I had the privilege of presenting yesterday at the "1st Annual Symposium on Teaching and Learning" at Southern Illinois University-School of Medicine in Springfield (my alma mater!). I am uploading a pdf of the slides from the presentation. This is my (very!) preliminary experience from last fall teaching the organ-specific lung section of the second-year pathology course at Rush Medical College in Chicago using a course blog (Lung Sounds) and Twitter profile (@lungsounds) to enhance the traditional curricular format of textbook, lectures and course syllabus.
It is interesting that there was not more participation on either the blog or Twitter. One of the comments in the discussion is that Twitter may not have yet caught on in the med-student age group. Maybe. Another was that the students may need more "hands-on" in-class development of groups before migrating to social networking groups. One suggestion was to have break-out small groups discuss a simulated case prior to the formal lecture presentation. This is a work-in-progress. I am considering using a Facebook course page for a proposal next year that would incorporate the ideas behind the blog/Twitter. An M2 student I spoke with has informed me about Google-Wave which has some interesting possibilities. Anyone else using social networking sites in their teaching?
Mark --
Very interesting. Also agree with Brian - this may present a stepping stone to completely remote "unattended" lectures via podcast or social media type tools.
Keith
Posted by: Keith J Kaplan MD | February 10, 2010 at 09:56 PM
I attended Dr. Pool's presentation at SIU. It was excellent! It is my personal opinion that the pathology lecture should die off completely, to be replaced by full-length podcasting of lectures. That will leave more time for students to engage in the social network-based learning that Dr. Pool is talking about.
Posted by: Brian E. Moore, MD | February 05, 2010 at 10:54 PM
Dr Pool, I would suggest you to try PathXchange.org. PathXchange is a professional networking community specifically for pathologists. It provides web 2.0 enabled capabilities to create case/ course galleries using whole slide images. You create student group and post your cases, courses, tests, forum discussions, etc and connect with peers. Its also one of the first peer-reviewed pathology knowledge base. Membership is free.
Posted by: Sampath | February 04, 2010 at 11:17 AM