I started using wikipremed lately to supplement what I am learning and it has been pretty helpful. A word of suggestion for John (if you have time) is to compose powerpoint slides such as those provided in the physics section for other subjects as well. I find it REALLY helpful.
I'm about to make all of the slideshows publicly available as a directory archive of folders as well as Photoshop layers and GIMP, Seashore, PowerPoint if someone is inclined.
Although most of the shows adhere to a 800 X 450 format most of my archive of slides and images (about 6000 figures) is in 800 X 600 format which is better for Powerpoint and was more common in video when I started putting the image archive together from my own and CC sources. There are about 500 new figures from the slideshows that haven't been archived, and there are all of the metabolism, genetics and physiology slideshows I've been working on the past two years that haven't been released yet.
Thank you for the request. I'll set up a downloads page with the Photoshop files this week and put a link here. If you don't have Photoshop, you can use GIMP to open them as layers, which can then be batch exported as a folder of JPEGs and imported into PowerPoint. The only delay is that I need to rename the photoshop layers because I didn't have a convention when I made them.
Photoshop is superior to Powerpoint for teaching if you don't mind having functional margins with pallets because you can extend the slides vertically in a convenient way, so that for a few of the slides you might have dimensions of 800 X 2400 and just scroll down as you talk. With a $50 graphics tablet and a $400 projector, a teacher with Photoshop or GIMP and a good creative commons image archive is better positioned for any subject than all these idiotic whiteboard and software systems.
Yes I will definitely make this a high priority, and this is coming from a person with a lot of oars in the water. We had a leak behind the kitchen sink and it bloomed into black mold behind an entire wall two thirds of the way to the ceiling. Everybody is sick. I had to remove all of the dry-wall and cabinets and throw it all away, so right now our counter top is seven feet of corion across two dishwashers, my son needs big help in trigonometry, and my book shipping is dead in the water because I am working seventy hours per week, my printer is dead again and for a few who are waiting your back orders are like a raven following me around. I have really appreciated the patience and kindness this past month so I am very happy to have something easy to do that could benefit everybody. I think it might be fun to try to explain the slides to a study partner or two. If you get through explaining my slides to each other with a friend or two and get anything like what my point of view is you'd have to be pretty much inherently incapable if you don't rock the MCAT.
Actually I think I'll make another post today which will be a kind of reading group for the next twelve weeks for a few out of print works, mainly Bioenergetics by Lehninger, about 200 pages published throughout the 60's, and Outlines of Biochemistry, by Stumpf and Conn, about 250 pages, published in the same period. Going week by week and chapter by chapter through these books with certain learning goals in sequence I will try to run a discussion where the vocabulary evolves through most of the MCAT curriculum, certainly most of physics, pretty much of general chemistry and your organic mechanisms, and the biology up to genetics, meaning that we may leave the option of not going in depth into physiology as well as some of the physics including real problem solving magnetism, geometric and wave optics, and nuclear physics. I think outside of those topics, some of the physics and the physiology, we can pretty much cover it all. My rule is going to be to not link to or refer to Wikipremed in the discussion, but to only use out-of-print, fair use, and freely available resources on the web (but nothing MCAT). Questions about WikiPremed should be off limits I think because it will be most enjoyable if we make the course like a book club for the two books I mentioned. I like them because they are out-of-print and available for $2 in pretty decent quantity at Ebay and Amazon as well as better than anything you have ever read about metabolism except for Stryer. If enough students are interested I can pursue the texts from the copyright holders if the web runs out of the copies left. If there is too much high-lighter you can swab it away with a lightly moistened wipe of dilute sodium hypochlorite or trichloroisocyanuric acid and follow with a moistened wipe of sodium thiosulfate solution to neutralize the oxidizer before it affects the paper or printer's ink.
But anyway I'm happy to do this for kicks and to have something to help the dozens, I say dozens of students I am failing with really dismal customer service (should be back up tonight
. If SDN can let the particular thread have a CC license I can use images from the commons and they can edit a book out of it if they want to make a lot of dough. They could print it. You could print it. We all could print it. It'd be no skin off my nose! If they could get Alfa Diallo to go along it'd be great to have access to the MCAT Pearls stuff for the discussion. The way to do it is for SDN to give him a cut of the printed method using basic manufacturing multiples. Who could compete with SDN in printing content developed on this website? It will help me get some ideas worked on. I need nothing else I tell you. I have appreciated that the community has accepted my postings and so this is a way I might be able to contribute that is consistent with the kind of approach that is only about the work I am trying to follow. Although the 'wiki' part is only coming apparent it should already be there in the philosophy behind WikiPremed. The more closed the network is to outside intrusion, the less able it is to engage with that which is outside itself, so MCAT courses based on holding back proprietary methods from scrutiny are going to be disadvantaged. If it can be more than just me pulling the wagon, meaning that folks take on a mutual responsibility for quality assurance, the book club I have proposed might even become one of your most valuable learning experiences.