Blogs'n'Dogs – Page 3 – E-learning services at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. The author is not a vet and will not give medical advice.

1.6.20092.6.2009

IT-Medi seminar 2009

Here are some notes from the annual IT-Medi seminar at Meilahti campus, organized by TUKE – the Research & Development Unit for Medical Education at the Faculty of Medicine. The seminar highlights cases where ICT is used in medical education, so of course it’s very close to the field of veterinary medicine as well and therefore highly interesting 😉

Virtual skin care

Docent Anita Remitz (HUS) presented dermatological patient cases she had worked on for the virtual patient case simulator, a slightly game-like self-testing tool that the Faculty of Medicine has built. Cases are usually presented as “Case of the month” -scenarios. In such a scenario, one dermatology case (a fairly easy one) had gotten the right diagnosis from 58% of students in general, and those who had taken the course already had 88% right so apparently education gets under your skin! Oh, and another case contained a photo of late syphilis infection, so now I’ll know how that looks, very helpful!

Of course this is no replacement for real-life practice, but it gives the students more practice than they could get otherwise, as well as getting to see more (rare) types of cases than they would see during the hands-on training period. The virtual patient simulator also helps in educating students in making cost-effective treatments, as more inexperienced students often take a lot of unnecessary tests in order to find the correct diagnosis, but with this tool they can see the actual costs of their treatment and compare it with other students results.

The use of ICT at the Faculty of Medicine

One of the students (a first year student) was there to give the student point-of-view of how ICT is currently used at the faculty. The lowdown: e-mail is used for all communication and therefore encumbered whereas other ways of getting information (like the intranet Alma) aren’t really working because the correct info is hard to find. At least the course material repository DiKK (Digitaalinen kurssikirjasto) is well thought of; all the course materials students need seem to come here on time and are easily found when you know that everything is in one place. No need to “DiKK” around!

My delightful colleagues from the ICT support network, Marja Silenti (ICT planner) and Päivi Heino (National Library of Health Sciences -Terkko) presented a couple of surveys done on the ICT use of both students (http://www.med.helsinki.fi/tuke/tiedostot/raportit/ok_08.pdf) and personnel (http://www.med.helsinki.fi/tuke/tiedostot/raportit/opk_08.pdf) at the faculty. Unfortunately not a lot of personnel participated in the survey whereas the students had been much more active. For the personnel, it seemed that despite all the support available it was the lack of personal time required to learn new ICT tools that was the biggest obstacle to try out new educational tools.

Marja also gave a quick presentation on the different ICT tools currently offered at the university, and had chosen the tools presented based on the tag cloud in her blog – a nice touch, which worked well (see picture above)!

These teeth are okay, those kids’ bones aren’t

Antti Kämppi, dentist and teacher presented the latest version of the Clinipoint-system (now called something else) he had been involved in designing and which won the “Learning technology” award in 2008 [ok.helsinki.fi]. It is basically a system using RFID-tags [wikipedia.org] to authenticate teachers so they can electronically approve and sign student achievements – apparently a cumbersome process during the dentist training stage requiring lots of handwriting otherwise – a few thousand signatures per student, in fact. I suppose any automation of monotone administrative tasks is always welcome.

Interestingly enough there seemed to be quite a lot of initial resistance amongst teachers when introducing the system. The development process also seemed to depend a lot on Mr. Kämppis personal contacts, otherwise it could have been a much more costly project than it was now. Getting cheap but good quality custom software is always a challenge.

The busy & cheerful doctor Mikko Mattila (HUC) presented his Moodle quiz on Pediatric Orthopaedics, a field that apparently students’ didn’t get that much time to spend with (approx. 3 weeks in total). We got to do one of the multiple choice quizzes collaboratively. Surprisingly enough it seemed that the relatively small x-ray pictures the quiz was based on provided sufficient information to work with – analyzing x-ray pictures is something I’ve always considered next to impossible even with large screens. The quiz certainly wasn’t easy – the questions drilled us on how fractures should be treated and how successful the surgery had been. Designing good questions is of course the biggest challenge, as the participants in this course had varying proficiency levels (lots of students from other medical districts). And, apparently the way of giving automatic feedback from the quiz wasn’t one of Moodle’s strengths, so there always seems to be compromises to be made with the tools these learning environments offer.

Links:

TUKE (Research & Development Unit for Medical Education)
http://www.med.helsinki.fi/tuke/

Virtual patient case simulator
http://www.med.helsinki.fi/tuke/palvelut/vpp.htm

Digitaalinen kurssikirjasto (DiKK)
http://oma.terkko.helsinki.fi:8080/~dikk

22.4.200923.4.2009

E-reader: first impressions

Having recently acquired the Sony Reader PRS-505 [trustedreviews.com] courtesy of a friendly New York -bound vet (thanks Elise!), I’ve now read a couple of books on this device utilizing an “electronic paper” -type display a.k.a. E-ink [wikipedia.org] and am ready to give my first impressions of it. “So why yet another gadget, Kristian? Can’t you read text from your computer display? What about the feeling of REAL books, books that look good on your shelf?” you might be asking, but despite flat panel LCD:s being quite OK to read from nowadays, they’re still not a match for traditional ink on paper when it comes to readability. With physical books, shelf space is always running out and frankly, some of the sci-fi stuff I read, the books generally have embarassing covers… 😉

Two good reasons for one more gadget

Electronic paper, which has been touted since the 1970’s is now finally becoming mature enough for consumer products, and here are THE two good reasons why this is a worthwile technology:

Particles in the electronic paper display switch physical states and create an effect that is very similar to ink on paper which is easy on the eyes, has minimal glare and comes without an annoying backlight behind the screen (so you actually need the bedside lamp switched on just like you need with a traditional book)
Once the text/picture has formed on the display, it does not need to be refreshed (or backlit) thus using much less power than traditional display technologies. One charge on the device is sufficient for months of reading (or, a month at least during my first trial)

These two factors are the significantly important (p < 0.05) things that an e-reader offers compared to other devices. The reading experience and energy consumption, folks. Oh, and the fact that you can cram hundreds of books in the built-in memory and on external memory cards making it the ultimate portable library. Limitations there are as well, alas, current e-book readers are black & white only (8 levels of greyscale in this case) and refresh times are much slower than with traditional displays, meaning there is a flickering lag (slightly less than a second) when you refresh the display with another page. So don’t plan on watching movies on these things.

Impressions after the first book

The device itself is a nice, slim design – the reader looks good (= your coolness factor goes up when you whip it out in public, always important) and feels solid thanks to its metal casing, and it comes attached to a faux-leather “book cover” which nicely protects the screen as well. It is clear within seconds to probably anyone that reading text on e-paper is much nicer than reading from a laptop or mobile phone screen. The contrast is good and while it’s more like reading a laser printer draft on slightly ashen paper (“…a bit of volcano fallout in the air today?”), it still beats any other screen I’ve tried when it comes to replacing real paper. And because of the way the reader works, you don’t have to think about powering the device off when you take a break from reading, just throw – or, rather, gently place, these things are still a *lot* more fragile than paperbacks – the reader on the bedside or in your bag and think nothing about it. Convenient.

A pleasant surprise is the multitude of (open) formats supported, which is untypical of Sony. The Amazon Kindle [wikipedia.org], for example, is quite married with its own e-book format (and US customers currently), whereas the Sony reader can read several common formats, including the “new standard”, EPUB [openbook.org]. It supports PDF’s as well, but these (esp. big files) are still problematic for the small reader screen; zooming in on text doesn’t work that well and you really need to convert the PDF to a reader-friendly format first for best effect. This is something I will try out more later, however.

Generally speaking, reading with the device went well, I was not annoyed by the flicker/pause when flipping a page and the user interface works fine. The buttons for switching pages aren’t perhaps optimally placed for my tastes, a small quibble.

Oh, and the first book I read? Here.

Who is it for, really?

Despite its stylish looks, this e-book reader is clearly still early technology – it feels a bit like riding a steam engine locomotive when you can already see maglev trains on the horizon. But when e-paper devices become cheaper, tougher, more versatile (they can be made flexible [readius.com], for example) and display colour I do feel like this will be a great way for researchers and students to carry articles and course books with them in a portable fashion. And traditional newspapers could benefit from e-paper as well [businessinsider.com]. Already the more expensive e-book readers come with touch screens enabling comments in handwriting or drawing on the e-paper and similar stuff, thus bringing them closer to normal computers than simply passive reading devices.

The PDF-support is not there yet, however, and the relative sluggishness of the displays makes flipping through pages not quite as smooth an experience as it should be, so in current form I suspect these devices aren’t yet the portable article repositories academics would like to have but wait a few years… so if you’re thinking about downloading the latest research papers on the reader for a quick browse, forget about it.

Another thing is the cost of content and possible DRM restrictions on e-books – prices for commercial books are still too high compared to the paper versions, so I don’t know how many books I actually will purchase for this system. Maybe I’ll read all the free classics I can get first, but it would be really nice to read contemporary content as well.

Currently the e-book readers (at least the one tested) are very good for people who read a lot of novels – as the price is high, you’ll need to read a lot to justify the cost compared to traditional books. But reading from a dedicated e-book reader is just that much better than any other digital solution, so it’s worth trying out!

Further (e-)reading:

Wikipedia has a list of e-book readers here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_e-book_readers

Jere Majava tests another e-book reader (Bebook):
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/jeremajava/2008/10/16/ensikokemuksia-bebookista/

MobileRead – a good site for e-book enthusiasts, with free classics available as well:
http://www.mobileread.com/

9.4.20099.4.2009

Pets and the dangers of climate change

Dogpills

RSS feeds brought this short piece by New Scientist to my attention, which highlights the findings of a couple of articles about diseases spreading in pets because of the rapidly warming climate [wikipedia.org]. This affects humans as well, but now there is data on the pet-side of things as well. Since ticks and mosquitoes that were previously hindered from coming to Europe because of colder weather now find it possible to do so, they also spread the diseases linked with them. Apparently ticks of the Ixodes genus spread TBE [wikipedia.org] to many other species of mammals (incl. the common pets) as well as humans, and dog ticks spread a malaria-like disease… ticks are nasty little pieces of work, I have to admit. Mosquitoes are much nicer, but besides giving us malaria they also spread roundworms to pets. And then there are fleas…

Link:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16924-pets-may-become-latest-victims-of-climate-change.html

Further reading:
Punkkien levittämät taudit koirilla [Scalibor vet. -lääkemainossivu huom.]

8.4.20098.4.2009

Feedback afternoon 2.4.2009

Salikuva 1 Palauteseminaari One of my duties as an e-learning planner is working on the faculty’s feedback system, especially the part concerning electronic means of collecting and storing student course feedback (which we collect mostly with e-lomake). The plan for the next strategic period of the university (2010-2012) has collecting feedback as one of its points of focus, making the task of having a working feedback system even more fitting, and this event I attended was part of the preliminary university-wide look on how feedback currently has been organized at the university. Student representatives told their views on what they wanted from the feedback they gave after each course, and different feedback cases were presented, including Mia Ruohoniemi showing what we currently do at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine.

Important stuff that came up and should be taken into account when discussing feedback:

Counterfeedback: it is important to tell the students how the feedback was taken into account and how it will change the teaching in the future. Students often didn’t know what happened to feedback after it had been given.
Transparency: Make the feedback results available when needed. A slight problem is what happens with course feedback after it has been used by the teachers – where does it go and how can someone who needs the info get it? Also, taking today’s stricter identity protection laws into account is important, and collecting feedback that might contain personally identifiable data needs to be done carefully.
Taking criticism: Teachers need to be able to interpret the feedback results (often including straightforward negative comments) and be prepared for criticism so that it doesn’t cause unnecessary psychological distress. This might be a real problem for some people who aren’t used to it.

One attendant presented the view that feedback should be collected so that the student signs it with his/her own name, thus staying behind the words (and possibly be more reasonable and not use unnecessary vulgarities) . There can unfortunately be instances where non-anonymous feedback can be harmful to the student giving it, so it might not work as a general guideline (for example, vet students expressed their concerns about maintaining anonymity in a survey regarding feedback collecting in 2007). The tight ip-laws often demand that feedback has to be anonymous unless giving it is an integral part of the course.

The electronic student administration service WebOodi has a feedback form component (PalauteOodi) integrated into its horribly dated interface, but we have used E-lomake instead because it is so much faster to work with. Still, having course enrollment and feedback after the course in one system would be great so it was nice to hear that First Vice Rector Hannele Niemi mentioned that the improvement of PalauteOodi would be on the to-do list.

Now, I’m going to concentrate on the three points counted above. Of course there were many other things and good ideas presented at the meeting, but you have to start Somewhere to get There… and collect feedback on the way!