proposal for a new web portal for students of BME innovation, design & entrepreneurship Workshop on BME Teaching of Innovation, Design & Entrepreneurship bmedesign.net

BME design courses growing web searching is now major source up-to-date info on technologies, procedures, products is important background

web searching is inefficient quality of sources highly variable good sources are generally not retained beyond end of term but…

we propose… an alliance of BME design programs to create and maintain a “shareware” web teaching portal bmedesign.net

strategy an “army” of student web crawlers can create and maintain a large and vital web portal… students will benefit from faster and better start to their own projects they will contribute to better education for future students and colleagues

engineering disciplines Bioengineering (general) Biomaterials BioMEMs Biosensors Biomotion Chemical engineering (general) Design Computer Modeling & Simulation Drug delivery Electrical engineering (general) Image guidance Mechanical engineering (general) Nanotechnologies Robotics Tissue engineering

organization faculty editorial board & exec editor each participating program responsible for 1-3 sections (for 3 years) TA or other local editor to add links collect URLs from students at end of term (class assignment)– to central

the wiki engine allows editing of pages through web browser simple interface for content control permissions can be set for various levels of editing features include search, notify, history/ rollback, locking

wiki - pros and cons Pro –Easily edited pages –Easily distributed editing responsibility –Minimal knowledge of HTML required –Changes tracked, has rollback feature Con –Pages may be altered inappropriately –New page creation requires unique naming –Adding pictures/photos awkward

funding concepts run lean – shareware ethic start-up funding by grant? industry sponsorship on annual basis? if possible, try to use this to raise $ for participating programs

main goal provide bme design students with an efficient and reliable tool to guide info gathering on web broader, better quality search accurate assessment of real-world technologies more time for other aspects of design education preserve work of previous students

associated goals further develop community among bme design, innovation & entrepreneurship programs (maybe) provide tool for bme design students to carry into careers (maybe) if industry is interested, provide some funding for programs

next steps? editorial board pilot 5-6 universities (15-18 sections populated) start-up grant/funding

thanks to… Chris Kurihara Abby Garner Ali Hassan