A MULTIMEDIA COLLABORATIVE COURSE ON THE PRINCIPLES OF PROTEIN STRUCTURE
Alan Mills, Birkbeck College, University of London UK
pps@www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/personal/a_mills.html
Peter Murray-Rust, Glaxo Research & Development, Greenford, UK
pmr1716@ggr.co.uk.uk http://www.dl.ac.uk/CBMT/pmr.html
Keywords:
- Protein
- Molecular
- Hypertree
- HyperGlossary
- Chemical MIME,
- RasMol
- KineMage
- BioMoo
- Multimedia
- Collaborative
- Bioinformatics
A COLLABORATIVE MULTIMEDIA BREAKTHROUGH IN AFFORDABLE EDUCATION
The Crystallography Department
of Birkbeck College, in collaboration with the
Virtual School of Natural Sciences
presents the first universal multimedia hypercourse on the Internet.
Free to all participants, the course uses
everyday hardware with new, free, software to present:
This course, currently running live has the support of leading
research groups throughout the world and will bring some of the latest and
most important
scientific developments
into any lab or home.
Unlike conventional education the course is developed
communally with
consultants and
students alike contributing
hypermaterial of high quality. With its central emphasis on collaboration the course
is already developing new resources such as a
distributed hyperglossary,
again constructed by communal effort. There are many different methods
for learning, including a virtual classroom in
BioMOO,
email discussion lists,
hyperpages,
interactive molecular
viewers, interviews with leading
scientists, self-paced
assessment on the Web and much more. Over 250
scientists and students from many disciplines and from 26 countries are actively involved.
Following a period of
administrative preparation
and planning the course was formally launched at the end of January, following
electronic registration
in the two weeks before Christmas, during which period, over 250 students applied.
Since then, they have
been organised into 20 groups
each named after an
amino acid, and each student
has been allocated a protein structure from the
Brookhaven
Protein Data Bank. Among the
pre-requisites,
is the fact that every student must have use of a graphical browser, and have an email
address. We are encouraging them to develop their understanding of the
technology of this new
medium, and to configure their browsers for
Chemical MIME to enable them
to automatically invoke the 3-D molecular viewer
RasMol to permit
visualisation and study of molecular structures.
Overall Course Scheme
The course material
has been designed around a linear
backbone, and students are already undertaking a series of
assignments. We are also
encouraging students to contribute hypermaterial as projects or as contributions to communal
sections on Protein Families
, and have offered a
Style Guide to help them,
as well as offering to mount a home page for any student who doesn't have local facilities..
One of the most gratifying features of the course so far has been the enthusiastic development of a
community spirit on the course.
We have tried to ease the problem of navigation, and most components can
be accessed from our
Main Index
which serves as the entry point for the VSNS-PPS Course.
If you have access to the World Wide Web, take a look at URL
http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/PPS/index.html
Dive In!
In our experience, people at conferences don't have much time to read posters
so we encourage you to delve around in our hypertree, and
email the organisers at pps@www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk for
further information.
Reference
`Protein Knowledge at a Click' by Tim Durham,
Times Higher Education Supplement, Multimedia Supplement,10th.Feb'95
Prepared 14th.Feb'95 by
Alan Mills, at Birkbeck College, for vsns-pps