AECOM Faculty Retreat Appropriate and Effective Use of Computers in Education

Group B - Belfer 1111
Evaluating Resources on the Web

Computer based material can be developed locally or obtained and incorporated from an outside source. This exercise will look at the second step in using material from outside: evaluating the quality. Although there are a variety of sources for computer based material, there has been a major shift towards developing and providing resources on the web. This exercise will provide so known medical web sites and explore how the quality of these sites can be evaluated. There are four parts to this exercise. All of the web sites referred to in this exercise have been organize on the page you are viewing : http://cobweb.aecom.yu.edu/ooe/meetings/aeuce/eval.html>

I) Each participant will link to <http://www-medlib.med.utah.edu/WebPath/FEMHTML/FEMIDX.html> and evaluate the quality. Discuss as a group your initial impressions of this site.

II) Each participant will evaluate a site from the list below. Refer to the number in the participant list to determine your assignment.

Name of participant	Evaluate site:
1) Mathew Berger	<http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~hurlbert/>
2) Christopher Cimino	<http://www.med.ucla.edu/wilkes/intro.html>
3) Morris Edelman	<http://www-medlib.med.utah.edu/WebPath/webpath.html>
4) Richard Hays	<http://www.mcl.tulane.edu/departments/anesthesiology/acidbase/henderson.html>
5) David Lawrence	<http://esg-www.mit.edu:8001/esgbio/cb/cbdir.html>
6) Shirley Levine	<http://www.med.umich.edu/lrc/cardiax/cardiaxnew/cardiax.html>
7) Judie Malamud	<http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/home.html>
8) Mimi McEvoy	<http://PedsCCM.wustl.edu/HYPERTEXT/Text.html>
9) Martin Nachbar	<http://www.meddean.luc.edu/lumen/DeptWebs/microbio/med/gram/gram-stn.htm>
10) Todd Olson	<http://vhgallery.gsm.com> (user name "Simply" password "Amazing")
11) Douglas Simon	<http://www.gi.ucalgary.ca/sponsors/abbott/slide_show/index.html>
12) Howard Steinman	<http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/gcrc/gene/try.htm>
13) George Sullivan	<http://www.agricola.umn.edu/owc/>
14) Steve Walkley	<http://www.anatomy.wisc.edu/>
15) Eleanor Wallace	<http://www.merck.com/pubs/>
16) Karen Weidenheim	<http://www.dote.hu/~hegedus/index.html>

Discuss what you found with the group. Consider the quality of the site from three different aspects: how easy is it to interact with this site, was the educational content good, and would it be easy to use this material in a course?

III) If you know of a site of interest to you. Look at it again now with the idea of evaluating it for your group. If you do not have a particular site in mind you can either choose a different site that interests you from exercise II or use a search site to find a new site to evaluate. Discuss your results as a group.

IV) Prepare a summary presentation of what your group learned for presentation to the entire group. Possible topics include: Can the ease of use of a site be separated from the educational content? Are there particular topic areas where the sites are easy to use? Are there particular topic areas where the content is of good quality? Are there particular types of material (e.g. images, text simulation) that tend to be easy to use or of good content quality? What types of material seems like it would be easy to integrate into an existing AECOM course? Would adjustments be needed in the course to allow for this?