Histology-World!
Okay, okay, so web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman commented about this terrible Flash intro for Histology-World!, and well, yeah, it’s pretty bad. But really, can you fault the designer for trying dancing text and crappy electronica music to make histo that much more interesting? Granted, it reminded me that I need to study, but still, picking apart fascia and connective tissue beats microscopically differentiating between developing granulocytes anyday. (How’s _that_ for technical jargon?)
Oh, yeah…a biology educator’s listserv I belong to picked over that site long, long ago. The consensus was that the intro was so embarrassingly bad we’d never use it in a classroom or lab, and that students were so turned off by the tedious gunk that they’d never get to the stuff we wanted to learn.
And hey, I think histology is fascinating subject without electronica and dancing text!
My particular grievance with the intro is that it states histology to be: “interesting, visual, challenging, and fun.”.
Um… fun? No. In fact, I think it’s left me cross-eyed.
Challenging… yes, in the world’s most difficult “spot the difference” quiz way, but with slightly higher stakes, in that your entire professional life may actually depend on it.
Visual… frankly the whole subject is highly discriminatory to those with protanopia and other forms of colour blindness.
Interesting… that was sarcasm, right?
I teach Histology and Pathology at Veterinary Medicine Faculty, Lisbon (Portugal). I’m aware that Histology is repulsive to most students, but I REALLY would like the reason why. Here at the Fac, many students fail the exam. Something important: you can’t get the whole picture of the clinical course of a (for example) lobar pneumonia without pathology and (consequently) histological grounds. I see clinical students more attached to blood and biochemical analyses, roentgenogram, echography, CAT, MRI, but the ultimate morphofunctional mechanism of diseases remains fuzzy.
We - students and teachers - should gather around and discover and try to overcome the flaws and snags that make Histology and Pathology difficult.
By the way, I would ask you to look at “I Hate Histology”at http://www.pathguy.com.
I have read a lot of criticism about my flash introduction. These comments are obviously written by those who are clueless as to the goal of this site. Some of these comments come from people who are so ignorant, that they openly claim to not even know what histology is…but nonetheless, they blatantly criticize the means that this site achieves its goals.
The reality is that histology can be a very difficult subject to master. It can take hours and hours of studying to learn to distinguish a peripheral nerve from collagenous fibers or to be able to know the difference between the fundic region and the pyloric region. Histology can be tedious, dry and difficult.
This site (including the tongue-in-cheek flash intro) is not designed to actually teach histology, but rather to achieve an intangible…..it is a site for students to come to after hours and hours of looking in a microscope and studying….a site for them to come to and play…and in the process of having fun, to gain motivation and enthusiasm for the prospect of learning histology.
Histology-World!