DEPPMANN LAB

While I won't be teaching for another year or so I wanted to let folks know some of the things that I've been thinking about.  Right now I'm planning on developing a course that will focus on signal transduction and subsequent transcriptional responses.  We can use this as a platform to discuss how these processes are involved in normal physiological responses as well as diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration.  This subject matter is very cool and should provide substrate for some exciting discussions.  I'll post a syllabus once it gets approved.

I'm also hoping to try out some new things for the way we interact in the classroom.  Here are some examples:

1. Podcasting lectures: While lots of profs already do this, it is a horrifying prospect for my first lecture course.  My bruised ego notwithstanding, I think it would be useful for students to have access to the slides and audio of each lecture. This is relatively simple and would allow me to go back and review the lectures and then break into the podcast if I feel clarification is required on something.

2. Collaborative writing projects:  I've started using things like google docs to write papers with collaborators and it has turned out to be a fantastic experience.  Instead of passing drafts back and forth, collaborators can work on a document simultaneously without being at the same location.  If people would like, I could also peek in on the document as it's in progress to lend advice.  I've seen demos of a new collaboration tool from google called wave, which is mind blowing and will be released in a year.  This will most likely be the platform that we use for our collaborate writing projects.

3. No textbooks: Science textbooks are really expensive and become out dated very fast.  So for the topics covered in class we will use recent review articles, Wikipedia, and other material around the web.  Using this approach will allow the course to update organically thereby exposing students to the newest and most relevant material.

4. Crowd sourcing questions and answers: I think it would be a lot of fun to incorporate things like twitter and facebook into the class. For example, as someone has a question, they can simply shoot off a tweet to @deppmanncourse from a phone or laptop and we will review them at different intervals during the class. This is meant to get the folks who don't normally speak up in class to participate without resorting to a socratic approach. Of course the more traditional method of speaking up is also welcome. Question tweets and answers will be reposted on the deppmann lab course web page along with the podcast. In this way we can generate FAQs for each lecture.

5. Becoming part of the scientific community: By the end of the course I would like students to not only appreciate the subject matter but actually become participants in the scientific community, To this end, one of the collaborative assignments will be for small groups to update various Wikipedia pages. I foresee a scenario where we would talk about a particular update in class and incorporate it into the material that might appear on an exam.

I'm expecting some things to work well and some things to crash and burn.  Luckily, nothing is set in stone and we can change things on the fly as needed.   I would love to hear thoughts on any of this or suggestions for other stuff we could try.  Post comments below.

Cheers,

Chris