The consumer choice model of this paper might speak more to impulse buying rather than some longer-term valuation. In any event, this paper might have implications for learning.
This paper makes me wonder if teachers of graduate and medical students shouldn’t reconsider using physical objects to teach instead of relying so much on text and visuals.

It reminds me of the method we used to teach one of my daughters spelling. In second grade she was getting 20′s and 30′s on her spelling tests; the psychologist’s evaluation indicated an extreme deficit in short term visual member (bottom 2%-ile) and recommended a kinaesthetic approach involving tracing on a white board letters. Indeed, within a few weeks she was nearly perfect on her spelling and we could shortly thereafter drop the whiteboarding and she is today an excellent speller.

Perhaps this is a “learning styles” issue. Or perhaps it is a valuation issue, which might drive a “learning style” issue. Perhaps we learn best what we value most (one of the ideas of andragogy) and that kinaesthesis drives valuation better than text. An object is worth a thousand pictures?

Likewise, we might consider the ‘value’ of books. Is a book read on-line or on a kindle valued as highly as one that one holds? Is a book that one marks up and dog-ears a better teacher than a book that is kept in pristine condition (so that it can be re-sold?)

This model might also apply to certain political decisions. For example, a citizen might value more highly a tangible right or good, such as as a “gas-guzzling truck”, over an intangible good, such as a “sustainable future”.

Moreover, there might be individual, developmental and possibly heritable differences in the role of kinaesthesis in valuation.

I’m attending a workshop presented by Deidre Larrier and Emily Hurst at the HAMC library.

• items of interest  over 5,500 medical apps for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.  The number of physicians using i-Phones doubled in 2009. This might be explained by the advent of the the iPhone2.   You can access these apps by going to the iTunes App Store.
• http://www.softwareadvice.com/ provides advice on medically-related apps.
• of general interest: dictionaires; pronunciation & translation.

Perusing the listings under Education

• access to: Wikipedia
• calculators, graphic calculators
• “Molecules is an application for viewing three-dimensional renderings of molecules and manipulating them using your fingers.”
• dictionaries and translators

Android apps

Blackberry apps

For free from the National Library of Medicine

• National Library of Medicine Mobile: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mobile/
• MedlinePlus (English with link to Spanish version of site): http://www.m.medlineplus.gov
• Wiser: http://wiser.nlm.nih.gov/
• REMM: http://www.remm.nlm.gov/
• AIDSInfo Mobile: http://m.aidsinfo.nih.gov/
• NCBI Bookshelf: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query/Books.live/Help/mobile.html
• PubMed for Handhelds: http://pubmedhh.nlm.nih.gov/

• It takes me (as administrator) about 30-45′ each week to set up the wiki structure.  I do this to maintain a certain structure and because I have the categories in mind as I write the questions. (So far I retained administrator control over the “entry” point page that lists all the articles  and their questions.  )
• Few students have made use of the wiki to write up their answers (which are given orally each week in a seminar following the journal club). Since TMA itself is voluntary, there is no way to require student entries to the wiki and there is so far little incentive to do so.
• The wikia.com wiki is straightforward with standard wiki features.  There’s a minor odd feature that if you highlight a text to make a link, the wikia will replace it automatically with other text, so that you have to go back and edit it back to what you want. It should accept the highlighted text as default.
• The chief impediment to getting students to write to the wiki I think is that it takes additional time to write up and edit a wiki.
• A second impediment has to do with copyright issues.  Under the doctrine of fair use, it is appropriate to take tables and figures from copyrighted works for display in a one-time teaching seminar, but not for repeated use or in a stable public forum. This means that figures would have to be redrawn. In most cases, students actually use the whiteboard for diagrams- so is is non-trivial to post them to the wiki.
• One solution to the copyright issue would be to take the wiki private, using the wiki feature of Blackboard, for example.

• http://lewisshepherd.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/your-choice-dataviz-as-event-or-book/?blogsub=confirming#subscribe-blog
• http://matei.org/ithink/2010/08/16/social-media-genome-toward-an-ecology-of-social-roles-in-online-collaborative-spaces/

I thought this use of Prezi was thoughtful and useful.

Video capture

I used Jing for a video capture of the Voki video, but this created an swf file which I wasn’t able to convert into anything usable.  This was surprising, because I could play the swf file using Firefox, but there still wasn’t anything in the cache.    I then tried Screenr and this generated a local flv file, which I was able to use.

I converted the flv file to wmv using VLC but the quality was poor; especially the first part of video was garbaged. I then tried converting using  Lumixsoft FLV to WMV converter http://www.lumixsoft.com/download.php.  This gave a much higher quality conversion.  The wmv file was uploaded into Windows Movie Maker.

Audio capture

Neither Jing nor Screenr picked up the audio.  I was able to capture this using NCH’ Soundtap Streaming Audio Recorder.  This generated a wav file that I could  uploaded into Windows Movie Maker.  The sound was synchronized with the video manually and the product saved as a wmv file, then uploaded to Youtube, then the embed code was pasted here via Vodpod:

There appears to be some loss of both video and audio quality through these manipulations.

• extracting the flv from the cache
• loading it into VideoPad Video Editor.
• To add  music, I converted  an mp3 file into wav format in WavePad and uploaded the wav file into VideoPad.
• I created an intro sequence by taking snapshots from the Xtranormal sequence and then added a voice track to the “intro”.
• Uploaded to Youtube.

Note:In VideoPad you can adjust the volume for each audio track separately.  I couldn’t figure out how to adjust the volume of  mp3 files in VideoPad, but it worked easily for wav files.  Here’s the product: “Lives of the Hunted. Episode 1″:

Lives of the Hunted Episode 1. In this episode, Dr. Capricious 'Cappy' Cumlaude berates her student Sam Sansarif for arriving late to the lab