1800 labs from 1200 institutions world-wide are using the site.

Here are a few examples how the site supports several aspects of a researcher’s lab life:

  • searching for products,
  • coordinating purchases (preventing ordering mistakes),
  • managing (tracking) reagents, documents, and data,
  • searching for jobs and publications, and
  • sharing information with colleagues and the community.

What do you think?

Google Pulls the Plug on Google Health

/ kristinemoss

From the  announcement on the Google blog:

“When we launched Google Health, our goal was to create a service that would give people access to their personal health and wellness information. We wanted to translate our successful consumer-centered approach from other domains to healthcare and have a real impact on the day-to-day health experiences of millions of our users.

Now, with a few years of experience, we’ve observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people. That’s why we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the Google Health service. We’ll continue to operate the Google Health site as usual through January 1, 2012, and we’ll provide an ongoing way for people to download their health data for an additional year beyond that, through January 1, 2013. Any data that remains in Google Health after that point will be permanently deleted.”

Also check out the TechCrunch story.

Industry embraces the semantic web! Just like us, only different….

/ ericmeeks

Google, Bing!, and Yahoo announced an initiative on June 2, 2011 to create Schema.org, a web site that will promote standard ways of adding machine readable (semantic) data to all of our web pages.  As a validation of the semantic web, this is great news.

However, they are supporting a different format for exposing semantic data than what we use in biomedical informatics, so what does that mean for our way of doing things?  More specifically, we have become proponents of RDFa as the “serialization format” for exposing our semantic data. RDFa is how VIVO exposes semantic data, it’s how the future versions (and current Harvard version) of Profiles will expose semantic data, and it’s intrinsically tied to our support of machine readable ontologies such as vivo and foaf.

Schema.org will support a different serialization format known as “microdata”.  Some are seeing this as the possible death of RDFa: http://graveshow.com/blog/tutorials/web-design/death-rdfa.  Others are not sure if it is a threat or opportunity: http://bnode.org/blog/2011/06/06/schema-org-threat-or-opportunity.  At least one person thinks this is actually good for RDFa: http://planet.linkeddata.org/.  The schema.org creators are aware of the controversy they have created with their support of microdata versus RDFa, and they do a good job of explaining their decisions here: http://schema.org/docs/faq.html.

The general consensus seems to be that RDFa is in many ways a more complete solution for semantic expression than microdata, but RDFa is difficult and intimidating for developers to grasp and therefore suffers from adoption outside of certain niche fields (such as BioMed2.0). We don’t mind handling the difficulty of RDFa because our field has already forced us to deal with the challenges of sharing large complex data sets and to wrap our heads around ontologies and other semantic concepts.

One way to interpret this would be to say that what we are doing with the semantic web in BioMed is great, and that we should continue down our path while industry takes a baby step into the semantic web with the more-pragmatic if less-complete microdata approach.  At the surface, this would seem like a fine solution.  The problem is: now we have industry and BioMed on different paths.  For those people (like us at UCSF) who want to combine the best technical solutions from industry with the best technical solutions of academia and research, this can be a problem.

In particular at UCSF we want to combine our “academic” BioMed semantic web solutions with the “industry” OpenSocial specification to create something that is a better way to publish and share data rich applications than either one of those technologies can support by themselves today.  In pursuing this we’re already seeing issues with bridging RDFa into the JSON centric world of OpenSocial.  Mapping RDFa to JSON is a tough problem to solve, and a number of solutions have been proposed (search RDFa and JSON) without any clear winner.  However with microdata, going from semantic web to JSON/OpenSocial might not be as hard.  Given industries favor of pragmatism over elegance, and the recognition that JSON is THE dominant data exchange method on the web today, this would hardly be surprising.  So…., for some of us this “support of the semantic web & simultaneous challenge to RDFa” may be good news after all!

Now we just need to deal with the very real problem of getting VIVO, Profiles and the rest of our BioMed2.0 systems to produce microdata as well as RDFa.  And why not?  Supporting one format, even by mandate, does not mean you shouldn’t support another.  If you want to share data and ideas, which we say we want to do, then the more the merrier.