Saturday, June 6, 2009

MBL/NLM MI Day 5/6: Insert witty title here

Please see yesterday's entry regarding my current cognitive ability, and note that not only was I not able to blog first thing this morning but it just took me 3 tries to spell cognitive correctly.

40 hours of continuing education in 5.5 days: Insane yet possible!



Dr. Christopher Cimino from the Office of Computer Based Education at Albert Einstein College of Medicine gave a presentation about education informatics. This isn't a frightening term, it's the use of technology in education, and mostly covered a lot of what I already knew from both my experience as an online graduate student and a current distance education teacher.

This reinforced much of what I suspect in that the role of evaluation is key for identifying educational needs first, then developing a goal, then the learning objectives, and only after all that delving into the method of teaching. Too often I think there is a push to go into 'teaching online' as a primary motivation and that usually doesn't result in successful educational experiences for either the teacher or the learner.



Kevin Johnson from the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University made a return visit to do a presentation on Care Provider Order Entry (CPOE). He didn't win a repeat of Powerpoint layout prize, but did win for groaner comedy involving Presidents (see slides 12, 26, 77 and 82) while outlining the history and many current challenges involved with CPOE.



I feel bad that I didn't get a better picture of Dr. Joan Ash from the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University, especially since she was the only presenter from our awesome Pacific Northwest region!

She did a great job in her presentation both teaching about evaluation methods in general, applying them to informatics interventions, and keeping us alert with humor and a friendly competitive breakout group project.

Some would argue I wasn't paying close attention when I shared this quote from her presentation on Twitter, but others agreed it needed to be heard. I can always count on my colleagues to offer interesting perspectives too!



Dr. Lawrence Kingsland, Assistant Director for Applied Informatics at the National Library of Medicine, gave a presentation about future trends that are rapidly becoming the norm already on the Internet and the mind-blowing speed and functionality that is still to come on the horizon.

He also literally rocked the house when the bass was cranked a bit too high on the speakers as we watched this. I highly recommend it as part of the answer when someone asks 'What is Web 2.0?'






Last and nowhere near least was Dr. Donald Lindberg, Director of the National Library of Medicine. His presentation about current issues isn't online and includes some embedded features... and that was part of his point.

Online books, journals and related resources need to move beyond being mere reflections of their paper counterparts and fully use their capacity for being interactive publications. A great example of this is the recent Medical Library Association 2009 conference posters, some of which have videos and hyperlinks embedded in them. What if journal articles about electrocardiograph (ECG) studies actually included rhythm strips? How can we tell if someone learned more/better/faster through the use of "supplementary data" that does not yet have standardized metadata in PubMedCentral?

Fascinating and much to think about.

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