My Experience on Searching for Educational Resources

My main source of educational resources are from books....yes, hard copy books. And that's usually if I'm looking for established knowledge in a particular field. However, if the knowledge is still evolving or developing, I will usually resort to the Internet. Or if the hard copy books are not available, then I'll resort to the Internet. There are two parts to my account of experience - (1) educational resources as materials or supporting materials for my lectures; and (2) educational resources for research purposes.

The first part: I lecture on a course known as 'Introductory Medical Science'. In this course, one of the topic is on case study in Life Science research. Being from Reproductive Biotechnology background, my obvious favourite subject is on mammalian sex selection (natural methods and scientific methods) and assisted reproductive technology (ART). My search for educational Internet resources for ART and scientific methods of sex selection is much easier compared to the natural methods of sex selection. Videos and educational articles on these subjects are plenty and easily found in the Net. Merely typing "Videos on IVF" in search engines gives good matches. However, for natural methods of sex selection, the effort is not so easy because you are more likely to come across websites that advertise natural methods for choosing the sex of your baby with claims of 97 to 99% accuracy. And obviously these websites do not reveal their science behind their natural methods (that's their trade secret!), so I can't get any educational resource from there. However, to date, this is the most useful and educational website on natural gender selection: http://www.in-gender.com/Gender-Selection/Natural.aspx

The second part: Searching for educational resources for research project use. Protocols on how to do various laboratory techniques such as agarose gel electrophoresis, polymerase chain reaction, gel extraction, Southern, Northern and Western blots are also easily found in the Net. Forums or message boards for troubleshooting aspects of these techniques are also easily available. An example is http://www.molecularstation.com/agarose-gel-electrophoresis/#protocols For project students who need to start a lab technique but feels jittery about it, and if I'm too tied up with other responsibilities, I will recommend protocol websites that offer videos for them to see how something is done. Ideas on how to troubleshoot lab protocols are also available in http://www.biotechniques.com/ in the form of message boards. Databases of DNA sequences of various species are available in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Abstracts of research and review articles can be found in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=PubMed. These abstracts also link you to the full text article in pdf format. However, many of these full text articles require subscription or payment before you can download them. If payment is required, usually I will do a search of the correspondence author's name in a search engine to find his/her email address. Then I'll email him/her directly requesting for the full text pdf format or the hard copy reprint to be mailed to me. And fortunately also, most of these authors responded to my requests promptly!