Thanks to Lisa Lee, the Digital Histology Interest Group is now a reality! Many thanks to Donovan Fox, Communications Manager, American Association of Anatomists for assisting her in creating this community! I am pleased to assist her as a co-moderator for this group. I am excited to see more than 40 have already expressed interest and have joined this group. I look forward to the exchange of ideas and resources.
By way of introduction, a few words about me. I first used digital image resources in combination with glass slides and micrscopes in teaching histology in the early 1970s when I led a team of faculty to create what we called back then "self instructional slide / script programs' using 2 x 2s (35mm slide photomicrographs) that included interaction orchestrated by questions in the slide descriptions and a self-assessment quiz at the end. I have seen the digital resources evolve from the glass lantern slides to 35mm slides to Videodiscs to CDs to DVDs to Internet based static digital and within the past 15 years, virtual slides. I have used virtual slides in teaching histology since around 2000 when I began the process of creating a resource for medical histology at the Medical University of South Carolina. November 2002, I organized what I think was the first symposium on "Virtual Slides and Microscopy in Teaching, Research and Diagnosis" sponsored by the Departments of Cell Biology / Anatomy and Pathology at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). Lisa posted a link to the historical symposium that you can peruse to see who the speakers were about technology, teaching, diagnosis and research. These were some of the very early adopters of virtual microscopy in the United States. There were around 100 attendees from the United States, Canada, Ireland and Japan. A book grew out of the symposium. In 2005 "Virtual Microscopy and Virtual Slies in Teaching, Diagnosis and Research" co-edited by R. W. Ogilvie and J. Gu was published by CRC Press (Taylor and Francis Group), Boca Raton, FL. After retiring from Cell Biology and Anatomy (current name is Cell Biology & Regenerative Medicine) at MUSC in 2006 I held a 0.5 FTE position in the Department of Pathology 2006 - 2009 during which time I replaced all of the static histopathology digital specimens used in the case studies with virtual slides, including a full set of annotated virtual slide histopathological specimens for students to study in the course. In 2008, I was appointed Visiting Professor, Department of Biology, University of South Carolina and charged with creating a fully online 500 level histology course for undergraduate and graduate students. That course has been running since Spring Semester 2011 now just having finished the 9th semester with 1100 undergraduate and 35 graduate students having completed the course. . At the recent EB 2014 meeting in San Diego I presented a poster on "Evolution of a cross-institutional aynchronous online 500 level college histology course with interactive lectures and virtual lab component". A PDF of the poster is attached. You can see the timeline of my more than 40 year career by going to my profile.
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Robert Ogilvie
Professor Emeritus
Medical University of South Carolina
Mount Pleasant SC
843-856-0062843-856-0062
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