Categories: uncategorized
Date: 26 April 2007 06:11:41
Good afternoon gang.
Today we are doing MBBS from home. I'm sure that I have told you all about the wondrous gizmo that is RichMedia. With RichMedia, I click on a link from my uni website, and up pops a screen with the powerpoint slides, a little video so I can see the lecturer, and the audio for the lecture. There is also a version without the video for those on dial-up. The powerpoint slides progress at the appropriate moments. At the moment I am listening to a lecture on drug treatment for depression. I am really quite familiar with drug treatment for depression for one reason or another, hence I am simultaneously wiblogging while keeping an ear out for items of interest in the lecture.
I suspect that this lecture is identical to the one I had during my pharmacy degree by the same lecturer. In fact I'm nearly certain. This tends to happen quite frequently, due to my degrees both being at the same university, with some amount of content-overlap and all. But I can confirm that I am listening because I just learnt something - tricyclic antidepressants do confer adaptive changes on the brain (up/down regulation of various receptors/transporters). I suspected this, but didn't KNOW it.
But anyway, this method of lectures works a lot better for me. It means that I can sit in a place less likely to send me to sleep and get up as often as I like to kick my body back into wake-mode, I can pause/rewind/fast forward as necessary, I don't have to travel an hour each way to uni, I can adjust my uni commitments so that I can work if my employers are in a pickle or I'm having a cash-flow crisis... that's enough reasons to start with!
The usual argument against not going to uni and catching up at home is "but if you get behind you'll never catch up".Yes, well that is true enough. But if we consider that I spend a lot of uni lecture time sleeping or reading the Herald online, and hence I will have to catch up afterwards, it's really an enormous time saving. It would be good if I could get through a lecture without falling asleep but unfortunately it seems to be out of my control. Something to do with a slightly too warm room, sitting still, in semi-darkness, with a droning voice...