A question for you: do we measure mass or weight on a laboratory balance? As we tell our students, weight and mass are not synonymous. Weight is the force of gravity acting on an object and varies depending on the object's location. Mass, on the other hand, is the amount ...
Join us to learn about strategies for helping students recognize, understand, and minimize variability while mastering fundamental biotech lab techniques. We’ll discuss practices for improving reproducibility as we introduce an open-access biotech lab manual from Dr.'s Lisa Seidman, Cynthia Moore, and Jeanette Mowery. Download the free lab manual at basicbiotechmethods.com. Speakers: Lisa Seidman, PhD, Emeritus Faculty, Madison Area Technical College Cynthia Moore, PhD, Emeritus Faculty, Illinois State University Jeanette Mowery, PhD, Emeritus Faculty, Madison Area Technical College About the ...
I recently finished updating one of InnovATEBIO’s Courses-in-a-Box, Basic Laboratory Methods in a Regulated Environment. This course introduces students to fundamental laboratory methods that preprofessional biotechnologists must master. Over the years, my colleagues and I have tried to identify the most basic concepts and skills that our students require to ...
I introduced the previous blog about our InnovATEBIO webinar ( To Reduce Variability/Enhance Reproducibility: Begin at the Beginning) with a story about pH measurement. In the experience described in that blog, I was trying to measure the pH of a difficult solution, one with a high pH and containing urea ...
In May, my colleague, Jeanette Mowery, and I presented an InnovATEBIO webinar: To Reduce Variability/Enhance Reproducibility: Begin at the Beginning. This is the first of two blogs about that webinar. Before discussing the webinar, I’ll share a personal story. Many years ago I was thrilled to land a postdoc position ...
What Were We Thinking?? I recently read a blog in which the author tells this story: W. Edwards Deming (a “founding father” of total quality management) was getting ready to teach a four day seminar on quality improvement when an executive approached him. The executive said that he was too ...
In spring 2013, the National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE) issued the results of a research study that analyzed the math and English requirements for community college students entering nine popular occupational fields, including biotechnology, nursing, computer programming, and business. The study addressed the question: "What does it ...
"Certification," "core competencies," "career ladders," "credentialing," "stackable credentials," "accelerated learning"... These are terms being brandished in the circles of my professional life. I suspect that large infusions of grant dollars from the Department of Labor (DOL) are at least partially responsible for the introduction of these terms into our collective ...
Last week, my colleagues and I were thrilled to receive copies of our newly published student laboratory manual, Laboratory Manual for Biotechnology and Laboratory Sciences: The Basics. *It was suggested that I write a brief blog to explain how this manual came to be written and for whom it is ...
