EBM Librarian: See one, Do one, Teach many!

On October 15, 2006, I attended the continuing education course Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) and the Medical Librarian taught by Connie Schardt and had my already-overwhelmed mind (first semester of health informatics library school) blown away by 8 hours of fantastic teaching. At that point in my studies, I thought people went to continuing education classes at conferences to brush up on knowledge and skills they had already learned and needed a refresher on. I thought I was the only person in the room who had no clue what EBM was, and was greatly relieved to learn that I wasn't!

Connie created the EBM Librarian wiki after our class as an opportunity to continue learning and sharing resources for medical librarians everywhere who are teaching about evidence based practice in their organizations. In the wiki you can find an overview on many topics including what evidence-based practice is, how to make sense of statistics in studies (this part terrified me, but Connie made it so understandable), teaching tools (beware of Jeopardy though, not all audiences enjoy it), and tutorials.

Are you creating or know of EBM teaching resources not already listed on the wiki? Apply to be a writer and join your colleagues! If the thought of adding yet another wetpaint wiki to your list makes you want to run screaming, please feel free to share with me and I'll add them with credit to you and your organization there. I'm not currently on the front lines teaching EBM but with evidence-based resources such as HEAL-WA now available to select practitioners in my state I'm trying to stay current.

ACRL 2009 - Peer to peer teaching/evaluating

I absolutely adore teaching online and am constantly on the lookout for strategies, methodologies and structures to enable my students to have the best learning experience possible there.

While this session was geared towards library instruction by librarians for students at the University of Alberta in a face to face setting, I wonder about the possibilities of implementing colleague peer-review teaching/observing relationships for online education and the valuable feedback that could be obtained by it.

Some teasers from my notes:

• Why experiment with peer to peer research process? A desire to share love of subject matter that shares your passion and enthusiasm, improve and enhance skills, overcome ‘silo-ization’ to talk and learn from one another
• Used a 3-step approach of Preparation, Observation phase, Closing phase
• Challenges of teacher: being observed by peers made them extremely nervous. Ironic since same academics ok with peer review of their research but threatened by having a peer in the classroom (paraphrase of Washer, 2006)

This also introduced me to skrbl, which I had not heard of before and want to check out later!

Friday Foolery #7: 'Cause rational discourse was not on the test

Tom Chapin puts into song (MP3 here) what I've been thinking for years, and why I am immensely thankful our son's teacher has a Master of Fine Arts and is not afraid to use it in her classroom even if it's not on the test or grading rubrics.

(Photo credit: success in standardized testing went to his head, by woodleywonderworks

Awareness credit: Gary Minron, Western Michigan University, who played the MP3 for us before a conference session about survey data)

Friday Foolery #3: Answer the phone and ask simple questions

On Wednesday we had a phone call just before 5am. I know for a fact nothing good ever comes from phone calls that early in the morning to our house, and sure enough a family member (who is fine) needed a ride home from the emergency room.

On Wednesday, 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Martin Chalfie received a phone call early in the morning too. He slept through it. When he awoke, he learned from the Internet that he was 1 of the 3 winners because he didn't answer the phone or think to check his voice mail that early.


(AP Photo/Harvard University, Livett- Weissman-Sanes-Lichtman)

During the 1960s Osamu Shimomura first identified the protein (GFP simply means green fluorescent protein) responsible for making a type of jellyfish that lives off the coast here glow in the dark. Chalfie demonstrated its value as a genetic marker in the 1990s after his graduate student Ghia Euskirchen was able to splice GFP into E. coli to create recombinant DNA, then he used it to mark certain neurons in C. elegans. Roger Tsien experimented with the amino acids (there are 20 in all proteins) in GFP to create a huge range of colors beyond green that can mark individual cells to study as shown in the picture above. (Source from nobelprize.org)

All this from a simple question: What makes those jellyfish glow?

What simple question do you have that might change the world?

Why is this here beyond the cool factor about anything that glows in the dark & the fact that you should always sleep lightly enough to hear the phone ring?

Genetics and biochemistry are dear to me because I was fortunate to be one of Mr. Stephen DeGusta's advanced biology high school students in the early 1990s. As a result of his connections in the field of genetic research our class was able to splice DNA several times, run them through agarose gel electrophoresis (I still have my final lab report with a picture of my gel), and do basic genetic engineering where we ligated a sequence for penicillin resistance into E. coli to create recombinant DNA then grew the cells on gels full of penicillin.

I've seen a few other shoutouts to Mr. DeGusta online, but it was about time for me to do my own. Some of my best hours in high school were spent cutting other classes and hiding in the lab behind his classroom (he knew full well I and plenty of others were back there) reading Scientific American and experimenting with planarians. Don't ask. You don't want to know.