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ISCB Education Committee Meeting Minutes

Fran Lewitter, ISCB Education Committee Chair

The ISCB Education Committee met on Sunday July 17th at ISMB in Vienna. Thanks to all who were able to attend.  There is a lot to do.  Please volunteer and get involved.  I have listed Action Items for each initiative. We currently have over 50 committee members and would love to have everyone involved with at least one item below. It would be great to form task forces for the various initiatives listed below.  Please let Lonnie and/or I know how you would like to be involved.


Attendees:

Murli Nair, Lax Iyer, Bruno Gaeta, Sandor Pongor, Antioine van Kampen, Celia Van Gelder, Andrew Cowley, Jennifer McDowall, Michelle Brazas, Aidan Budd, Andrea Schafferhans, Curtis Huttenhower, Erik Bongcam-Rudloff, Vicky Schneider, Francis Ouellette, Jim Cavalcoli, two students sent by Sorin Draghici, Lothar Richter, Lonnie Welch, Fran Lewitter

1. Appointment of Committee Vice Chair

  • Lonnie Welch (Ohio University) will be vice-chair of the education committee

2. Improve ISCB Education Web Pages

  • Resume development of educational content for ISCB website, including discussion board/wiki, content on how to develop professional skills; bioinformatics lessons for high school biology teachers; high quality computational exercises for bioinformatics topics for different levels of students
  • Go to www.iscb.org/iscb-careers and click on "ISCB Education Committee" link on the left to see what's there
  • Also take a look at the "High School/Secondary School Resources". This needs to be updated and managed.
  • Log into the ISCB web site with your credentials. To access our internal wiki go to (www.iscb.org/iscbwiki/index.php/Education_Committee).  This is where we develop pages before making them public.
  • ACTION ITEM: People need to volunteer to help manage/curate these pages.

3. Curriculum

  • Lonnie Welch initiated a curriculum survey this spring
  • We discussed  preliminary result of curriculum survey
  • Response rate was about 33%
  • Computation, Math and Stats were designated as the most important topics to teach
  • Where do Ph.D. students go after completing a degree in bioinformatics?
    • There is interest in knowing the paths pursued by students after finishing degrees in bioinformatics.
    • How can we gather this information?
  • ACTION ITEM: Lonnie has a number of ideas to move this effort forward and you will hear from him shortly. Your participation is welcome.

4. Bioinformatics education in 2ndary schools

  • We talked about holding a workshop for high school kids prior to ISMB2012
  • Folks from NBIC may be interested in participating.  Are there others?
  • It would be helpful if someone on the Education committee who is local to LA area could be involved.  Any volunteers?
  • Continue to pursue the effort to incorporate bioinformatics in the Advance Placement test for US biology students.  Kevin Karplus has taken the lead on this.
  • ACTION ITEM: Who can take the lead on the organizing a workshop?  Continue working on A/P biology effort.

5. Workshop on Education in Bioinformatics (WEB11)

  • Vicky Schneider, Michelle Brazas, Andrea Schafferhans and Fran Lewitter organized a workshop
  • Details can be found at www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2011-program/workshops#w5
  • It was held on Tuesday July 19th and was very successful
  • Four of the presentations can be found at www.biotnet.org/
  • In the box "Search this site" enter ISMB.  Do a second search and enter Bateman.
  • ACTION ITEM: Should we propose a WEB12?  If so what topic?  Should we aim for something longer than 2 hours (e.g., a SIG, a Satellite meeting)? Who can spearhead this effort?

6. Involvement with ISCB Student Council Education committee

  • Curtis Huttenhower has agreed to be a liaison with the Student Council Education committee(SCEC)
  • ISCB SCEC will put together what they want to accomplish on the educational front
  • We'll see how to work with them on our projects and their projects
  • ACTION ITEM: Curtis will exchange ideas and foster joint projects with the ISCB SCEC

7. Curriculum Repository

  • Vicky Schneider gave a short talk about the Bioinformatics Training Network (BTN) that she helped to initiate (www.biotnet.org/).
  • Educators are depositing course material to this web site.
  • ACTION ITEM: Please consider signing up on BTN and contributing your materials.

8. Improve the Bioinformatics information in Wikipedia

  • This came up at WEB11 and in our committee meeting.
  • Several ideas have been floating around of how to proceed.
  • ACTION ITEM: Who is interested in this project?  What can we do as a committee?  How can we get others in ISCB to be involved?

9. We discussed the idea of holding some conference calls during the year to address specific Education Committee issues.  Stay tuned.

10. FYI: The RECOMB Bioinformatics Education meeting was held immediately following ISMB. Slides for invited talk can be found at http://casb.ucsd.edu/bioed11/presentations.php.