Blog 7: Professional Learning Network

It was hard to find an educational group geared toward me because teaching medicine is a bit of a niche, most groups I found were more geared to K-12 or college. I tried joining a couple several weeks ago.
Active learning Facebook group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/12256460391/

Learning Education and Training Professionals Group
http://www.educationalnetworking.com/Learning%2C+Education+and+Training+Professionals+Group

The first turned out to be dead which I didn't realize when I joined. The second was ok, but again, really not geared toward me or what I do. More toward general professionals. I read some aspects of it but really didn't get much out of it.   I have been a member of an online course through Stanford for sometime (https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Medicine/ANES205/Fall2014/about) that involves weekly updates with lectures and various discussion forums to talk about the issues at hand. I think it actually falls under the category of a learning network quite well due to the interactive nature of it and I think I got the most out of it through various discussion on how best to teach and engage patients. The discussions involved both students and the instructors which was nice.

The RSS feed I had trouble using, its information overload for me. I checked it every now and then and usually just used it as a reminder to check out websites I already used on a regular basis. I frequently read the Health Care Blog. Its also kind of a neat way to organize various articles from several journals of emergency medicine like Academic Emergency Medicine and NEJM journal watch. But overall I found it a little overwhelming and difficult for me to use in my general work flow.

I think these are great general tools for education. For RSS feeds: High school students could use it to keep track of recent events for a class, college students could use it to help with research for a paper, elementary school teachers can keep up with other ideas around the country. Its a great idea if you use it right, which I just couldn't find the right way to use it for me. Professional Learning Networks have clear benefits for larger populations like science high school teachers or elementary school teachers. I think my issue is being an emergency physician in education there just isn't a huge community out there like that, its more localized and everyone just already knows everyone and contacts them directly.

Journal 6: Self-Reflection

I've really enjoyed this class so far. As someone with zero experience in web design or programming I wasn't sure how difficult this class was going to be for me. Fortunately, I've found that I actually find the HTML to be incredibly intuitive. While I may often have to look up the exact tag for a particular function, I can always look it up, and actually using them makes a lot of sense - particularly linking to other pages. All of the HTML tagging was interesting and fun (particularly all the semantic issues where you could have the web browser know if you were writing a date, time, phone number, etc to help more appropriately display them in the browser). The forms in particular were fascinating to me, although I wish I had some experience in java to understand how more modern forms work.

For links, folders, etc I'm already incredibly neurotic about how I keep files organized on my computer - so maintaining clean folders for an organized easy to link to website hasn't been difficult for me. However, I do have a tendency to decide I want to move something because it will make more sense and I have to be careful not to do that now as it will break all my links. 

The CSS has definitely been the most challenging and rewarding. I am not a visually oriented person, actually trying to design things and decide what looks "good" is hard for me. So even though I get how the CSS is detached from the HTML document and still affects in in various ways depending on the id, class, etc. My problem is I can't imagine how what I'm typing is ultimately going to look. Given that that is the whole point of CSS I'm concerned about my actual abilities to use it to create a beautifully designed webpage.  My most rewarding assignment so far was the chapter 12 exercises, for this exact reason. To actually see step by step how what I was tagging and defining was affecting the website to create a much nicer looking menu made me feel hopeful that I will be able to do it on my own.