| Third RECOMB Satellite Conference on Bioinformatics Education (RECOMB-BE 2011) | |
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Austria - Vienna |
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| Hosted by: | ISMB 2011 |
| Venue: | Hilton Vienna Stadtpark |
| Dates: | Jul 20, 2011 through Jul 21, 2011 |
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Description |
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| RECOMB-BE 2011, held in conjunction with ISMB 2011, will consist of invited presentations, oral presentations selected from submitted abstracts and papers, a poster session, and discussion panels, all of which focus on improving bioinformatics education. The goal of RECOMB-BE is threefold: to showcase best practices of teaching bioinformatics ideas to biology undergraduates, to discuss existing challenges in bioinformatics education (with an emphasis on undergraduate education), and to promote collaboration among educators with the aim to develop a mature bioinformatics curriculum. In keeping with the focus on undergraduates, the conference will also showcase selected bioinformatics research projects conducted by undergraduate students. While biology has been transformed into a computational science in the last decade, the biological curriculum remains largely unchanged with respect to computational issues. The question: “How should we teach bioinformatics to biology students?” has become of the utmost importance, since many universities have not only founded undergraduate bioinformatics programs but are considering the addition of new computational courses to the standard biology curriculum—a change which would represent a dramatic paradigm shift in biology education. However, as the first two RECOMB-BE meetings demonstrated, there is a great divide in how even the world’s top bioinformaticians thought the subject should be taught, and therefore the above pedagogical question has not been answered satisfactorily to date. RECOMB-BE therefore aims to demonstrate the intricacy, practicality, and beauty of modern bioinformatics at the undergraduate level, and advance the discussion about its curriculum in the biology classroom. For a summary of RECOMB-BE discussions and the educational challenges that lie ahead for bioinformatics, see Computing has changed biology--biology education must catch up (Science 2009, v.325: 541-542). RECOMB-BE will have a somewhat unusual format, inspired by the biennial mathematical conference called Gathering for Gardner (G4G) At G4G, leading mathematicians give high-school and undergraduate level lectures; the goal of G4G is therefore to present complex mathematical ideas in a simple form. This objective is one for which the bioinformatics community must also strive in order to establish meaningful future collaborations with biologists and to bridge the cultural gap between computational and experimental scientists. Unlike previous meetings on bioinformatics education, which have focused on how bioinformatics should be taught, RECOMB-BE showcases how leading bioinformaticians actually teach. Speakers will give short, introductory-level lectures, aimed at undergraduates. These lectures will be complemented by discussion panels focusing on existing challenges in bioinformatics education as well as poster presentations given by undergraduate students on their research projects. |
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| Additional Information | |
| Event URL: | http://casb.ucsd.edu/bioed11/ |
| ISCB Member Discount: | None |
| Contact Person: | Phillip Compeau ([javascript protected email address]) |
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