SfN: Workshop on "Resources for Teaching Neuroscience"

I TA'd a bunch in college and I am currently the TA for the medical school Neurology course, so I am always looking for good ways to make teaching better.

However, the moderator made a good point during the workshop that SfN -- in spite of the fact that majority of members do teach or are themselves students -- has always focused on research rather than teaching. This issue exceeds SfN; I would argue it applies to academia as a whole. It seems to me that teaching is viewed as something that you do because you have to and research is something that you do because you want to.

Anyway, that issue is probably the result at least in part of the limited resources available for teachers to make their lectures and labs more interesting. This workshop discussed some of the resources that are available on the web. They list a lot of good weblinks on the workshop website.

The highlight of the web resources for me would have to be the MIT OpenCourseWare site. MIT has decided to stream numerous lectures from the undergrad and graduate courses for free. Totally check it out. I don't even know why I paid for college anymore. I don't know if I would ever utilize and entire lecture in a course that I was teaching, but it would be cool to use snippets particularly if they are running an experiment in class that I don't have time to set up. (One problem has been that they don't often update these courses, but there is still a lot there including student notes -- which I think would be super useful as handouts.)

Another good one is the Whole Brain Atlas -- a web atlas that provide excellent images of both normal and pathological brains through a variety of imaging modalities.

The emphasis in the discussion was on the idea of user\-generated content -- a concept with which from writing this blog I am slightly familiar. Basically, in order to solve this problem of media resources we need gifted and dedicated amateurs to post useful things. Then others need the means to collect these things into user friendly libraries. A great example of how this could work is YouTube. YouTube lets you collect and post whatever videos you want and make lists of favorites that other people have posted. This way they are both available to you in an accessible form and to others who would like to use them.

So go off and multiply the web resources so that we may all prosper with the fruits of good teaching.