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Contents: For my seminar report, I decided to prepare a public library web portal to interactive biology sites, specifically those dealing with anatomy and dissection. Personally, I have no real science background—I took the required Biology and Chemistry courses in high school, and an Astronomy (physics) class in college, but my fascination with dissection, anatomy, and how the body works is purely extra-curricular. I am a bit (<---understatement of the year) obsessive about frogs, a fascination which began in my high school biology class. (Read the story, which I used as my primary college admission essay, here.) But, as an active vegetarian and animal lover, the idea of dissecting an actual animal no longer appeals to me in the slightest. And since I will never ever ever go to medical school, I will never have the opportunity to examine an actual corpse. (Quite honestly, dead animals kind of freak me out—when my cats killed a mouse several years ago, I picked it up with a whole wad of paper towels and threw it out the window, and was compulsively washing my hands for the rest of the day. Kind of a Lady MacBeth syndrome, with out the guilt, or some such.) However, I am absolutely fascinated by anatomy. When I was living in Berlin, Germany, there was a traveling exhibit there called Körperwelt, which is a collection of human bodies that have been preserved by a method called plastination. Some of the bodies are more or less intact, but most have been converted into a sort of art, to display the various systems in the body (for instance, there is a life-size model of the circulatory system, made from somebody's actual circulatory system, and a body in which the chest cavity has been turned into a sort of drawer). It sounds disgusting and horrifying, but it is absolutely entrancing. (If anybody is curious, I have a video!) The closest thing I could find to it online is The Virtual Human: http://www.madsci.org/~lynn/VH/. Beware, this site is not for the faint of stomach. The online dissections and information I have found are amazing, and highly recommended for ambitious learners of all ages. They are also great for biology students who are unable to handle the real thing. (One girl in my high school biology class, while the rest of us threw frog limbs around the room, did research in the library. One of these sites would have been perfect for her!) And now, for a much more formal explanation of my project. According to an article published in Innovations in Education and Teaching International in 2002 (Lin et al. 2002), there are four modes of information processing, or "cognitive preference": Recall, or learning by rote; Principles, or learning by explanation of principles or relationships; Questioning, or using critical thinking to examine and understand information; and Application, where the information is used to solve real-life problems. Students are fairly adaptable, and will, in general, learn to "prefer" those modes that are favored by their teachers. Individuals certainly have their own preferences, and until recently the most popular cognitive preferences were Principles and Questioning. With the new advances in Science-Technology, however, modes of learning have shifted, and presently students seem to prefer Application above all, with an even more pronounced shift away from the already unpopular Recall. "Biology teaching and practice, as in all the domains of science teaching, mainly relies on visualisations of the relationship between anatomic structure and biological functions" (Mikropoulos 2003). Visualization and manipulation are two of the most productive methods of education. The internet offers the opportunity for users to utilize their powers of visualization and create their own images, and the simulations that they work with help them understand abstract concepts more easily. By directing independent learners to websites that involve visualization and manipulation of models, we are encourage healthy, productive extracurricular education. Children learn from doing, creating, and experimenting, more than by being talked at and drilled. "While a significant part of learning certainly comes from teaching--but good teaching and by good teachers--a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself"(Negropointe 1996). The web, and the interactive websites that I suggest, all encourage this "doing" and "experimenting." When students have to be involved with a learning activity, they're more likely to retain what they learn; they question how things work and immediately apply what they learn. It's much harder to forget what you learn when you've already used it and thus truly understand it. It is unrealistic to expect classroom teachers to be able to keep up with the students' growing propensity for constant interactive, hands-on learning. "The strength of school environmental factors makes it difficult to introduce standalone inquiry-based activities into a classroom. In many classrooms and schools, students are accustomed to seeking correct answers and producing work that meets clear specifications, laid out in advance" (Wallace et al. 2000) The independent initiative that the internet encourages is tough to nurture in the classroom, without encouraging all-out chaos. The Internet Project movement is definitely a step in the right direction, but for some students it isn't enough. For this reason, I believe that it is doubly important that independent investigation and discovery be encouraged in the public library, where students aren't limited by curriculum and syllabi. Furthermore, for a library with the goal of creating lifelong learners, having portals to enhance scientific learning for adolescents is an excellent way to contribute to that goal. "To help students become lifelong science learners, we can encourage them to integrate what they know... We mean that process of comparing ideas, distinguishing cases, identifying the links and connections among notions, seeking evidence to resolve uncertainty, and sorting out valid relationships" (Linn and Hsi 2000). Although we may hate to admit it, we all know that there are things that the internet (and computer software in general) can simply do better than any book can. Although I have designed this portal with a public library setting in mind, it would certainly be useful in a school as well. For schools that don't have the materials required for an actual dissection, the online resources may be crucial to meet the objectives that the actual biology lab would fulfill. Likewise, in schools that don't have instructors qualified to supervise in-depth biology labs (for instance, small rural schools), the online 3-D simulations will prove invaluable. And for students who are morally opposed to or afraid of an actual dissection, the virtual versions present very acceptable alternatives. In fact, in a study of undergraduate biology students, those who did their rat dissection using dissection software (developed using Macromedia's Dreamweaver Attain) scored better on the subsequent multiple choice quiz than students doing a conventional rat dissection (Prevadec 2001). Not only does the online dissection provide clear labels and immediate answers to the students' queries, the students were able to work without the distraction of "the smell and blood" (Mikropoulos et al. 2003). And even students who do take part in an actual dissection may feel more comfortable if they are able to view or take part in a virtual version prior to or concurrent with their labwork. For teachers concerned with educational outcomes, here are some of the standards that are met by activities done on internet anatomy and dissection sites. Standards for students in grades 5-8 Science as Inquiry:
Life Sciences:
Standards for students in grades 9-12 Science as Inquiry:
Life Sciences:
These are only a few of the most obvious standards that may be met by the interactive websites that can be accessed from this portal. Those sites listed that provide more content-driven than an interactive/simulation-based will, of course, fulfill more of the theoretical aspects of the standards, such as scientific history, biological interdependence, and data analysis. Any active involvement in the Frogwatch organization would be particularly useful in developing data collection and analysis skills. My hope is that making these sites easily accessible to the young patrons of the public library will inspire them to delve more deeply into the world of scientific inquiry. These sites should help visitors enjoy achieving the academic objectives listed above in a way that strongly appeals to adolescents and young adults: by pushing the bounds of decency and emphasizing, as much as possible, the "gross-out" factor. Now you know my rationale behind developing this site. To tour Interactive Anatomy, click here. Fleck, Earl W.. Virtual Fetal Pig Dissection, from Computer Enhanced Learning: 100 Courses at 50 of America's Most Wired Colleges. Wake Forest (1999). Online at: http://www.whitman.edu/biology/vpd/VPDVignette.html Lin, Chen-yung, Yeong-jing Cheng, Yung-ta Chang, and Reping Hu. "The Use of Internet-Based Learning in Biology," Innovations in Education and Teaching International 39 (2002): 237-242. Linn, Marcia C., and Sherry Hsi. "Overview," from Computers, Teachers, Peers: Science Learning Partners. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (2000). Online at http://clp.berkeley.edu/CLP/pages/overview.html. Mikropoulos, Tassos A., Apostolos Katsikis, Eugenia Nikolou, Panayiotis Tsakalis, "Virtual environments in biology teaching," Journal of Biological Education, 37, No. 4 (2003): 176-181. Mulrine, Anna. "Skipping the Formaldehyde." U.S. News & World Report 135, no. 13 (2003): 64-65. Negroponte, Nicholas. "Hard Fun," from Being Digital. Rockport, MA: Open Book Systems (1996). Online at: http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/ch16c02.htm. Predavec, M. "Evaluation of E-Rat, a computer-based rat dissection, in terms of student learning outcomes," Journal of Biological Education 35, no. 2 (2003): 75-80. Wallace, Raven McCrory, Jeff Kupperman, Joseph Krajcik, and Elliot Soloway. "Science on the Web: Students Online in a Sixth-Grade Classroom." Journal of Learning Sciences 9, no. 8 (2000): 75-104. I would like to thank my professional website designer, Nathaniel Wilson (also known as Brother), who made all of my design ideas a reality. 'Cause he's nifty and things. And I would like to thank my wonderful computer, Eric, for always being there for me. You're the best! |
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