You know, when I first came across it, I thought the Journal of Visualized Experiments was a great idea — even if I didn’t have time to watch any of it.
But then they start doing things like passaging mammalian cells, and I’m a little concerned that there’s an amount of straw-clutching going on. As a sometime elite (he says, modestly) cell biologist myself (I can get HEK293s into fresh flasks before Robert Plant finishes wailing “…aaand she’s buy-y-y-ing a stai-airway to hea-ea-eaven”) I know, see, that any institute or lab that has the necessary facilities for doing cell culture sure as damn is going to have a wizard who will watch over your shoulder and say “Don’t you bloody dare touch the neck of that bottle”. The idea of watching a video to learn how to split cells, or even as a reminder, is simply
Wrong.
PS. While checking the spelling of “Plant” I came across this rather splendid-sounding concert, which unfortunately I’ve missed. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss? Now that’s worthy of a video or six. Swoon.
I can get HEK293s into fresh flasks before Robert Plant finishes wailing ”…aaand she’s buy-y-y-ing a stai-airway to hea-ea-eaven
But can you do it to Napalm Death ?
Dunno Henry; I’d have to ask my cells.
Coming at it from the angle of an editor at Nature Protocols, I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with you on this one, Richard. I do understand your point, though – it is an argument we’ve come up against a number of times when commissioning (or seeking referees for) ‘basic’ protocols.
I definitely don’t think that these movies should be seen as a replacement for having an expert walk you through the procedure. But, if done well, I would hope that they could serve as excellent teaching aids.
I remember feeling perpetually bewildered and extremely stupid when I first stared in the lab (a state of mind that seems to have stayed with me!). I also felt very guilty for having to ask people to show me things again and again – I seemed to be incapable of absorbing everything the first time round. For me, having a movie to watch – even for the simplest of techniques – would have helped a lot. They probably would also have helped the poor students/post-docs who had to teach me!
It would be very interesting to hear the opinions of the target audience, which presumably would be anyone (but mostly students?) carrying out the technique for the first time?
Dorothy, I take your points (and it’s OK to disagree with me!).
However, I think that any student who can’t do cell culture after being shown once, and then watched while they do it, probably shouldn’t be allowed near a sterile hood… I’m not convinced that any amount of watching telly would help.
And my main point is that the telly, or the computer, can’t wander into the TC room on spec and exclaim “Good God man, what are you doing?”
I should add, Dorothy, that my comments assume that the local CC wizard is actually competent…
I think I agree with Dorothy here, we can argue about how useful a specific video would be for specific people under specific conditions but I think generally surely having additional material can’t hurt?
I agree that cell culture is an example of something that people need to be carefully trained in and that there is often (but certainly not always) expert help available. But in many cases, especially for new techniques, this isn’t going to be the case. Perhaps it is helpful to indicate on any piece of training material what it is intended to be for; introduction to, refresher, or ‘after this you ought to be able to do it yourself’?
But overall I think you are conflating the issue of what it takes for you to trust a specific person in your hood and the issue of whether such videos are useful in general as a part of training processes.
Besides JoVE is open access so you could always re-dub a version of said video with Richard periodically shouting over the top: ‘Good God man, what are you doing ?‘
hahah!
Yes, I like that.
ponder
NO! NEVER TOUCH THE PIPETTE TO THE BOTTLE!
I think there’s definitely a place for such videos. I did my first degree in chemistry, then switched to molecular biology for my Master’s. The first two weeks were intense, to say the least. Learning the most simple techniques like running a gel and PCR that I’d never even heard of in my chemistry undergraduate degree. If a suite of video walkthroughs had been available back then, I could have spent the summer before my Master’s getting a head start on learning basic techniques, rather than delivering Chinese takeaways.
And you don’t have to watch movies on desktop computers now that there’s newfangled contraptions such as laptops, iPods and iPhones….. for the richer students and postdocs, anyway 😉
I agree that the more information available for newbies, the better. I guess the danger would be if the senior people in the lab decided to stop lavishing so much time on newbies because “it’s all available on the web”.
I do prefer the hands on approach. Can’t beat personal supervision.
I definitely don’t think that these movies should be seen as a replacement for having an expert walk you through the procedure. But, if done well, I would hope that they could serve as excellent teaching aids.
Spot on Dot.
Even to a non scientist like me, I find the content of sites like JoVE and SciVee to be very informative. I spoke with JoVE’s CEO Moshe Prtisker early January and it only took him a couple of minutes to clearly talk me through what JoVE is all about.
I think we’re going to see a continued increase in the amount of video content in science. As with anything though, give us quality – not quantity though.
Disclaimer: I am one of three bloggers who contributes to the official JoVE blog
I don’t deny that JoVE might be doing useful things. But teaching cell culture? The secrets of which are handed down from master (or mistress) to apprentice in darkened and mystical runes?
Don’t think so.
I like to watch other people do techniques. Because everybody does it differently and sometimes you learn something. How not to do something; which makes you feel superior and great, or how to actually do something; which makes you humble again.
I’m not a cell culture guy, just tissue culture. And I can assure you everybody does it differently. There are masters. Just different masters.
One aspect Richard has touched on here is that we all have so little time, one wants to filter the information one receives, whether it is a video tutorial or whatever it is.
Good tagging (captioining and explanations of level, intended use, etc), RSS and so on for videos help, to allow people to select the ones that suit them.
The video format does have a lot of potential but from what I have seen of scientific videos of various kinds, many of them (NOT the ones on JOVE) are not of sufficient quality to be widely useful. So for me, it is a medium that has potential but issues such as the one Richard raises need refining. (As well as the technical quality of the videos themselves, to be useful at the level needed by a professional researcher.)
Thank you all for this interesting discussion about our JoVE. Your questions and suggestions help us to evolve and become better.
We initiated a special section on Basic Video-Protocols following multiple requests from the scientific community. So I am surprised to hear this question: do we actually need them? But I am happy to answer.
First, let’s look at numbers. So far JoVE has published more than 200 video-protocols in different areas of biological sciences (neuroscience, immunology, cell biology, etc…). The “basic” ones are less than 10% of this content. As we continue to publish more, the ratio will remain approximately the same.
1) I put the word “basic” in BIG quotes because: is there anything in biology today that can be considered “basic”? Biological research is becoming more and more fragmented, and researchers become more and more focused on their specific areas. Typically, as I observed in many labs, a neurobiologist would not know how to do a Western blot, and a biochemist would not know how to perform a simple cell staining. These are very “basic” techniques.
2) After the genomic revolution, biology enjoys a strong influx of scientists from other disciplines (chemistry, physics, math, ….). On some stage, these scientists begin to learn biological techniques. Trust me on this – there is nothing “basic” in this process. Similarly to Matt Brown (a comment above), I went through this on my transition from chemistry to biology. Oh, yes, you might be lucky to have people in your lab who can show you how to do an experiment. How much of this show do you remember next day? How many times will you bug them to show you this and that again before it will work in your hands?
3) Young students – undergraduates and graduate students at the beginning of their Ph.D. research. Again, there is no much “basic” for them in their learning process.
To conclude, a lot of scientists, even at advanced stages of their career, need to learn “basic” techniques. But if you feel beyond that, it is OK – you have a lot of advanced stuff on JoVE, tagged, classified, and searchable. 🙂
Best,
Moshe
To conclude, a lot of scientists, even at advanced stages of their career, need to learn “basic” techniques.
This is the key point in this discussion for me. Speaking for neuroscience research, but I’m sure this is true for a variety of disciplines, studies these days involve techniques borrowed from genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, cell biology, behavioral science, etc… The only way to complete such studies is to have 4 collaborating labs together (and a 17 author paper as a result), or a few people in a single lab expanding their horizons and mastering some new techniques, regardless of their “seniority”.
The initial phase of learning a new technique invariably should involve a hands-on experience. But as alluded to above, a quick brush-up on one aspect of a technique, or to remind oneself not to touch the neck of the bottle, advice all potentially provided within the JoVE video, can be an important part of consolidating the new technique into memory. And best of all, JoVE is available 24 hours a day for “questions’, while your friendly trainers in the neighboring lab may be at the pub just when you need advice.
I think that JoVE is fast becoming a resource that most scientists didn’t even know they needed.
One thing I like about JoVE is that it – via the straight video format – gives a real mirror on who are doing the science, say you can hear a lot of foreign accents from people all around the world.
The best marks I ever got for an undergrad lab report were a result of going to the library and finding an old video (and I do mean VHS) on ELISA techniques. No-one in the entire class had got their assay to work, and the video helped me to understand why. Let’s just say: undergraduate lab demonstrations? You’re doing it WRONG.
Funny I should read this today. My PI is off at a “sister” institute showing a lab how do a cell culture! Apparently they can’t get it to work, but he’s published on it numerous times. I wonder if they’d rather have him there (with associated expenses; it involves a flight) or just a video to watch…
@ Ian
Exactly….
So, can you actually ask questions of the video?
Just curious.
I mostly work with a computer but once in while I do bench work. One huge difference in both types of work is how dependent we are on mentoring. For almost any silly question that I might have working on the computer there will be an answer online a search away (even some code to do what I want). To work in a lab we need to know the protocols and all those little tricks that actually make it work. Video protocols are a big enhancement on text protocols and should decrease the mentoring requirements for working in the lab. I can’t imagine having to ask around the lab every time I need to implement some new computational approach. I would be limited to what people (physically) around me know and it would take me so much more time.
As others have mentioned “basic” here really depends on the background training. I am sure our definitions of what are basic computer skills differ.
Can you annotate the video protocols?
I’m not sure whether you can annotate on JoVE but there are some good video annotation tools out there. Viddler is the one I like the most for that kind of thing. But I agree annotation and flagging of issues by other users/experts would be a great thing to have on JoVE.
Really? It might have some use, then.
When I started in my current lab, a postdoc was sent to watch me split cells to make sure I did it right. I had done it before, but she didn’t quite believe how often I had done it until she saw my mad skillzzz in one handed bottle opening and pipetting without touching anything. “I see you have done this before.” “That’s what I SAID!” It was all practice, practice, practice.
But I also have one cell line where everything is a bit weird and different in terms of what to look for and what conditions to use, and I got four pages of instructions from the lab that sent us the cells (with things like “pipette 1 ml drop wise over 30 seconds and then 8 ml over 30 seconds” and “the colour will be slightly lighter”). A video might have a little useful there.
My comment got too long so I posted it on my blog instead
Eva, I think that in that case a video might be useful, but it really is rather a bespoke thing, isn’t it? And is it — genuine question, I don’t know the answer here — easier/faster for the ‘teaching lab’ to make a video and pre-empt the questions, or write things down? Is it not possible that the video maker will think “Here is the protocol, you’ve seen me do it: Now go away and leave me alone?” I don’t know. If you (as the ‘trainee’) have questions raised by the video, and you ask for clarification, do you expect a video response or a written one?
Bora: your blog comment does presuppose it’s a good thing that everyone can do cell culture. Having seen some people, I’m not convinced…
(Snob? Me? I prefer ‘elitist’)
Correct.
I also wish I could watch videos of some techniques I wanted to use in my research, but could not afford to travel long distances to learn from people who could do them, so in the end I just abandoned those experiments.
Now, being a desk-bound editor I’m afraid I wouldn’t know a JoVE from an hole in the ground, but the whole business of remote tutorials is intriguing.
Nature editors spend a lot of time going out on the stump, telling people in labs and at conferences how the editorial process works. Naturally enough, people are always extremely interested to hear about this, and have lots of questions, especially about the peer-review process.
Here at NN, and thanks to the tireless work of my colleagues, especially Maxine, we’ve made this process available more generally in fora such as Ask The Nature Editor and blogs such as Nautilus and Peer to Peer.
But we’re always interested in new technologies, and have been using vbideo increasingly, especially in the process of publicizin g papers. But I do wonder whether Nature might offer training videos on how to publish papers, or — because interactivity is better — run seminars via a chatroom or even (gasp) in Second Life? Hmmm. I expect we’re already doing that…. aren’t we?
(How did I miss this last comment? Jet-lagged to hell and back, I guess)
I think you’ve nailed my misgivings, Henry. Interactivity. Can’t do that with a video.
You can’t really do it with a printed protocol, either; but at least you can scribble in on it as you talk to the author by email or on the ‘phone: hence my question about annotations.