Clams Casino

Don't gamble with your health. Skip oysters on the menu, or clams for that matter, if you live in the State of Washington. The Department of Health has issued a warning about the detection of Vibrio parahaemolyticus, a close relative of Vibrio cholerae, in oysters from local waters. Play it safe by cooking oysters thoroughly to get rid of bacteria and any taste whatsoever. You can read more and really curtail your appetite on the DOH site.

On the upside, I was about to clean my garage, but do I really want to get Hantavirus? Better leave the mess alone.

And the Winner is ....

Jing is a free screen capture and screen casting program.

Download and install was quick and easy. Jing requires the .Net Framework 3.0 which I had to download. It comes with a clever user interface complete with sunburst and popping rays. It was easy to capture the screen and resize the image. Both share and embed features worked equally well when I tried them. All the cool round buttons come with self-explanatory fly-over labels. Jing is still being developed by its creators who maintain a chatty blog instead of a help screen. Pointers usually come as Jing screen casts and are good examples of how to use Jing for teaching.

The potential for Jing in the classroom is tremendous. Every quarter, I explain at length how to navigate Angel and other websites. The NIH, WHO and, last but not least, the LWTC websites bury information remorselessly. Jing would allow me to capture screen images or screen casts, post them online and not waste precious class time.

Screen images can be edited later, but videos are not editable. With no voice over capability, sound and images are recorded simultaneously. I wrote a script to avoid painful pauses. All my embarrassing typos are on record. The screen casts do not look professional and there is no way to fix them. For short tutorials, though, they are perfectly adequate. As one creator points out, think of them as clever voice mails.

Remember that Jing is still freeware. Enjoy it while you can.

Students Information

At the beginning of the quarter I assigned homework and one of the questions was "What differential stain would be used to diagnose the following diseases?" This is a fairly standard assignment in microbiology. It emphasized the link between class information and real clinical situations. It encourages students to read on their own. The standard answer for anthrax is endospore stain. One student wrote down M'Fadyean stain which I never heard of. It turns out it is considered the gold standard, but it is not performed by most labs because it takes 1 year for the solution to be mature enough to be used (Don't ask!). Very few government labs (USDA) have this stain on hand. Her reference was the World Organisation for Animal Welfare. It is the animal equivalent of the World Health Organisation. I added the link to list on the right.

Lab Instructions for Students

Lab manuals come in two formats.

Some schools rely on published manuals, usually glossy, heavy books with photographs and illustrations, which are not as expensive as textbooks, but are not cheap either. Oftentimes, instructors use only a small fraction of the experiments either for lack of time or lack of equipment. Most four-year colleges and community colleges provide their own manuals at cost to the students. The manuals are not as visually appealing, but they are tailored to the curriculum and the equipment at hand and they are very, very cheap.

The newest trend is to load the manual online. Students download and print instructions as they go. The major advantage, of course, is that the manual can be constantly updated, improved, and modified at no cost. Links to videos and animations are embedded in the text. The manual for my class is online and I am currently fending off attempts to adopt a publisher's manual.
The document below is an example of lab instruction. The illustrations I use are in the public domain at the Public Health Library, a service of the CDC.

And the Blog Played on

The only way to learn how to blog is to write one and improve on it. Read students' comments and pay heed to them. Students certainly know what a good blog looks like.

I certainly would copy the side bar from Option Command where all the links to cool tools are parked. I will immediately start with AuthorSTREAM and PdfMeNot. Students bring laptops to class and I will link them to Web 2.0 backpack for note taking and organizing tips. I would take polls on the textbook and the individual lab instructions. I already encourage writing opinions and comments in a separate section of the lab report. It helps me teach a better course.

Last but not least, a blog will allow me to keep in touch with students who graduated. One student was pregnant during class and her baby was born a month after finals. Everyone wanted to see pictures. A blog is a good space for sharing news of alumni, provide tips about job openings, advise incoming classes on interview strategies and, yes, on how to survive Ms. Bug Lady's microbiology course.

Final Reflections

Already two weeks have gone by and it is time to submit my blog. I learned a lot in these two weeks. I wrote my first blog, learned to embellish the page with pictures, links, and loaded a Power Point presentation and video.

Here are some points I would like to make in final analysis
· The first comment I have is that to write a blog for a class will require a lot more work than I first realized. The current generation of students is also the generation that grew up with word processing, Photoshop and cool web pages. A class blog must be organized, well designed, and easy to navigate. The information must be up to-date and updated (I just discovered that the World Health Organization feed is not dynamically linked and does not change.) The blog reflects both on the college as a teaching institution and on me as an instructor. It can be quite time consuming and demanding to write a blog that meets the expectations of the class. As an example, a slide presentation on SlideShare looks better than on Scribd. It will take time and effort to select the appropriate tools.
· A blog in the case of instruction is not a personal journal. All the links must work and all the information be relevant. I read excellent blogs and blogs that looked good, but on close reading the contents were of dubious academic quality. Some blogs were pedantic, didactic, and pretentious. Others were confused and confusing. I am so glad I am not a student in those classes.
· Privacy and security are a major personal issue for historical reasons. There must be a “blogtiquette” that needs to be followed: courtesy, respectful comments, avoid unnecessary personal information and long-winded comments. I would like to take inspiration (plain English: cut and paste) from the blogging policies of IBM.
· Redundancy is also a question I would like to discuss. I post most of my teaching material on a class management tool provided by the college. A blog is open to the whole wide world. It takes discernment to decide what is to be shared and what is for the class only.
· There is no doubt that I have to learn or refresh HTML if I want to write a good blog. The beginner’s templates are great to go online in a few minutes, but the instant I wanted to add flexibility and appearance I was lost in the forest of my mistakes.
Would I use a blog for my class? Absolutely! It is too powerful an instruction tool to ignore. There is so much flexibility with a single click, too much interaction with students not to use it. Navigating Angel can be infuriating to students. It takes umpteen clicks, “OKs”, authorizations to download and other hurdles only to discover that you really don’t care about the information you reached. What a waste of time!

I announced in class that I was writing a microbiology blog for a course I was taking as part of professional development. My students’ first reaction was “What is the URL?” That sums it up, doesn’t it?

The Class Blog

Blog Lesson Idea
I intend to turn the blog to the class. I get all my writing done on the class management tool, Angel. This is the blog of the class, for the class, by the class.

Students Stories
My students already work in the field of health care. They are in the trenches. They work in pediatric emergency rooms, trauma centers, dental offices, and last but not least the meat department at the local supermarket; they see it all.

I would like them to write down the wealth of information they share briefly in class. Usually we don’t have enough time to hear the full story and many questions are left unanswered. I have learned so much from each class and want new students to benefit from the knowledge of their predecessors. As an example, a student told me about a musician friend of hers. He ended up in the hospital with a mysterious ailment that baffled the medical staff. It was anthrax that he contracted from the animal skins he was priming to build a drum. Many students had malaria. One student battled TB for a year. She is not yet out the proverbial woods.

Power Point Presentations Library
Every quarter students write a research paper on an infectious disease of their choice. The paper must be accompanied by a 5-8 minute oral presentation. The papers are usually a solid piece of work, well researched and well written, except for one or two duds. The power point presentations are wonderful. They really grab your attention. For some students, health care is a second career; they come from graphic arts or marketing, and does it show in their work! I would like these presentations to be available as a reference source for future classes. See an example below.

Read this doc on Scribd: Anthrax presentation

Microbes in the News
Students review online a news article from the general press on microbes and society. I can always count on Salmonella, E. coli, or methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) to rear their ugly little heads somewhere in the country.

Microbe of the Week
Discuss in some details one important pathogen a week focusing on its biology and identification rather than the pathology.

“From my teachers, I learned much. From my peers, I learned more. But it is from my students that I learned the most.” – Babylonian Talmud: Mak. 10a; Tan., Ta'an. 7a

Gram Stain

Hans Christian Gram was a Danish doctor working in Berlin during the Golden Age of Microbiology. The staining procedure named after him, the Gram stain, was published in 1884. It is the most commonly used technique in microbiology. The music is a reminder of the fact that a Gram stain is one part science and two parts art and practice. To this day, we don't understand how it actually works. Notice that the demonstrator is left handed. Most lab instructions are oblivious of that simple fact, and directions are for the right handed only.

I drew a flow chart of the Gram stain in Adobe Illustrator for my students. I recommend laminating your copy.

It's DNA Day!

April 25 has been designated DNA day. The April 25, 1953 issue of Nature marked a milestone in science. Three papers reported on the structure of DNA. The papers are considered classics and everyone cites them without reading them. So be original, download and read them.

The discovery of the structure of the double helix was one of the most exciting development of science in the twentieth century-- I am prejudiced here--and one of the most sordid tales of scientific competition and machiavellian chicanery. A student in my Cell Biology class pointed me to this site for a blow-by-blow account of the race to the double helix.

It has been more than 50 years since the double helix took center stage in biological sciences and DNA still spins its magic.

Visit the site of the NHGRI (National Human Genome Research Institute) for DNA activities. It is all about us, you, me, the lowly fruitfly, and the splendid E. coli.

Happy DNA day!

Don't throw that cheese yet!

In honor of Earth day I will address a stinking problem: when do you throw food away? I have an apocalyptic view of life. Soon we will all starve and you just don't throw food away. My husband is of "the better safe than sorry" persuasion and will toss anything that is remotely suspicious such as good apples with a brown dimple.

So I went to the source, if you will, the Food and Drug Administration, which offers some recommendation on what to keep and what to throw.

I guess I will have to throw those green fuzzy tomatoes now.

Bon appetit!