Women in Control: Real and Virtual World Healthcare Intervention

We’ve just wrapped up our NIH-funded experiment, using virtual worlds for health behavior change and patient education.  The Women in Control study, out of Boston University Medical Center, was a year-long research program to test a virtual world versus real world-delivered diabetes healthcare intervention.  The program’s subjects were Boston area Black women, between the ages of 40 and 60, who suffer from out of control type 2 diabetes (T2DM).  The Co-Principal Investigators,  John Wiecha, MD, MPH and Milagros C. Rosal, PhD, designed an intriguing study with a talented team. The eight-week health behavior program was an adaptation of a CDC program called The Power to Prevent. One hundred women in the greater Boston area participated. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of two groups – those who engaged in weekly 90-120 minute sessions in the virtual world of Second Life and those who did so in face-to-face meetings at Boston Medical Center.

Our research questions: How feasible is the use of a virtual world for this purpose? And will subjects in the virtual world program demonstrate similar impact at study-end on health behaviors as subjects in the real world, as measured by patient activity levels; dietary patterns; adherence to diabetes medications; and improvements in metabolic and anthropometric indicators (hemoglobin a1c values, body mass index, and blood pressure)?

We are still churning the data and analyzing our results, so stay tuned for future posts and publications, but we do have this 4-minute video (beautifully compiled by Ariella Furman, Framed in 3D) that gives you a feel for the study and the impact on the subjects.

You can also read past blog posts on the study here and here.

A Reflection on “36 Views of Mount Fuji”

My copy of 36 Views of Mount Fuji

I just finished reading Cathy Davidson’s 1993 book, 36 Views of Mount Fuji and its been swirling around in my head ever since. Many of us know Cathy Davidson from her excellent work at Duke University, her thoughtful blog, her recently released book Now You See It, as well as her work cofounding the group HASTAC (“haystack”), a network of learners dedicated to new forms of learning for the digital age. What you may not know is that, long before all of that, Dr. Davidson wrote this incredible book, a reflection on her time in Japan. She’s made a number of trips to Japan over the years, first as an English teacher at Kansai Women’s University (KWU), and then later as a speaker, visitor, and friend.  Through it all she’s developed a deep and abiding affection for the Japanese people and their culture. The book is a memoir, but it’s so much more. The roots of her current work, the pathways of her agile mind, her ability to ferret out subtle truths of human nature, her reflections on learning — these can all be found in the  pages of this book.

I loved the book and found myself going back over key passages, mining them for insights that are as fresh today as they were when she penned them nearly 20 years ago. Take, for example, this excerpt, reflecting back on a whimsical pantomime exchange she had with a Japanese friend who could not understand her broken Japanese.

“For reasons I don’t fully understand, I like wordless communication.  I love the feeling that comes when there is understanding – and even appreciation – without history, story.  There’s both anonymity and revelation, the opposite of what, in psychobabble is known as self-disclosure. The Japanese have a term for this kind of language”  ishin denshin (wordless, heart -to-heart communication).  It’s considered a profound kind of communication.”

The book is full of insights like that.  Bore holes into human nature, careful examinations of Japanese culture, insights into a way of life that fascinated and frustrated her.  And with each page you could just feel her learning, taking full advantage of each new situation to grow and extend her understanding of the human mind and its infinite complexities.

I was particularly fond of the way Cathy describes her ongoing grapple with the Japanese language.  She unflinchingly tells the learner’s tale and does not side-step her struggles. And of course it is language that holds the key to cultural insight.  Subtle shades of meaning, emphasis, formality vs. informality – so many secrets locked into thousands of years of tradition.  What is said and what is not said.  And so she perseveres, against all odds, determined to gain fluency. She learns to write kanji, she practices, she enrolls in an intensive language course at Duke, taught by a much younger, junior faculty member, and fails miserably.  In the ongoing struggle, I couldn’t help but glimpse the masonry behind Cathy’s bold 2003 strategy, as Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, to give all incoming Duke students a free iPod, sparking equal storms of creativity and criticism.

I found her frank revelations about how hard it is to fit in, particularly poignant. “Like most foreigners, I’m pretty good at adapting to a new situation (or I wouldn’t enjoy traveling in the first place) but I’m also a bit of a misfit (or I would never have wanted to leave home).”  She observes that, because she is an obvious foreigner there (a gaijin), she attracted people who like to negotiate cultural differences, who are interested in figuring out and crossing those chasms.  And yet, as Cathy puts it, “every friendship I make in Japan is grounded in the unalterable recognition that, however often I may return to Japan, I will always be going home.”

Though the east and west coasts of the United States hardly present the culture gap that Cathy experienced in Japan, I often have found myself thinking very much like her with regard to my love of both the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston….

“I like both places but I also find myself profoundly critical of aspects of both countries; which ever one I’m in, the other one runs like a counter argument in my head, in a way that always makes me, somehow, fidgety.  That’s the word.  My connection with Japan makes me always anxious for the place I’m not.”

Toward the end of the book, Cathy describes her stay at The Practice House, during a fourth trip to Japan.  The Practice House is a quasi-Victorian KWU residence, furnished in Western style.  The idea was that students could live in the Practice House for a few weeks to master the basic domestic skills and routines of a typical Western homemaker.  Cathy finds it a cheerless and disturbing place – not only the oddity of viewing our Western nature through a Japanese lens but the decor and furnishing of the house had halted somewhere in the mid-1960′s. The magazines, the books, the decor – all trapped in a pre-1970′s time warp.  What an odd thing that must have been – spelunking down into a recreated model of your culture’s recent past.  But in her own unique way, Cathy manages to spin the tale of her time in the Practice House and fill it with interesting observations, helping us – as her readers – to see right along with her.  I loved the notion of the Practice House and could almost paint a picture of it in my mind, right down to the yellowed index card, pinned on the wall next to the telephone that read, “Hello, this is the Practice House.  ______here.  Who would you like to speak to?”

The book’s title is a reference to a series of block prints by the artist Katsushika Hokusai’s, known as Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1826-33).

Mount Fuji Seen Below a Wave at Kanagawa

The Hokusai prints inspired other writers as well.  The American writer, Roger Zelazny, wrote 24 views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai in 1985, a novella divided into 24 chapters, each one named after one of the prints, and each the setting for the chapter’s events as the protagonist tours the area surrounding Mt. Fuji.

Red Fuji

Cathy incorporates the prints into her book, with a small image opener on each of her book’s 16 chapters.  She uses the images as a metaphor for how difficult it was to convey a holistic picture of Japan with her book. The best she could do, she explains, was to give her perspective on Japan and Japanese culture, to record an account of her insights and experiences.  She could relate stories of personal encounters, describe scenery, capture exchanges but no matter how intimate and particular these stories were, none of them could ever presume to capture the whole.  So often, when we Americans travel, we’re encouraged upon our return to sum it up, provide a poignant image that tells the tale of our trip  or our favorite moment but, as Cathy says, it’s impossible to do.  ”For me, ” says Cathy,”Hokusai’s way is more accurate.”

Lovely.

Learning in a Virtual World: Population Dynamics

Population Control: Past Policies and Future Challenges

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research (GFMER) offer courses to healthcare providers around the globe.  Often, their “students” are doctors, nurses, and other practitioners in remote locations with minimal support and limited time.  Consequently, many of their courses are offered online.  Once such course, Sexual Health and Reproductive Health Research is offered each year to over 150 healthcare workers all over the globe, as you can see in this map of their students’ base locations:

Map of GFMER course participants.

In their quest to innovate and offer the best possible learning solutions, Dr. Mario Meraldi, from WHO and Dr. Karim Abawa and Dr. Aldo Campana, from GFMER recently partnered with Dr. John Wiecha, from Boston University Medical School to offer one such course in an online 3D virtual world.  Participants from Ethiopia, Italy, Switzerland, France, Pakistan, Nigeria, India, Kenya, Sudan, Afghanistan, and the U.S. came together as avatars for a learning event on Population Dynamics:  Past Policies and Future Challenges.  Those with spotty internet connections joined the event through a synchronous broadcast delivered via Livestream.

The event was one hour in length and took place on the WHO/BU island in the virtual world of Second Life.  Working with the session’s facilitator, Dr. Marloes Schoonheim (a GFMER demographer), we designed a learning space that led participants along a learning ramp, with stops along the way. Here you see an aerial view of the designed space, followed by a diagram showing the numbered learning stops:

The learning space, showing the ramp which bends around a mountain.

Learning stop map.

Dr. Schoonheim gathered the learners at each stop and talked through visuals or an experience designed to illustrate her particular point. In the following picture set, you first see a graph depicting world population growth estimates between 1950 and 2010, followed by a visualization of thousands of babies’ faces on a rotating cylinder to underscore her point.

World population growth 1950-2010.

A visualization effect for world population growth.

The instructional designers and producers for the session were:  Neil and Robin Heyden, Janalee Redmond, and Liz Dorland. We started with Dr. Schoonheim’s PowerPoint slides, which after some discussion, turned into a storyboard. Brainstorming as a team, we came up with ideas for the visual displays and effects. As we designed this learning space, we kept in mind the principles in the Open University article, Designing for Navigation and Wayfinding in 3D VirtualLearning Spaces, by Shailey Minocha and Christopher Hardy (2011). In their article, the authors make clear that the design of a learning space impacts the processing of information and the learner’s grasp of new concepts. For example, we made the route clear by adding a well-worn dirt path texture to the ramps, as seen here:

A clearly defined path.

Stacked, rotating photo cubes provided a good presenter perch.

Each stop was marked by a large visual (photograph, book cover, map, or graph).  The graphics were all created by designer and Photoshop expert, Kate Motter. Additional visuals were displayed on slowly rotating cubes, stacked at the stop.  In a playful touch, Dr. Schoonheim sat on the stacked cubes, to indicate where the learners’ attention should focus, as she gave her remarks. World maps reinforced the location of each case study. Dr. Schoonheim infused her comments with locational language (for example: “to your left”, “in the next gallery”, and “follow me up the ramp to the world map”) to help direct the avatars.

At the halfway point, we offered a short break with virtual snacks served on a platform, overlooking a stunning vista (complete with waterfall).  The learning ramp, bent around to deposit the participants back to the starting point, where they assembled in an open-air seating arrangement for a question-and-answer session.  The chat was lively with questions coming in from the Livestream audience, as well as the in-world learners.

Snack break, with a view.

With 19 avatars in Second Life and 40 viewers in the Livestream audience (many of whom watched in small groups, clustered around one computer), the event reached a significant audience.  In addition to managing the broadcast, Ariella Furman recorded the session so that others could later, asynchronously, review the session.

In our after-session-review we noted the following opportunities for improvement:

- Time between stops, while feeling like natural transitions to the avatars in Second Life, felt like dead air time to the Livestream audience.  In the future, we should design to fill those gaps, and keep our broadcast audience in mind, as well as the avatars.

- Highly visual elements, like the rotating photo cylinder, take a few minutes to rez for most viewers therefore sufficient time must be accounted for in order to achieve the desired effect.

- Rehearsal time was mandatory.  Our crew conducted three rehearsals – the first was a run through of the content with discussion amongst the team at each point.  The second was a technical rehearsal to test the video, livestream, and simulated effects.  The third was a dress rehearsal, conducted in real-time (without interruption), just as the live event would be.  With each rehearsal, the transitions smoothed and the problems lessened.

Marloes’ avatar.

- The facilitator’s comfort in the virtual world was an essential ingredient.  Though new to online virtual worlds, Dr. Schoonheim quickly took to the medium.  She invested many preparation hours in Second Life, getting used to the navigation and the “feel” of being in an avatar.  The avatar’s look was important to her. Liz Dorland helped her with hair, skin and clothes to match her real world appearance. We also gave her a speaker’s animation effect (pacing and gesturing), and added a notepad into her hand.

- It’s difficult to balance the positive impact of interactivity (fielding questions throughout the session) with the importance of keeping on track and sticking to the alloted time. Participants posed questions during the session which the producers acknowledged and queued up for the final question and answer session (given how impossible it is for the speaker to give their talk and monitor a flowing chat window simultaneously).  Marloes led an engaging discussion session in the last 10 minutes of the event by addressing those saved questions. In hindsight it might have worked well to have a second content expert, a sort of teaching assistant, to type answers to questions as they came up in local chat during the session. If the audience feels their questions are attended to, they will engage further.

All in all, the event went smoothly.  Here are additional photographs and here is an Economist article, on the topic of population dynamics and fertility rates that Marloes recommends for further information. Be sure to check back in a few weeks, when I will post a montage video of the event, currently being created by Ariella Furman.

The Jesus Game

The Wikipedia entry for "Jesus"

We had a bunch of teenaged boys in the house last night who introduced us to “The Jesus Game”.  For the uninitiated, this is a rousing online rendition of “seven degrees of separation”, where the player is challenged to get from some remote, randomly selected topic to “Jesus“, on Wikipedia, in the least number of clicks.

So, here’s how it works.  You navigate to Wikipedia.  I give you a random topic – say, discrete math.  You scan the article, looking for suitable links.  You strategize on your best shot, click, scan the new article for a relevant path, click, and so on. When you finally arrive at the Jesus entry, you’re done.  Then we go back to your browser’s history, count up the number of clicks between “discrete math” and “jesus”, and that’s your number.  Then it’s my turn. Hilarity ensues.

Here’s what I loved about watching these boys play the game last night:  first, they were completely intent.  Focused doesn’t describe it.  If the house had been on fire, I would have had trouble dragging them away.  But the other thing I loved was their conversation around the choices.  They were all looking over the players’ shoulder, making suggestions, shouting out advice, scanning the article for meaning.  Debating whether Catholicism or Protestantism would “get them to Jesus” faster.  OK, so it’s not deep learning, but it’s a darned interesting way to observe their minds at work. It was like game play narration (which I’ve blogged about earlier), they were narrating their thinking, sharing it with others, learing from each other as they carved a path and then, afterwards, reflecting on the their decisions (which paths led to traps, which were the most productive).  And here’s a really interesting thing – once a player made their way to a path previously blazed by an earlier player, they opted to not “cheat” (and mimic that path), but to look for an alternative.  One player announced, “No no, that would be too easy, I’ll look for something else.”

And to complete the metathinking circle, there is a wikipedia entry on The Jesus Game.

Beginner’s Mind and Watercolors

Watercolor Tubes. All lined up and ready to go.

Yesterday I took an all-day watercolor workshop.  With just three of us learners and a very intense, French instructor, there wasn’t a lot of room to hide in that art studio – it was all learning, all the time.  Since I hadn’t held a paintbrush for many years, it was a humbling beginner’s experience for me.  A good reminder of what it feels like to be on the learner-end of the equation.

Tints from a mass stone.

We started with an introduction to color (hue, chroma and value), followed by some painting exercises to render mass tones (the pure color, right out of the tube) and tints (dilutions of that original color).  Fascinating. I couldn’t help but make note of the expert language our instructor used – how exclusionary it felt, how unwilling any of us were to ask for clarification or to possibly derail her by admitting that we didn’t understand a term she’d used a few minutes earlier. But my anxiety eased when I finally had the brush in my own hand and tried it myself.  Ah, yes…now I see what she meant (even if I didn’t remember all the terminology).

Following that, our instructor gave a few more painting demonstrations of various brush techniques. In addition to the expert terminology, there were many vague references to an understanding that would “come with time”, intuition that we’d develop with patient practice, and a “feeling” that we would eventually acquire if we worked hard. I was guessing that my peers, like me, were not planning a watercolor painting career and were most likely feeling a bit at sea.

“Your painting should float on the page!”  ”Let the paint do its work, don’t control it!”  Her advice sounded interesting, but I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant or how to translate her admonishments into my actions.

Following the demos, the instructor put out some pots, shells, and a bunch of grapes on a purple cloth – a still life tableau – for us to paint.  Not really knowing where to start (were we expected to draw the whole assembly? do you draw the items first with a pencil?), we all floundered around for awhile. So many decisions to make!  Wet on wet?  Wet on dry? Brush size? Perspective? Which objects?  Realizing that I was wasting valuable workshop time, I decided to narrow my focus.  Just one brush.  Wet paint on dry paper. This color palette. And hone in on the grapes. It was just a few hours, afterall.

Once I made those decisions, I fell into a rhythm with my painting.  Just me, the palette, the brush, the paper, and the grapes.

Nothing but potential.

I love the process of mixing the colors. At the start of the workshop we were each given an enormous white enameled pan.  She showed us a method where you apply a bit of paint from the tube to the pan’s side, and then bring it down to the bottom, with water, push that over to another color with your brush, and blend.  As I worked to render my grapes, I mixed at least twelve  different combinations of red and blue….blue and yellow…that green with the ruddy violet.  A gorgeous alchemy of color splayed across the clean white of my pan.

Before I knew it, two hours had swept by, and the workshop was done.  I was happy with my painting –  one grape in particular, was my favorite.  It had just the right shades, a bit of transparency, a suggestion of roundness, and the hint of green where the ruby plum grape joined the stem. All the terminology, expert nuance, and trepidation was swept aside as I took pleasure in the satisfaction of one grape well rendered.

The finished grapes.

Whew. Take a Moment.

Map of the Internet

Something happened this week that caused me to just stop and take a moment to consider what a freakin’ amazing thing the internet is.

So, here’s the situation.  We’re about to host a virtual world event in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Geneva Foundation for Medical Research (GFMER).  The event is one session of a many-session training course for healthcare providers around the world in sexual health and reproduction.  The participants will be tuning in from over 150 different countries, either with us in Second Life, or tuning into the live, streamed event online.

The event facilitator is Dr. Marloes Schoonheim, who is pretty freakin’ amazing herself.  She’s a demographer, researcher, and educator based in Geneva, Switzerland. Here’s her website. Here’s her blog.  And here’s her entry to the BBC My World short film competition.

We’ve been working with Marloes for a few weeks now (which has been an absolute delight), to introduce her to Second Life, pin down the content for the event, and adapt it for the unique affordances of the virtual environment.  We’re also recruiting participants to join us for the event, which will be optional.  Our first email announcement didn’t get much traction among these busy healthcare workers.  So we decided to try a different approach…

We filmed a 1-minute video “commercial” for the event, in Second Life, with Marloes’s avatar describing the plan and inviting everyone to come.  Here are the steps we took together:

1.  Drafted the script, emailed the document to Marloes.

2.  Connected via Skype to discuss.

3.  Arranged a time to meet in Second Life (6 hour time difference).

4.  Used Screenflow to video record Marloes’ avatar in the virtual world.

5.  Exported the video to MOV format and posted it to YouTube.

6.  Shared link to the video in emails to all participants in the course (in 150 countries).

Just take a moment to consider that list and the implications.  All done within 24 hours, between Boston and Geneva, without spending a nickel.  Pretty freakin’ amazing.  Here’s the video:

Tiny Conspiracies

The Bassler Lab

Bonnie Bassler

We’ve just concluded the ninth annual Biology Leadership Conference (BLC) in South Carolina and what a weekend it was! Our keynote speaker,  Dr. Bonnie Bassler , gave the meeting a rip-roaring start with a research talk about her lab’s work with bacteria, figuring out how they talk to each other, and, as an outgrowth of that work, gaining insight into the evolution of  multicellularity.

Bacteria, Earth’s earliest lifeforms, are single-celled organisms, covered with a membrane, and filled with cytoplasm that includes only one piece of DNA.  Compared with humans and other mammals, they have very little genetic information (only a couple of thousand genes) with which to work.  Their lives appear to be fairly mundane – they grow, divide and replicate.

As humans, our relationship, with bacteria is pretty interesting.  Humans, like all organisms, are made up of cells – roughly a trillion cells that make up one human body.  It turns out that you have 10 times more bacteria cells than human cells on and inside of you (there are roughly 40,000 species of bacteria in the gut alone!).  In other words, you are really 90% bacteria.  And if you look at the gene pool, those proportions become even more astounding. We know that there are 20k genes in the human being.  Well, if you tally up all of that bacterial genetic material, you have 100x more bacterial genes, than human genes, in and on you.  So, doing the math – you are only 1% human.

Bacteria R Us, illustration by Bryan Christie

But all of those bacteria are not just passive riders in and on your human form, they are very busy creatures.  They provide an amazing repertoire of functions that you can’t do on your own – food digestion, educating your immune system, and vitamin production.  They also cover you in an invisible film – a sort of body armor.

But we don’t hear much about all of those positive contributions. When we hear news about bacteria, it’s mostly bad news  - lyme disease, toxic shock, or food poisoning – the myriad ways that bacteria make us sick.

Hawaiian Bobtail Squid

Dr. Bassler started as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Mike Silverman (from the Agoroun Institute, now retired), who had been working on a special kind of bacteria, Vibrio fischeri, that live in a mutally beneficial relatonship with a marine organism – the Hawaiian bobtail squid (pictured at left).  This squid has a pristine, one-to-one symbiotic relationship with the bacterium Vibrio fischeri.  The squid provides a safe and comfortable home, the bacteria provide light.

Here’s the story from the squid’s point of view:  during the day, the squid buries itself in sand to avoid being eaten by predators. Good strategy. In this video you can see the squid’s camoflauge behavior. It comes out at night to hunt, but of course, it’s difficult to hunt in the dark.  Fortunately, the bobtail squid has a specialized light organ, two glowing lobes, located on the underside of its body, loaded with (10 to the 12th cells per ml) bioluminescent bacteria.   The squid’s ink sac works like a shutter, controlling the amount of light shining down, into the dark water below.  The light organ and ink sac are controlled by  a light organ on the squid’s topside, so that the bacterial light precisely matches the light coming from the stars and moon above. In effect, the squid counter-illuminates itself to avoid predation, while hunting.  Together, the squid and its bacteria are the stealth bomber of the ocean.

Vibrio fisheri

From the bacteria’s point of view, the light organ is a safe haven,  loaded with nutrients.  The bacteria and the squid, as a pair, manage to avoid wasting valuable resources by only turning on the light when appropriate – that is, only at night, and only when there are enough bacteria around to make it worthwhile.  The light is turned on by a sort of chemostat – the bacteria make and release a small pheromone (called an autoinducer).  As they grow and divide, they sense the level of the autoinducer.  A particular autoinducer level is the cue to turn on the light.  In the morning, the squid pumps out most of the bacteria from its light organ – and the process resets itself.

The biochemical key to this beautiful process is this autoinducer.  As the bacteria grow and divide, the molecule builds up precisely in proportion to the number of bacteria present.  The bacteria use the autoinducer as a communication proxy – initiating a response (turning on the light), based on the detection of that chemical’s level. In effect, the bacteria are using the level of the autoinducer as a method for counting their number – or quorum sensing.  It’s as if the bacteria vote chemically –  and then turn on the group behavior.

The enzyme that makes the autoinducer freely moves in and out of the bacterial cell.  The receptor that detects the molecule’s presence sits on the cell surface (like a hormone receptor). When the molecule reaches a certain concentration, it binds to the receptor on many bacterial cells, in the typical lock and key manner, and that binding action turns on the bioluminescence. Like a light switch.

Endosymbiosis

And here’s the interesting connection to the evolution of multicellularity.  According to the endosymbiotic theory, early ancestors of eukaryotic cells engulfed and incorporated other prokaryotic cells.  Eventually, the engulfed cell formed a relationship with its engulfer and became a cell living within another cell – an endosymbiont.  In the same way, we can look at quorum sensing as an early version of development in complex, multicellular organisms.  Turning on the light among hundreds of bioluminescent bacteria is similar to turning on hundreds of genes in a multicellular organism at a particular time.  These luminescing bacteria perform their action in synchrony – behaving just like multicellular organisms when they do.

So what all are these bacteria doing with quorum sensing? Turns out, there’s a wide range of these autoinducer chemicals that participate in various bacterial group functions. To mention just two examples: such a chemical in  P. aeruginosa is involved with production of virulence factors and biofilms and such a chemical in E. carotovora is involved with  antibiotic production.

Quorum sensing helps bacteria to strategically time their invasions. When you think about it, it makes no sense from the bacterium’s point of view to kill the organism it has invaded. The better idea is to dribble out molecules and give the host a chance to mount an immune response so that the host and the bacteria can continue their relationship.  For the bacteria, it is much better to wait, count itself, and then, when the numbers are right, mount a group assault and infect the host in such a way that both the host and the bacteria survive.

Bacterial community: biofilm on your teeth.

But it’s not as simple as one species of bacteria living in or on one host. Like all other organisms, bacteria live in complex communities, surrounded by many other bacterial species.  Take for example, that thick film you feel on your teeth in the morning?  There are roughly  600 species of bacteria at work, creating that lovely film for you each day. Imagine the “noise” with 600 bacterial species, sending out their biochemical signals. So, if bacteria live in these complex communities, surrounded with all of that biochemical noise, how do they take a census?

To answer that question, the Bassler lab went looking for genes.  In the process, they found that there were really two signals.  Two chemical signals (autoinducers 1 and 2) tell the Vibrio fisheri bacteria to produce light.  But why two?  Why is it useful to have two circuits to provide one line of information?  To get to the bottom of that question, the Bassler lab made bacterial mutants with only one system, then collected their bacterial chemical output and applied it to bacteria with both systems. Using this method, they figured out that the second system was turned on by every species’ autoinducer chemical.  In other words, one system allows bacteria to detect “self” and talk with their kin while the second system detects “other” and allows for interspecies communication.

The gene involved in interspecies communication  is luxS and all of bacteria studied by Bassler’s lab have this gene.  When the researchers collected the molecule produced by the luxS gene, purified it, and determined its structure, they found that every bacterial species made the exact same molecule.  In effect, the chemical encoded by the luxS gene provides a common chemical  ”language”. The bacteria are, in a sense, “bilingual”.  They can talk to each other, within their species, and they can talk across species. “Am I alone?”  ”Am I in a group?”  ”Am I winning or am I losing?”

The film on your teeth, mentioned earlier, is a complex, architected community.  Bonnie speculates that there is most likely a vast chemical lexicon among bacteria yet to be discovered. Imagine the possibilities if we could devise methods to interfere with these bacterial conversations! Take antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens, for example. Rather than search for newer and stronger antibiotics to kill these resistant bacteria, perhaps we could modify their behavior and limit their virulence by interrupting their conversations?  And by interrupting the signal, perhaps we could buy time for the host’s immune system to get rid of the bacteria on its own.  Chemical interference could be aimed at  the autoinducer 1 signal, for a targeted approach, or the autoinducer 2 signal for a broad spectrum approach.

What method might be taken to interfere with the bacteria’s signal?  One approach would be to search for an antagonist to block signal reception – a way to interfere with the shape of the lock/key fit of the signal chemical and its membrane-bound receptor.  Turns out, there are libraries of thousands of molecules, created by chemists, that can be screened in search of molecules for this purpose.  And here’s the really sweet part about the bioluminescent bacteria: They give a no-nonsense indication of each chemical candidate’s success – does the light go on or not?  Robots in the Bassler lab screen scads of these chemicals – up to a million molecules in ten days –  testing them with their bacterial communities. Of course, they devise methods to make certain that the tested molecules aren’t acting like bleach and just killing the bacteria.  As a result of this work, they’ve now narrowed it down to 12 molecule candidates that interfere with the receptor.  Initial experiments with these candidates and a virulent bacterium that kills mice looks very encouraging. The chemicals interfere with the bacterial conversation sufficiently to prevent the mouse from succumbing to the bacterial infection.  Of course, there are many miles yet to go before these methods might be available to apply to human bacterial diseases – the molecules must be tested, refined, made deliverable in human systems, etc.  But the important thing is – it works.

If you’d like to hear more from Bonnie, you can view her 2009 TED talk or this wonderful video of Bonnie, in her lab, talking about the nature of science and the work in her lab.  Thank you, Bonnie, for such an inspirational talk!

Experimenting with Participatory Media: Mike Gaines at University of Miami

Mike Gaines teaches general biology to undergraduates at University of Miami. He’s one of those incredible educators who is always trying something new – regularly reinventing his course and his approach in order to keep it fresh, alive, and interesting (for his students and for him!).

Mike Gaines' wiki page

Recently he decided to introduce participatory media to his course (BIL 150).  For some time he’d been looking for a good way to turn a critical analysis of science in the movies into a workable course assignment and a wiki site seemed like a good way to organize it. He built a course wiki site, using Wikispaces, and gave his freshmen biology students the assignment to watch two movies, Contagion and 50/50, and then post their analysis of the biology in those movies (misconceptions?  inaccuracies?  controversies?)  as wiki entries. The student posts are very revealing. You can almost hear their wheels turning as they apply the course concepts (cell division, genetic mutations, viruses) to the science plot twists of the movie (cancer treatment, infection, and disease management).

Following success with that, he started a new page on the wiki site where students would record their observations and reactions to the Richard Dawkins lecture, The Magic of Reality.

Now he was up and running, he decided to experiment further.  Twitter, Wordle and Pixton quickly came next.  He used Twitter to keep in touch with his students, conducting virtual office hours to answer questions and take the “pulse” of the course. After each exam, he asked students to create Wordles (word maps) of their reactions to the exam so that the students could easily (at a glance) check in with each other on their sense of it (really hard?  how’d you do? what concepts were confusing?  how much and how did you study?) and how their own reactions compared to those of their peers. I thought this was a particularly ingenious use of a simple media tool. It was so interesting to read their potent relief as their calibrated themselves to their peers on terms other than test scores.

What I think Mike has done particularly well here is to design his teaching approach so that he’s engaged his students in an authentic experience, where the representation of his students’ knowledge is absolutely essential to the ongoing flow of the course.  There is no busy work here, no tack-ons – everything the students are doing feels important and part of the fabric of the course.

Cleverly, Mikes also used that course wiki site to get final feedback on the course from his students. He set up a new wiki page for student feedback and asked them all to post their comments, suggestions, gripes, and concerns on that page.  From the looks of it, almost all of his students posted something and many of them wrote a quite detailed and useful analysis of their experience.  There are some excellent insights there, but if you don’t have time to read them all, here are a few of my favorite student remarks:

“Because our audience was middle schoolers, critical thinking was required to help express technological and biological in an understandable manner to a general audience.”

“I enjoyed having the opportunity to provide my own input (through Twitter especially) because it gave me a chance to actually think about things more thoroughly. For example, by simply asking us to tweet you about what we found most hard about the test, you are asking us to rethink the test and try to figure out what went wrong. Tweeting is such an easy way to provide input but it really helps spark thinking.”

“Throughout this course twitter has been used as a useful tool to communicate with the professor. Although it may seem informal, it is an effective means of communication because a student can ask the professor a question as soon as they think of it. The comments from twitter were then converted to Wordles, this was exciting because as a student I got to see that other students had the similar concerns and comments on the course.”

“In particular, I thought the use of twitter was a fantastic way to connect with Dr. Gaines and make you stand out in a large class. The same goes for the Wordles, which allowed you to have some valuable input on the tests. It really showed that Dr. Gaines cared about us as students, and didn’t view us all as just one gigantic class that blended together.”

Pretty darned impressive.

And here’s what Mike, himself, had to say about the experience,

“My advice to teachers who want to try this is that once you become familiar with different aspects of Web 2.0 technology, it will be a useful addition to your pedagogical tool kit. It’s how todays students communicate. I had some fears at first because I felt my students were “digital natives” while I was a “digital immigrant” and I would know less than they do.  But this did not turn out to be the case. This teacher and his students became partners sharing their different expertise in the digital world to make my large lecture class more interactive and exciting.  So go for it!”

Extend Learning with Social Media

credit: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/57/ystman2400sk1.jpg/

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the use of social media tools to extend and expand a given learning experience.  Because I work primarily with adult learners these days – continuing medical education, management training – I’m experimenting with various models to gain perspective on what works best for them. These motivated learners have typically come for one event – a seminar or a workshop – and the challenge is to encourage reflection and application beyond the boundary of the one instance. To tap into their stong relevancy orientation and to honor their significant life experience in the bargain. These are factors that seem ripe for social media.

The challenges are the usual suspects…not enough time, unfamiliar with the tools, how to keep the motivation going as you move away from the high-impact event.

Martin Luther Nailing his "95 Theses" to the door at Wittenberg

Looking for inspiration, I came across a wonderful article in the December Economist called How Luther Went Viral.  In this well written piece, the author talks about the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther used the media of his day to spread the word about religious reform (his 1517 nailing to the door of “95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences“).  Scholars have long debated the relative contributions of the printing press (a new technology at the time, allowing the mass circulation of pamphlets), versus getting the word out from the pulpit, in the oral tradition. While these tools were important, the article argues that the underlying critical factor at work was the system of media sharing along social networks that allowed the spread of these new ideas – what we refer to today in new media parlance as “the network effect”.

It turns out that Luther was pretty darned good at this. For instance, he opted to write in German (as opposed to the more scholarly Latin), he avoided regional vocabulary to ensure that his message had impact in wider geographical circles, he made full use of all the media of his day (woodcuts and songs as well as the pamphlets), and he recognized (and leveraged!) the way his media passed from one person to another which added up quickly to a wider audience than he originally expected.

The article goes on to explain that modern media theorists refer to participants in such a situation as the “networked public”, rather than an “audience”.  The distinction being that the people hearing Luther’s message were doing far more than just listening. This 16th century networked public discussed, participated, amplified and extended the message. So that each time the word passed along, it grew bigger and more impactful.

Bingo. That seems to me to be the key – reframe our instructional design so that we think of our learners as a “networked public” and create environments where they can do so much more than consume information.

Can I suggest a few actionable principles (and please, add your thoughts for more!):

- A regular schedule. The most effective social media-connected groups include a regular, heartbeat ritual to them – a weekly gathering, a daily post, or a regularly scheduled webinar – the instance is created to fit the needs of the group but the consistency is vital.

- Set intentions. Just as with any collaborating group, it’s critical to set out a clear intention for the group – what is it that we hope to achieve? – and then inform our design with those goals.

- Amplify the message. Seed and encourage plenty of opportunities for the networked participants to participate, discuss, dissect, share, apply and spread what is learned.

- The importance of facilitation. These experiments require a strong facilitator to urge everyone along, make connections, moderate discussion, and provide tactical support when needed.

- The importance of strong and weak ties. The most effective groups (whether in person or connected from a distance via social media) are those that consist of people with strong ties (those who know each other well and have worked together before) and weak ties (people new to the group).

- A combination of synchronous and asynchronous work.  It works well for the learners to have some opportunities to extend their learning right along with their peers, all together – and some opportunities to do so on their own time, when it’s convenient.  A healthy mix of both.

- The tools don’t matter.  Tools change – but the principles are the same.  While we’ll need to use and understand the tools in order to use them well, we want to keep our eye trained on what they allow us to do (the affordance).

What else?

Storytelling

Storytelling

Humans are storytelling creatures. Whenever someone says, “that reminds me of a story…”  we prick up our ears and settle in to listen. Two recent Scientific American articles, The Secrets of Storytelling and Fiction Hones Social Skills shed new light on the intricacies and importance of storytelling.  The first article, by Jeremy Hsu on the secrets of storytelling, hones in on why our human brains seem to be particularly well wired for both telling and hearing stories.

The impact of storytelling

The second article dispels the myth that avid readers are isolated bookworms, out of touch with their social world.  The article’s author argues that we humans use stories as a kind of social simulation to help better understand ourselves and human character in general. That entering these imagined worlds of fiction help us to develop empathy and rehearse social interactions so that we are better fixed to take on another person’s point of view.  The article’s author cited a 2006 experiment conducted by Raymond Mar (University of Toronto).  Mar and his colleagues assessed the reading habits of 94 adults and tested their sample on emotion perception and social cognition (by asking them to make judgments/decisions on emotional state/interactions through photographs or video clips).  What they found was a positive correlation between reading fiction and the ability to correctly assess emotional states and interpret social cues.  In other words, the more fiction someone read, the stronger their social aptitude. This is an opinion I’ve long-held (perhaps rationalizing my love of fiction) but it was so gratifying to see it described so well, and  backed by scientific evidence, in a peer-reviewed journal.

Like many others, I’ve been transfixed by National Public Radio’s Story Corps project.  Since 2003, the non-profit Story Corps has recorded over 35,000 stories of people’s lives. These digitally recorded oral histories are broadcast weekly on NPR and archived at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. The heart of the Story Corps project is the interview. Typically, the storyteller is interviewed by a friend or loved one, urged on to recount a story familiar to both of them. In addition to the warm humanity that comes through in these stories, I’m always struck by the interplay between the interviewer and the storyteller – the nature of the questions, the good-natured coaxing, and the way that rapt listening works to loosen the storyteller’s tongue.

So what is it that makes a good story?  Ira Glass, from This American Life (another fabulous storytelling radio show from National Public Radio), in his video series on storytelling, outlines the building blocks of good storytelling. First, he explains, there is the anecdote – a sequence of actions, one thing following another.  The power of the anecdote is so great that, no matter how boring the facts, you still tune in because it is a sequence of events, like breadcrumbs, that you are eager to follow in order to get to the implied and hoped-for destination.  What’s going to happen? He goes on to say that good stories include bait. The bait typically comes in the form of a question that your story is shaped to answer. And then there’s the all-important point of the story – the moment of reflection, the insight, the ah-ha moment that brings your story together and makes it all worthwhile.  Similarly, Brian Sturm, UNC Chapel Hill, explains his view of storytelling, theory and practice in this video. He explains what a story is and how good stories weave together character, plot, and events as a unified whole and why they are so persuasive (he also tells some great stories in the bargain).

In thinking about storytelling, I found this visual resource helpful  - The Periodic Table of Storytelling. It provides a useful organizational framework  (familiar to any graduate of a general chemistry course) through the different tropes, genres and storytelling methods in a handy, navigable chart.

The periodic table of storytelling

“Digital storytelling” has become an educational buzz phrase as educators and administrators attempt to use participatory media tools so that students can tell their stories more effectively to a wider audience.  There are some amazing online resources to help any educator bring digital storytelling methods to their students.  If you haven’t already seen it the Center for Digital Storytelling (based in Berkeley, CA – natch) is an amazing online resource. Penguin books sponsors a wonderful called we tell stories.  Contests abound, like KQED’s Digital Storytelling Initiative. The University of Houston has a wonderful web site designed to support the educational uses of digital storytelling.  The National Storytelling network, a sort of guild for storytellers, has an interesting website chock-full of resources. And there is even an international conference on digital storytelling, slated for March 2012 in Valencia, Spain.  There’s a range of useful storytelling tools available online like VoiceThread, Pixton, Voki, Storify, and Tikatok - to name just a few.  The always amazing Alan Levine (aka CogDog)’s wiki site on “50 Ways to Tell a Story” is a terrific resource where he tells the same story using 50 different online tools so that you can figure out the unique affordances of each one.  With free and easy-to-use storytelling tools and video, we can all be published authors.

Then there is the notion of transmedia storytelling – the fine art of telling a story via a range of media types (print, audio, video, etc).  The idea is to craft your story in such a way so that it has built-in mobility, so that you harness the power of various media to augment, so that you tell parts in one way, embellish other parts in a different way.  Here is a PFSK series on The Future of Transmedia Storytelling that gives food for thought.

A Child's Christmas in Wales

This Christmas, as a family, we gathered together on Christmas Eve, as we do every year, to read aloud to each other Dylan Thomas’s Child’s Christmas in Wales.

“All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.”

As it always does, that story wraps us in the warm glow of Christmas’s remembered bringing the snows, the guttering gas flames, the swelling uncles, and tipsy aunts to life – even though they were written about an age ago, in a place far far away.  Over dinner the next day, I urged my parents to tell stories from their youth to my listening sons. I could feel the story of my mother’s high school Latin teacher and my father’s first job as the operator of copier for architectural plans sinking into the fiber of my two sons’ young souls. Lodging there, expanding their perspective, and adding to the texture of what they will become.