Biomedical Multimedia Unit News

This is probably old news, but while looking up possible technologies for streaming my friends’ wedding to another friend overseas, I found this:

http://www.dimdim.com/

It’s an open source web-conferencing tool - which is kind of cool in itself, but he thing which pricked my interest was that it’s already been integrated into moodle! Watch the launch video to see details.

I came across this article on Wired which reviews the major players in the social networking arena (as far as students may be concerned).

It’s an interesting array - perhaps the audit trails could supply some data about usage among our students? I know personally among my peers, it was all myspace until about two months ago, when there seemed to be a mass exodus in favour of facebook.

Whenever I walk through the labs, there’s usually at least one person who, at a glance, is obviously on facebook. But I rarely see anyone accessing myspace anymore. Although that could just be because myspace pages are harder to recognise, given the level of customisation available.

I often wonder if we spend too much time worrying about a student’s ability to grasp interaction in our work. It might be that we need to improve the intuitiveness of our interface designs, or it could just be an overzealousness to cater for the lowest-common-denominator student. Surely there’s something to be said for the value of explorational learning models?

In any case, I stumbled across this simple shockwave game on Digg. There is one line of instructional text for the entire game, which incorporates 36 different modes of interaction. The user is left to figure out how each level works. It relies on the user’s desire to explore and solve each puzzle, which could be compared to a student’s desire to access information through multimedia, in our work context.

http://ece4co.vis.ne.jp/sw/2007/05/post_16.html 

Perhaps we should consider more simple, elegant means of presenting content?

With a large (and increasing?) proportion of University students coming from overseas, I thought this little article about emoticons might be interesting (if not directly pertinent to what we do)…

Emoticons carry cultural baggage

I’ve been looking into what SL might have to offer education for medical and other health sciences professionals, since I heard the suggestion that it might be good for PBL. I though that notes of my preliminary researches might be of interest to others: 

Three places to find out more about who’s doing what:

Health education in SL wiki http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Health_Education  

SL roundtable in March on health education and medical training http://audiocourses.pbwiki.com/medic_150307

SL healthcare support and education mailing list (and archives) https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/healthcare 

Three sources of blogging in, about, for or with SL

http://scienceroll.com/2007/04/16/medicine-in-second-life-virtual-doctors-hospitals-and-of-course-sperm-donation/

http://secondlifemedicallibrary.blogspot.com/

https://blogs.usask.ca/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=248&search=second+life

… and a heart murmur sim for SL  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJY2Iwbzop4&eurl=

This interview was broadcast on the Radio National breakfast program in October 2006. In view of our changing student body, I thought it might be of some interest.

Now to the NEO… Never heard of them? They’re a group not easily defined, but one that makes decisions with one thing in mind—themselves. They resent being labelled, but some are dubbing them the New Economic Order, or NEO. And according to consumer behaviourist, Ross Honeywill, they are a product of the new information age.

For five years Ross Honeywill and social scientist, Verity Blyth have surveyed 500,000 people to find out more. They’ve just published Neo power: How the new economic order is changing the way we live, work and play.

http://demo.bmu.unimelb.edu.au/media/neo.mp3

So a new player is emerging on the social networking/filesharing horizon. Called Scribd (because of course as a web 2.0 site, it has to drop a vowel) this page utilises the Flash paper format (a streamlined web competitor to PDF) and allows users to tag, share and even download the document - in MS Word or PDF formats usually.

The interface leaves a little to be desired, but no doubt they’ll change it as time goes on. In any case, something worth exploring, and I especially recommend we all read this.

I confess that I had never thought about the home entertainment value of my medical imaging records until I read this account of how to “geek out with your own body”.   Is this a new twist on an evening of watching someone’s travel slides, do you think? Thanks to Quinn Norton and others in Wired’s biotech blog:  http://blog.wired.com/biotech/2007/01/tumor_strange_d.html 

In an interesting development, Victorian public schools look set to ban YouTube, in an effort to curb ‘cyber bullying’.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21306297-5006785,00.html

So much for person of the year…

I recently started listening to the ‘60 second science’ podcast, put out by Scientific American.

A little something from Monday’s podcast that might be of interest - it’s about teaching methods.