Bioinformatics learning

A forum for discussion on learning bioinformatics tools

Monday, April 17, 2006

Bio-researchers wanted

Announcement:
For my analysis as described in this blog, I would like to interview Bio-reasearchers of all kinds. The individuals for the interview should be both students and akademic staff, that are either very good at using bioinformatic tools, ok or who have not got a clue on how or where to start. With bioinformatic tools, I mean e.g. using databases as BLAST, sequence alignment tools like ClustalX/W or other useful internet/PC-devices.

The objective of the interview is to identify some ways to do a better instruction of bioinformatics such as: Should one use book or hyperlinks as teaching material, are courses needed or are tutorials enough, what are the qualities of an informative and usable bioinformatic tool?

The interview can be in English or Danish and it can be either live (in Copenhagen) or by phone. Your identity will be anonymous in the final report. The interview will last approximately 30 minuttes.
If you would like to participate please contact Sine Zambach, sinez@itu.dk or by phone: (+45) 21235533

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Sources of the project

Material I intend to use in my project about learning bioinformatics tools

Empiric
- I helped teaching in the workshops of Introduction to bioinformatics (with extensive and useful quantitative lecture- and tool specific evaluation from more than 30 Biochemistry and Biology students)
- I will to do some qualitative research using some representative bio-researchers from the different segments that I will work with.

Theoretical
Methods litterature and IT literacy
The Media Book, Newbold, Boyd-Barrett and Van den Bulck, Oxford University press, 2002:
- Ch 2 “Tools for studying the Media” by Hilde Van den Bulck: Using the ideas and basis for qualitative and quantitative methods
- Ch 7 “Advertising and Marketing” by Rachel Eyre and Michel Walrave: Using the segmentation of user-profiles on the users of bioinformatics tools.
- Ch 8 “Interactive Electronic Media” by Gillian Youngs and Oliver Boyd-Barret: Using the “distance learning”-methods. (no - it has nothing to do with distance phylogeny methods)
- Livingstone, Sonia: Media Literacy and the Challenge of new Information and Communication Technologies, The Communication Review, vol 7, 3-14, 2004


Bioinformatics maintaining litterature
- Campbell, A. Malcolm: Public acess for Teaching Genomicsm Proteomics, and Bioinformatics. Cell Biology Education, Vol. 2, 98-111, 2003
- Andersson, S. et al: Theory Anchored evaluation applied to a CSCL intense course in Bioinformatics



Please don't hesitate with suggesting more sources on the subject. I know there are some material about teaching Bioinformatics but I can't find it right now...

Monday, April 03, 2006

Sine: bioinformatic-tag

Welcome to Bioinformatics learning

This blog is created while working with a project on ITU in the course: Medier og Kommunikation 2006.
The aim of the project by now is to segment the (potential) users of biologic information on the internet, and thereby try to investigate how their knowledge and use of the tools could be improved.