Biomedical Multimedia Unit News

… to help create the next generation of better surgeons.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/fun.games/02/19/surgery.games.reut/

… and you find yourself wanting to doodle, try this out:

http://www.squidsoup.org/doodle

Recently a very clever short introduction to the meaning of web 2.0 was posted to you … if you guessed tube you’d be correct. The poster is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology Michael Wesch from Kansas State University.

It’s very good.

In the three months since Gregor posted about that Amazing Interface, it seems that a company named Perceptive Pixel has taken the technology and run fill-tilt with it.

Health information technology meets modern parenthood, in this example of an item  that might interest some BMU colleagues personally as well as professionally: Upgrade Your Baby. Courtesy of Dale Hunscher, a self-defined “socio-geek” working in clinical research informatics at the University of Michigan Medical School.

Now, I know this blog is supposed to be about our work, but I like to think that as a group, we share more than just our interests in education and technology. With the recent quandaries as to what is and is not appropriate to post on here, I thought I’d test the boundaries a little, and post a link to an online ecological footprint calculator.
I like to think I’m pretty energy/environmentally conscious – the results of this prove I’m a little deluded. According to my results, we’d need 3.0 planets to support everyone living my lifestyle. My global footprint is 5.7 hectares. What is yours?

Announced over the new year, Time’s “Person of the Year” is “You” — that’s also me and everyone. We’re all persons of the year because we’re contributing user-generated content as pro-sumers. The Time edition goes on to profile the aspects of Web 2.0 that have become familiar — YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, OhMyNews — and some that aren’t so familiar. For example, I learned that a “mil-blogger” is a US miltary blogger and there are at least 1,200 out there.

Again, relating to the Net Gen and Digital Natives projects, how can we think about user-generated content — which by definition is active, voluntary, and self-directed with intrinsic motivation — in terms of educational settings, which may include externally imposed direction requiring extrinsic motivation?

Roger sent this over to me and is an interesting direction for the BBC in the UK.

www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6290585.stm

“A virtual world which children can inhabit and interact with is being planned by the BBC.”

I am not sure what this ‘channel’ will allow children to actually do … even less clear are educational implications or spin offs, if any. I suppose it is big media trying to capture what people are already doing on the web and morphing it into another, familiar medium …

It does raise a question for me about capturing what people (e.g. undergrad students) are doing for entertainment purposes and harnessing them for educational purposes. What are the implications of taking social or entertainment-based activities (e.g. social networking, blogging) and importing them into more formal and structured educational environments. This is part of what we are thinking about in the Net Gen and Digital Natives projects.

www.bmu.unimelb.edu.au/research/netgen/index.html

www.bmu.unimelb.edu.au/research/munatives/index.html

Kevin sent this around and is concerned about putting it up on the Blog. (That is perhaps unfair and I just wanted to beat him to it.)

Interesting to see our very own students using YouTube in this way …

Man … look at the amount of food they have …

Following the entry on 20 Nov 2006 “Amazing Interface”, Billy’s noticed the multi-touch interface in Apple’s iPhone. While it’s still early, since no one’s had a chance to play with an iPhone yet, it’s interesting to note the initial concerns for accessibility that are popping up.

Advances such as this raise questions about accessibility for the visually impaired (no raised keys) and those with limited physical mobility. Granted, these issues might be addressed before the product is released. However, they still raise questions for educational designers who might aim to include this kind of interface in educational technology.