Learning Theories and Medical Education

Working in UF's own Health Science Center, I have an interest in health science and medical education. Most medical schools divide the 4 year education into components consisting of 2 years of basic sciences and 2 years of clinical clerkships. The 2 year basic science classes are primarily taught in behaviorist fashion with emphasis on didactic lectures and rote memorization.

Unlike this traditional approach to teaching the basic sciences, Mercer University School of Medicine (my alma mater, but I'm not biased I swear) uses a problems based program. In this approach all the knowledge acquired in a typical medical school during the basic science years is learned by studying patient cases. Here's an interesting article about using case or problem based learning in medical education -- Problem Based Learning in American Medical Education: An Overview.

Now that we are constructing an understanding of the central paradigms of education and instructional theories, what paradigm do you think the Mercer program is primarily using and why? What influence do you think the problem based program has on the education of medical students? Would you feel comfortable seeing a doctor who learned basic sciences using this alternative approach? For my part, I think I would feel more comfortable with a doctor who learned under this method because the problem based focus encourages problem solving skills and a more holistic understanding of the basic science concepts.

If you're interested in medical education, here's another good article comparing clinical clerkship scores of students in lecture based and problem based programs of the same institution --
Differences between students in problem-based and lecture-based curricula measured by clerkship performance ratings at the beginning of the third year

Book Review

I've decided to read The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman for the book review assignment. After the book was published I heard mixed reviews about the the title and it certainly got enough press. Now I'm going to read the book for myself so I can see what the hype was all about and form my own opinions.

Chapters 4 & 5: A Graphical Representation

Here's my attempt at a graphical representation of the information presented in chapters 4 & 5 of our text.

My Technical Professional Development

In thinking about what areas I'd like to improve my technical skills, I'm drawn to animation/graphic software. I've used TechSmith's Camtasia before for some simple library tutorials. Here's a link to the first tutorial I created in Camtasia a couple of years ago: Finding Full Text Articles in PubMed. Like I said, this was my first attempt at Camtasia and producting tutorials, so please be nice :-)
I like using Camtasia because you can do some nice editing/mixing and select various output formats. Building off my experience with Camtasia, I'd also like to know how to use Macromedia/Adobe Flash for animation and tutorials.
So, my broad goal is to learn how to use Flash. I'll use my new skills to create some kind of library related tutorial, probably related specificially to this course.
I'll start by completing NetG tutorials 15027 & 15028:
Macromedia Flash MX Part 1 - Flash MX Fundamentals
Macromedia Flash MX Part 2 - Animation Basics

I'll post more about this as I further develop my plan.

New Sloan Report on Distance Learning

Sorry for any duplications...
For those of you interested in distance and online education, The Sloan Consortium 2005 Report on the state of Distance Education in the United States is available from their website. Here's a direct link to the PDF of the report.

Information Literacy Continued

Now that I've watched the Gators soundly beat UCF, I can get back to my earlier discussion of information literacy (it doesn't hurt that the ALA/ACRL website is back up). Here's the definition from the Association of College and Research Libraries I promised: "Information literacy encompasses more than good information-seeking behavior. It incorporates the abilities to recognize when information is needed and then to phrase questions designed to gather the needed information. It includes evaluating and then using information appropriately and ethically once it is retrieved from any media, including electronic, human or print sources." (ACRL Website) So, we have an idea of what IL is, and I mentioned before that libraries everywhere are incorporating IL goals into library instruction. If you're interested follow the link to ACRL's Information Literacy site for more information.

Information literacy is such a big deal with librarians that the ACRL has an Institute for Information Literacy that holds annual, in-depth training on IL called the Information Literacy Immersion Program. I'm interested in exploring the training the immersion program uses and whether it teaches sound instructional design principles. A comment from Dr. Dawson points out that much library instruction focuses on the lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. I would have to agree with her assessment. How are instruction librarians schooled in instruction? Librarians are experts in our particular niche...give us a database and a complex search topic and we can play the database like a finely tuned organ to get the best results possible. But how do we rate as instructors? What do students attending a typical library instruction session learn? How can we design instruction to focus on higher levels of learning? I hope that as I progress through this course and the Ed Tech program I will be able to answer these questions and design high level library instruction.

By the way, if anyone has comments on library instruction in general or specific experiences, I'd love to hear from you. If you have ideas on improving library instruction that you'd like share, I'd love to hear them. Please don't include names of instructors or specific information that might be used to identify the instructor (I give you permission to use my name) because I wouldn't want to upset or offend any of my colleagues.

Speaking of instruction, I'll be doing a "quick and dirty" demo of RefWorks next week. If you've used RefWorks (or any citation management software) before I'd love to hear your comments. If you've used RefWorks and have specific questions you'd like me to address or you have suggestions for what I should cover, please let me know.