One of the most useful tools in teaching computer literacy are screen capture software. These software allow you to record your screen and is valuable if you want other people to see what you see in your own computer.
Medhacks recommends two tools for this purpose: Wink (www.debugmode.com) and Camtasia (free version) at www.camtasia.org. Of the two, Wink has the advantage of cross-platform capability (Windows and Linux) while Camtasia works only in Windows.
If you have presentation slides that you deliver to different sets of students, save yourself the trouble and record them with Wink or Camtasia. Let them watch the lecture ahead of time and focus face-to-face encounters for interactive discussions.
Here are some movies I’ve made with Wink.
For those of you who like documenting your clinical algorithms (decision trees, decision flows), you may want to investigate Gliffy (www.gliffy.com). It allows you to create flowcharts (and others) which you can collaboratively edit with the rest of your team.
Here is one I created with Gliffy.
Some readers have responded about the fact that its a lousy thing to find a good article online but not be using your own desktop or laptop (with Zotero or JabRef installed). They end up e-mailing the article to themselves and all of that trouble.
You all probably know PortableApps by now. You install it in your USB drive and it has all the open source applications you would probably need to live the rest of your life (that is, if you try not to live too long, okay?). Head on to the site and look for yourself. It eats about 300-400 MB of your drive and any other application is additional.
The cool thing about PortableApps is that if you install PortableFirefox on top of it (yes, that very reliable browser), and then install the add-on Zotero, then you can go to any machine in the ward (the ¨floor ¨ — for some) and be able to store all your citations on your USB drive in a good and efficient reference manager.
Go ahead and download all you want….
If you still think Zotero is not enough (see previous posts), then try out JabRef. JabRef is a Java-based reference manager and accepts different types of bibliographic data formats (yes, including MEDLINE).
If you are a medical student or resident in training, storage of citations, abstracts, and full text is indispensable. You must have a reference manager. Shoestring budgets perfectly fit JabRef.
With the Internet abounding with free material, it is often easier to search Google and download the image you need. A good site that summarizes such resources is from the University of Nebraska Medical Center (http://www.unmc.edu/library/reference/medimage.html).
Note that many images are governed by copyright. So before you include that downloaded image in your presentation slide, make sure that you comply with the ownerÅ› conditions before posting your slides on the Internet. Dont worry. There are a lot of generous contributors of images on the Net.
Just ask permission. Free medical images are often one email away.
Sometimes it is necessary to show someone what you are see on your desktop. This can range from a part of a medical picture (like the rim of cytoplasm around a plasma cell) or a diagnostic procedure which you wish to explain step-by-step (adding a procedure to patienÅ› electronic medical record). The conventional way of doing this is through voice-annotated video.
Another way of doing this is by downloading free material from the Internet (images and video) and documenting what you want to say with a desktop recording tool. Two tools come to fore when it comes to desktop recording. The first (and my personal favorite) is Wink (www.debugmode.com). The other is RecordMyDesktop (http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/ Still undergoing testing in my laptop).
Wink is such a useful tool that I use it to teach health workers how to use specific applications like CHITS (www.chits.info). If the health workers forget how to carry out a particular procedure, they just click on the Wink movie I created and the movei shows them how itÅ› suppoesd to be done.
Try them!
As we proceed to a hospital-wide wireless environment, new tools such as Fring (www.fring.com) allow us to use our Wifi-ready phones as virtual walkie-talkies. With Fring, we can talk to any other Fring user (and even Skype, MSN, GoogleTalk, or Gizmo) through the wireless infrastructure. The possibility is mind boggling. Free calls over the Internet over actual phones – not headsets that look like leashes on the laptop.
Now we can be mobile, avialable, and all for free…
Fring me at amarcelo…Â
Medicine is all about learning from what other people have discovered — and remembering! In order to do this, we must have an organized way of managing the volumes of scientific articles that accumulate everyday in our hard drives. It was once said: the number of citations in MEDLINE increase so fast that if you read two articles per day for a year, you would be hundreds of years behind. (Yeah right, who reads two articles per month?)
Managing these articles is what this medhack is all about. The technical term for such tools is ‘reference manager’. Although that generic term has been used by a proprietary brand, the term sticks and academics know what the terms essentially means.
Our featured reference manager for this medhack is Zotero — an extension to the Firefox web browser (did I tell you to start using Firefox?). Zotero takes its spot at the right lower corner and can be activated by clicking on its icon.
A neat feature of Zotero is its ability to extract bibliographic information from PUBMED. Just open the citation (where the abstract is viewable) and click on the Zotero icon at the end of the URL in the address box (see image). That’s it!
Zotero is full of features. It’s free and won’t bite so go ahead and test drive it today.
I have always told my students and co-teachers to use the Firefox web browser because of its more secure nature and its ability to be extended with powerful features. Not to mention that it is also open source.
I therefore recommend to all medhackers to use Firefox as it provides you the flexibility to let your ingenuity fly. And while we’re there, go open source and be truly free.
The component words are ´med´ for ¨medicine¨ and ´hack´ for ¨hacker¨. There are many definitions of ‘hack’, and they range from the best to the worst. Jeffrey Veen has an article on it and I agree with him that a hack is “the appropriate application of ingenuity”.
A MedHack then is that same stroke of ingenuity applied to medicine.
Other hacks may be found at MIT where students make it their regular fare.