Social Bookmarking Soul Mate

GAPCarey has a delicious account. For that small minority of you who might think that the previous sentence refers to an account with an exceedingly pleasurable taste, you are wrong. Delicious, formerly known as “del.icio.us” is, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, “a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.” In other words, GAPCarey, whose real name is a complete mystery to me, bookmarks websites that he (though for all I know GAPCarey might be a she, but for simplicity’s sake we’ll assume he’s a he) finds interesting and then shares those bookmarks with anyone in the world who wants to look at them. However, the best part about GAPCarey and his delicious account is not simply that he tags things and shares them, but rather what he tags and shares.

The top ten most common tags on GAPCarey account are, in order: science, education, biology, resources, interactive, tools, animations, web2.0, math, and teaching. The research project I am working on is about how animations can be used as interactive teaching tools to enhance medical education in specific as well as biology and science education in general. So GAPCarey and his delicious account have potential to be a really great resource for me in my research and also probably has links to a lot of interesting things that I may want to comment on in this blog. He just might be, as one of my professors would say, my “social bookmarking soul mate.” However, before we make any conclusions, let us examine GAPCarey more thoroughly so that we may be equipped to make the most accurate decision possible.

We already know what he tags. Now the question is, how does he tag? The first word that comes to mind? Prolifically. He adds probably an average of two or three new bookmarks per day and has bookmarked 831 sites using hundreds of different tagging categories. Most of the time, he doesn’t write any comments, but simply tags them the site with anywhere from one to nine different tags. Sometimes, he does have some comments, but only on about one in 20 bookmarks or so. This is slightly disappointing, because comments can give so much information about whether a site is helpful or not. However, regardless of the lack of comments, I was able to find a few really interesting sites

One of GAPCarey’s bookmarks led me to the “BioInteractive” section within the Howard Hughes Medical Institute website. This site has dozens of animations on multiple topics including, biodiversity, infectious diseases, neuroscience, cancer, obesity, evolution, immunology and DNA. I even found one of the animations about DNA replication that my molecular biology teacher showed us a few weeks ago. Another site I found through GAPCarey’s bookmarks is the Virtual Medical Centre (judging by the spelling of “centre” and by the narrator’s accent, it is a UK-based website), which has over 250 medical animations to help explain various medical conditions as well as common medical procedures. Both of these are really great resources and the quality of the animations is quite good as well.

However, while I did find these two very interesting sites, I had to sift through quite a few other less helpful bookmarks to do so. It seems that GAPCarey’s interest differ from mine in a few key ways. First, while I am mostly interested in medical and biological animations, he is interested in all fields of science. Secondly, many of GAPCarey’s bookmarks tags as “animations” contain 2d animations as well as, or instead of 3d ones. While 2d animations certainly have their place, I’m really not that interested in them for the purposes of my research or for this blog. In conclusion, then, I think that GAPCarey’s bookmarks may be a good research source for me (and for all of you who actually read my blog), but there are enough differences in our interests that we’ll still have to do a considerable amount of sorting. So as a social bookmarking soul mate, I think he gets a 7 out of 10.

New Research Project

As I’ve been doing research (and as I’ve just been going to class) I’ve realized that one of the major intersections between the fields of animation and medicine is in education. Since I’ve started this blog, both my organic chemistry professor and my molecular biology professor have used animations to help us visualize new concepts. So I decided to do some more in-depth research on animation as a teaching tool, with an emphasis on teaching science, but also in education as a whole. I went into this project assuming that the answer was self-evident: of course animation is an excellent teaching tool that helps students learn, right? The answer, as it turns out, is this: Probably. But maybe not as much as we’d think.

 

The first thing my research revealed was that there hasn’t been enough research to form a concrete conclusion. In some studies, the use of animation did facilitate learning in the test subjects. But in other studies, the test scores for students who viewed an animation was not significantly higher than those of students who viewed static images or plain text. Some researchers have suggested an explanation for this discrepancy, namely that the effectiveness of animation as a teaching tool depends heavily on the nature of the material that the animation is trying to teach as well as on the amount of non-essential information in the animation that the students have to sift through to find the pertinent material.

So, in the light of this research, I’ve decided to conduct a small study of my own, partly with the hopes of contributing to the greater body of knowledge in this area, but also out of curiosity and because my findings may benefit me in my quest to reconcile my major and minor. Also, it’s a requirement for one of my classes. In order for it to be the most helpful and the least redundant, I’ve tried to choose a research question that focuses on a specific type of learning that animation might be used in. In other words, because it is likely that animations are more effective when teaching some topics than others, I’ve tried to choose a specific kind of topic to research. So, without further ado, here is the question that my research project will attempt to answer:

Are computer animations more effective than static images for helping students visualize and learn about the three-dimensional structure of organic molecules?

How, you might ask, do I plan on accomplishing this?  The answer: a combination of a survey and an experiment. Using primarily Facebook and email messages, I plan on asking friends, family members and classmates–a relatively large and diverse demographic–to participate. Half the people will view a short animation explaining the “chair” conformation of a cyclohexane molecule, which has a very particular three-dimensional shape. The other half will view a few static images of the molecule and be able to read some text explaining the images. Both groups will then answer questions designed to determine comprehension of what they have just watched or read, as well as a few questions regarding their experience with the animation or the static images and their own opinion as to the effectiveness of each as a teaching tool. For the majority of participants, the content will likely be completely new, making it easier to assess the animations effectiveness for teaching novel information about a particular three-dimensional structure.

Hopefully, there will be a relatively large number of people who respond and the results will be representative of the population as a whole. But we’ll see.

And if you want to know the results, subscribe to the RSS feed and I’ll post updates from time to time.

Some Other Cool Blogs

While looking around at other blogs that are related to mine, I came across these two sites.
http://www.xvivo.net/blog/
http://prep4md.blogspot.com/

(And in case you are curious, here are the comments I left)

XVIVO

So as someone who is looking into pursuing a career in 3d animation, and more specifically, in biological/medical animation, I find this post intriguing, encouraging and helpful. I’m an undergrad at the University of Southern California majoring in biology and minoring in 3d animation. In my drawing class last semester, my professor’s favorite phrase that he continually drilled into our minds was “draw what you see.” It’s encouraging to know that was good training for my future career. However, your post also brings up some questions. Are art fundamentals essential to every aspect of 3d animation? I understand how they would be important for some parts of the animation process, but not all. For example, with things like texturing, lighting, and rendering, it makes perfects sense that one would need to be well acquainted with light, shadow, value, etc.  But what about things like modeling, rigging, and animating? In my class yesterday, we learned how to build skeletons for out characters and then bind the polygon mesh to it and then “paint” skin weights so that the model moves correctly with respect to the skeleton. How, in your opinion, does “art vocabulary” fit in to these components of the animation process?

Prep4med

I might have just missed it, but there doesn’t seem to be any explanation for these “Pre-Med Student” tip movies. And I was wondering: who is this guy? Is he a doctor? Does he teach at a medical school? Some of his tips in these movies seem really helpful, (and on that note, thanks for posting them) but some of them are a little more confusing. For example, in this movie he talks about choosing a major and recommends choosing one like biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, or “anything that sounds like it’s science about people.” I’m currently an undergrad at the University of Southern California and some of my professors have said almost the exact opposite. They recommend having a major (or at least a minor) in a completely different area of study. Their reasoning is that this would set you apart from the rest of the applicants who are nearly all science majors. Also, they would say, it demonstrates that you are a more well-rounded applicant and shows that you are able to handle the stress of having lots of different types of classes–an ability which is important for med school. So, as someone who is already in med school, which of these sets of advice do you think is better? 

Annotation

While doing some research on animation and it's role in biology and medicine, I found this article about it's usefulness as a teaching tool:

Ruiz, J. G., Cook, D. A., & Levinson, A. J. (2009). Computer animations in medical education: a critical literature review. Medical Education, 43(9), 838-846. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2923.2009.03429.x  

As the title suggests, this article analyses the current literature on computer animation as a tool to help teach medical students. The article “aims to illustrate potential applications of animations in medical education, to identify evidence-based principles for their design and use, and to propose an agenda for future research.” The researchers looked through articles from several databases including MEDLINE, PsychINFO, and EMBASE. The majority of these were originally studies that compared computer animations with other teaching tools, both computer-based and non-computer based. They found that the effectiveness of animations as a teaching tool varies widely, depending on the subject being taught, the type of animation, and the students’ previous knowledge on the subject. Because of the nature of the article, the bibliography is quite extensive: they reference 80 different sources, from almost as many different journals. Thus, to some degree, this paper is only as reliable as the sources upon which it is based. However, based on the origin of the sources, and after looking through a number of them, I think it safe to assume that this is article is quite a reliable source of information on this topic. Also, it presents both sides of the argument, namely that animation can sometimes be useful as a teaching tool, but other times it has been found to actually hinder learning. Overall, this article is very useful when doing research about the effectiveness of animation as a teaching tool, medical or otherwise. The bibliography was especially helpful and led me to numerous other articles on the subject. That being said, if the goal is to find new research on the topic, this article will not help.