Kindle in Medicine

Kindle is a new device that is changing the face of reading. The best of the current lot of e-book readers, Kindle is a boon for medical students and professionals, allowing them access to hundreds of books on the go!. Kindle, now in its third avatar, the Kindle Dx (Deluxe) boasts of advanced features, like PDF support (experimental) , longer battery life, 5-way Controller and sleeker design.

Check out more features here.. You can view it from all angles, zoom into any area and look at its features.

Using Kindle in Medicine

* Easy for medical students to keep up with all their scheduled reading. You can download and read reference materials that you have read previously to refresh your memory.You can seek out new textbooks to look for answers too.
* Seeking out symptoms, conditions, and other relevant information is easy.You can view photos on the Kindle if you need to see pictures of various signs and symptoms conditions.
* Study medical texts and highlight portions of texts / make notes on the Kindle as you go. Zoom into images for micro details.Bookmark and annotate important portions.
* Research can be done on its built-in web browser ( experimental feature) , no need to carry a laptop to access the internet.It offers free Wireless access to Wikipedia
* .Multiple books can be read at once, no need to carry a JUMBO Grey”s anatomy or Robbin”s Pathology encyclopedias !! It boasts of storage capacity of 1500 / 3500 books, depending on the Model.
* You can listen to music while you read.
* Inbuilt Text-to-Speech feature lets you listen to your favorite books.

It has a clear policy for returning the instrument or any content bought ( within 7 days of purchase) and also One year limited warranty. The kindle library boasts of more than 300,000 books for download, and many more added regularly. Priced at 300 and 500 $$ , and weighing approx. 300 and 500 grams (depending on the model) it is still too pricey for open embracing of this technology. Some libraries have started lending out Kindles ( with preloaded content) to its patrons.

Personally speaking , i can see a lot of content being adapted for Kindle, provided the machine becomes less expensive.
Also , many more wireless features ( like chat, email, videos etc) need to be added. If more such functionality is added to justify its high prices, i expect a LARGE number of medical students turning to Kindle.

Related articles

• Video: What Can Amazon Kindle 2 Do for You? (casesblog.blogspot.com)
• Kindle Books: The Art of the Sample Chapter (poynter.org)

Scientic animations awards ceremony, China

The 1st Annual International Science Animation Awards being held August 8th 2009 in Guiyang China

Deadline for DVD submissions to “Sci-An” Awards is July 15th 2009

Guiyang, China (PRWEB) June 17, 2009 — Honoring the works of visual wonder that depict what science perceives beyond our eyes, The 1st Annual International Science Animation Awards (ISAA) are being presented in Guiyang, China August 8th 2009.

The ISAA “Sci-An” will be awarded for 2D and 3D works that demonstrate both the highest achievements in scientific and medical communication and superb attention to aesthetic, creative and technical presentation

” This is an industry that will grow exponentially with the compounding demands from various science sectors in the years ahead “

This year marks the first in what will be an annual juried salon, bringing together in China the work of scientific animators from around the world. Professional and student work is welcome, and will be judged separately.

The event will include presentations and panels with industry leaders from across Asia, the United States and Europe.

The two judging categories are commercial and educational, in short form of under three minutes’ run time. Long form work and compilations from longer projects may be entered and will be evaluated separately.

“The need for recognition in this dynamic emerging field has grown to the point of launching this inaugural event” said founding co-chairman, Sander Johnson, who with founding co-chair, David Bolinsky initiated the concept for this international forum at last year’s Guiyang Animation Festival, in Guiyang, China. That festival is the launch for this year’s Sci-An Awards, which will next year become an independent event.

“Hosting this unique forum and awards ceremony in China truly invites pan-Asian and East-West interaction with leaders in the industries and major universities” said Bolinsky, a leading American creator of 3D scientific animation for Harvard University Medical, the Smithsonian, most major pharmaceutical companies, NOVA and additional broadcast clients. “And it promotes further advances in these various industries of science and animation”.

ISAA General Secretary, Liuyi Wang, founding Director of China’s Asian Youth Animation & Comics Contest sees great benefit in highlighting achievements in these advanced new fields of science animation as 21st Century career paths for talented young computer animators. “This is an industry that will grow exponentially with the compounding demands from various science sectors in the years ahead” said Wang.

ISAA “Sci-An” Awards will be given to first, second and third place, plus awards of merit and best in show. The judges this year will include David Bolinsky, XVIVO Scientific Animation Partner; Jane Hurd, Hurd Studios Founder; and Elizabeth Rega, chief anatomical consultant Walt Disney Feature Animation and SONY Pictures Imageworks, with prominent Asia judges to be announced soon.

Deadline for submission is July 15th 2009 and entries cannot be returned.

In welcoming all applications; there are no entry fees required with submissions.

Applications can be downloaded from www.ayacc.org/Sci-Ansubmissionform

Healthcare and emerging technologies

OBBeC.com: Healthcare and Emerging Rich Web Technologies – The WEB 2.0/Semantic Web Challenge and Opportunity

With the advent of 2009, I was looking for something to overview the present situation in Health Informatics. Healthcare related use of the internet is a common phenomenon and an estimated 80% of internet users have used it for obtaining health information. Knowledge body in Health sciences is large and fragmented, and even a treating physician may not have all the data he requires.

There is an urgent need for tools that can aggregate information from
multiple sources to improve health care decision making, enhance health
management, and produce better patient outcomes. This is one of the
main drivers for the use of the Internet in healthcare.

Semantic Web applications and Web 2.0 technologies have yet to be applied to health care.  Privacy issues are of concern, but use of cloud computing within health care delivery system just cannot be held back. Every person has a fundamental right to health, which includes easy access to high quality and best possible care and access to medical information, besides other parameters.

- Podcasting from Yale medical library-

screencasting-and-podcasting-experience-of-the-yale-medical-library-presentation

Screencasting and Podcasting: Experience of the Yale Medical Library

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cla yale)

Podcasting@ Yale

Yale medical library published an interesting study-cum-project-cum-guide for use of screencasts and podcasts by medical learners.

The study finds many more off-campus users of the medical podcasts and videos than on-campus users. Not surprisingly, the cost benefits were very obvious. What i found particularly arresting was the suggestion of using only 1 to 3 minute long videos for teaching purposes. I would have thought that Ten minute videos would prove very effective. But apparently, yale students have difficulty viewing high quality content for more than a couple of minutes!!

See this slideshow for the complete report.

Screencasting and Podcasting: Experience of the Yale Medical Library

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cla yale)

Screencasting and Podcasting: Experience of the Yale Medical Library

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cla yale)

E-learning in Medical education

The use of elearning in medical education: a review of the current situation — Choules 83 (978): 212 — Postgraduate Medical Journal

Computers are increasingly used in medical education. Electronic learning (elearning) is moving from textbooks in electronic format (that are increasingly enhanced by the use of multimedia adjuncts) to a truly interactive medium that can be delivered to meet the educational needs of students and postgraduate learners. Computer technology can present reliable, reusable content in a format that is convenient to the learner. It can be used to transcend geographical boundaries and time zones. It is a valuable tool to add to the medical teacher’s toolkit, but like all tools it must be used appropriately. This article endeavours to review the current “state of the art2 in use of elearning and its role in medical education alongside non-electronic methods—a combination that is currently referred to as “blended” learning.

Read the full article on BMJ health intelligence.

Everyday things i do, put here concisely.

eLearn: Feature Article

Ten Web 2.0 Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes to Be a More Successful E-learning Professional
By Stephen Downes, National Research Council Canada

The following list was inspired by eLearn Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lisa Neal’s blog post “Ten Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes To Be a More Successful e-learning Professional.” We’d like to offer the “Web 2.0 Edition” of Lisa’s list:

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1. Listen to a conference presentation. When you run across conference presentations while reading your RSS feeds (EDUCAUSE Connect is a prime source, as is OLDaily), save the conference site as a bookmark and revisit it to hear a presentation.
2. Record a 10-minute presentation about something you are working on or learning about, either as audio (use Odeo) or video (use Ustream), and post it on your blog.
3. Do a search on the title of your most recent post or on the title of the most recent thing you’ve read or thought about. Don’t just use Google search, use Google Blog Search and Google Image Search, Amazon, del.icio.us, Technorati, Slideshare, or Youtube. Scan the results and if you find something interesting, save it in del.icio.us to read later.
4. Write a blog post or article describing something you’ve learned recently. It can be something you’ve read or culled from a meeting, conference notes (which you just capture on the fly using a text editor), or a link you’ve posted to del.icio.us. The trick here is to keep your writing activity to less than 10 minutes—make a point quickly and then click “submit.”
5. Tidy your e-portfolio. For example, upload your slides to Slideshare and audio recordings to Odeo and embed the code in your presentation page. Or write a description and link to your latest publication. Or update your project list.
6. Create a slide on Zoho. Just do one slide at a time; find an image using the Creative Commons licensed content on Flickr and a short bit of text from a source or yourself. Add this to your stick of prepared slides you use for your next talk or class.
7. Find a blogger you currently read in your RSS reader and go to their website. Follow all the links to other blogs in their blogroll or feedroll, or which are referenced in their posts. Well, maybe not all the links, or it will take hours, not ten minutes.
8. Write a comment on a blog post, article, or book written by an e-learning researcher or practitioner.
9. Go to a website like Engadget, Metafilter, Digg, Mixx, Mashable, or Hotlinks and skip through the items. These sites produce much too much content to follow diligently, but are great for browsing and serendipitous discovery. If you find something interesting, write a short blog post about it or at least a comment.
10. Catch up on one of your online games with a colleague—Scrabulous on Facebook or Backgammon on Yahoo. Or make a Lolcat. Or watch a Youtube video.

Edutools for medical education

Edheads – Virtual Hip Surgery – Total Hip Replacement Surgery – THR

Follow this link and perform virtual surgery.
A great tool with immense potential in medical education..
Virtual Hip Replacement :

Take on the role of the Surgeon throughout a hip replacement surgery!

My baby steps with moodle :)

The best open source LMS in the netiverse ” Moodle “
Easy to create and easy to use.
Online support available.
and its FREE!!

Learning with an i-Phone or an iPod.

About iTouch Learning

Both the iPod Touch and the iPhone use the same multi-touch interface
(shown in the picture to the left);

you control everything with your fingers.

They both have the traditional iPod
functionality to listen to audio (music/podcasts/audiobooks/MP3 files) but also
to watch videos (MPEG-4 files) and view photos.

But they are more than just an iPod
as they now also have on-board Internet applications which include:

• Safari web browser
  - to search the web using the touchscreen QWERTY keyboard
  

• Mail reader
  - to read HTML videos and Word, Excel and PDF attachments
  

• YouTube player – to locate and view YouTube videos
  

• Maps reader – to get directions and check
  traffic with Google Maps
  

Read more by clicking here….