Category: academics
-
More thoughts on the "Fundamental Theorem of Medical Informatics"
Okay, I couldn’t help but think about this theorem a bit during the day. Here are some of my thoughts: Corollary #1 identifies an intelligent user. I suppose there is an inherent idea that the user is a health care professional of some sort. Friedman provides a bit more detail and describes intelligent user as…
-
Thoughts on the "Fundamental Theorem of Medical Informatics"
I’ve been doing some reading on what Charles Friedman calls “The fundamental theorem of medical informatics”. Basically, it goes as follows: Corollary #1 (Person): The intelligent user’s personal knowledge and beliefs are at least as important as anything the technology does. Corollary #2 (Technology): The technology must be able to tell the user something he/she…
-
Evaluation as a meta-discipline
In recent discussions and readings I’ve been doing, an idea seems to be recurring: evaluation is meta-discipline. This concept isn’t something that’s new to me, as I was initially trained by Dr. Anita Myers in program evaluation during my time at the University of Waterloo. We were taught that evaluation is embedded within a context…
-
Threats to validity: training and teaching in studies
I had an interesting discussion with someone the other day about threats to attributing causality in studies with “training” as part of the intervention. This discussion reminded me of another discussion I had with a few other colleagues about a paper that was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). The article is…
-
Chipping away at the glacier…
A few articles in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) recently caught my attention. Sorry, no links to the articles – NEJM is an access-only journal (i.e., you need to have a subscription). I’m getting a sense that ehealth issues are slowly getting on the radar-screen of the traditional biomedical journals like NEJM, The…
-
It doesn’t look right…
Well, there goes another day. I spent most of the day learning how to use “master documents” in Microsoft Word (I’m using Office XP Professional). Gotta admit that after trying to work through the idiosyncracies of Word, WordPerfect sure is a great word-processor. The advanced features were so easy to use, especially things like drop…
-
Anatomy of an academic article
I came across this comic from the “Piled Higher and Deeper” comic strip about grad students (www.phdcomics.com). Couldn’t help but get a chuckle out of it.
-
Extending in the classroom
The most recent session of the “Teaching in Higher Education” course was about electronic tools in the classroom. There was a demonstration from Resource Centre for Academic Teaching (University of Toronto). On a purely technical note, this presentation could have been done in 15 minutes – the guy spoke way too slowly and belaboured each…