community

Building Your Learning Community

Are there people you’re connecting with during your time here at UAMS? Who makes up your pack, your crowd, your network, your peeps? Are you including the people you collaborate, study, and work with as part of your coursework? What about the instructors and practitioners who serve as mentors and advisers? Don’t forget the students and faculty from your IPE groups. These are some of the people you have in your learning community.

What is a Learning Community

A learning community is a group of people who share common academic goals and meet together to collaborate on coursework and increase their learning. They can be formal structured communities like the academic houses in the Colleges of Medicine and Nursing. They can also be informal groups of the people you go to for exam reviews, group projects, and collaborative research papers.

Benefits of a Learning Community

There are a number of good reasons for building/participating in a learning community.

Study Partners. Being part of a community means you always have a stable group of people working together to make the learning more effective. The students share resources that that can make learning easier. Therefore, they feel more prepared for exams by quizzing one another and explaining difficult information.

Out-of-Class Experiences. Whether it’s service learning, volunteer opportunities, or interprofessional projects, connecting with others in a community will make learning more meaningful, authentic, and interprofessional.

Connections to Instructors and Mentors. Building relationships through service learning and volunteer opportunities with instructors and practitioners will help you know where you will want to go in your profession after you have graduated.

Lasting Friendships and Professional Relationships. The people you connect with today will be the people you will work with as you build your professional career, and move your profession forward in providing the best possible health care experience.

Chances are you have already gathered people both from inside and outside your program into a learning community. They are the people you go to regularly for study sessions and labor with on group projects. Enjoy these relationships. They make your learning better and increase your satisfaction with your time here at UAMS.

Notes on Thanksgiving and Gratitude

It’s that time again. Lest we forget the holidays, TV reminds us. Already round-the-clock Christmas movies are broadcast. So it was that I recently honored Halloween by seeing “Addams Family Values.” There is a delightful send up of all the awful, unhistorical, overly sentimental, school productions of “the first thanksgiving.” Never mind that it wasn’t nearly the first thanksgiving day by European settlers on this continent. Never mind that our current celebration has wandered away from what was originally a harvest festival with gratitude to God because it looked like enough food was stored in for the winter. Many years in agrarian societies that is not a given.

The Official Thanksgiving Holiday

When President Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of the Civil War, proclaimed November 26, 1863 a federal holiday and unified the date of the celebration, he did so largely because of Sarah Josepha Hale who argued for a unified date during a period of military and political disunity. In our day the holiday has become an occasion for food, family, and football. Recently, we’ve added an economic aspect with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. For college students and faculty it has become the last short breather before finals.

Your Thanksgiving

May your Thanksgiving honor one or more of these important themes. The rancorous presidential election will be behind us. It might be good to re-unify, even with that annoying, politically wrong, uncle. Connect with your human family be it blood relatives, extended kin and in-laws, or other families of friends and associates. Think and speak gratitude to those who have enriched you. Indulge some delicious pleasure. It’s healthful to splurge once in awhile. Enjoy shopping amid the roiling crowd or at home in some cyber-boutique. Breathe, rest, and ready yourself for the sprint to the finish of finals week. Have a great Thanksgiving holiday!

The Innovation Hub: Creativity, Collaboration, and Entrepreneurship

On Thursday, March 3rd, the Innovation Hub in North Little Rock invited the community to tour the Hub’s workspaces for designing, making and collaborating. Visitors were able to see the space and learn about their programs, classes, and opportunities. The Open House included tours, activities, demonstrations, and a special celebration featuring local, state, and federal officials.

The goal of the Innovation Hub is to create opportunity, develop talent, and retain that talent for a better Arkansas. The facility is designed around key parts, which together, offer an extensive set of resources. Each of the Hub’s parts and programs include education and mentorship for both adults and children to help foster innovation and promote entrepreneurship.

Spaces for Innovation, Design, and Collaboration

Makerspaces

The makerspaces at the Innovation Hub offer an impressive collection of equipment, including a full wood and metal shop, robotics and advanced computer software, 3D printers, and more. Mentors who will share their time and experience are available to help you with your projects.

Arts and Design Studios

Make your creative vision a reality, whether you work in ceramics, painting, drawing, graphic design, illustration, or printmaking. The arts and design studios at the Innovation Hub offer resources and mentorship so you can innovate and think creatively.

Collaborative Workspaces

Finding a supportive place to meet and collaborate with others can be difficult. The Innovation Hub offers workspaces, complete with resources and support, for entrepreneurs who want to join together and launch new enterprises.

The Innovation Hub recently launched a new program connected to the health sciences called HubX Life Sciences Accelerator program. An accelerator program helps small groups of startup companies by providing funding, work space, resources, mentoring, and networking opportunities to guide them toward a successful business launch. This program, a partnership between Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arkansas, Baptist Health, the Iron Yard, and the Innovation Hub, is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and innovators successfully launch businesses that will solve problems, increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve access to quality health care services.

For more information about membership, classes, and use of the facilities, visit the Innovation Hub website at http://arhub.org/.