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Educational informatics for the biologyteacherLinda Baggott a , Jon Nichol b & Paul Ellison ca Biology and Educationb History and Education , Exeter, EX I 2LUc Information Technology Services , School of Education,University of ExeterPublished online: 13 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: Linda Baggott , Jon Nichol & Paul Ellison (1997) Educationalinformatics for the biology teacher, Journal of Biological Education, 31:3, 189-196, DOI:10.1080/00219266.1997.9655562

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Educational informatics for the biology teacher Linda Baggott, Jon Nichol, and Paul Ellison

In the 1 8th century we had the agrarian revolution; the industrial revolution

followed in the 19th century, early in the 20th century came the

technological revolution, and now as we head for the millenium, the

Information Revolution is upon us ...!

Introduction

Like them or loathe them, computers are with us, and are here to be exploited. Three main aspects of com­puter application in education have emerged over the last 20 years: for administration, for children's learning, and for teachers' professional development. Computer-aided administration and learning have been the main uses of computers in schools since the 1970s. The final element, computers for teachers' pro­fessional development, is a relatively new phenome­

non that has been made feasible by the new in­formation and communication technologies (ICT). The power and potential of the Internet in education for both administration and curriculum development are enormous. It is probable that in the near future all schools will have a link to the Internet, and will be able to use it both to disseminate and collect informa­tion from all over the world. It will be possible, for example, to share teaching materials, new ideas, news about syllabus changes, exam requirements and so on, with colleagues both far and wide. Because of this huge capacity for almost instantaneous information exchange, we may be on the brink of the greatest revolution in education since it became compulsory. This paper is a report on developments at the leading edge of ICT in education, with a specific focus on pro­fessional development.

The Internet and what it provides The Internet is a network of computer networks — lit­erally hundreds of thousands of computers connected together for the purpose of communication. An anal­ogy can be made with the roads system: there is a net­work of various types of roads for vehicle transport. Sometimes the roads, such as motorways are wide and

Abstract

This paper gives an introduction to the Internet and World Wide Web showing what they can provide for the biology teacher. It gives information for the classroom practitioner

on the promises, possibilities, and realities of the new information and communications technologies; how to get connected, how to avoid the pitfalls, and how to reap the benefits of a growing and developing global information system. The curriculum opportunities are set in context for the biologist, and pointers to useful and relevant Internet

sites are provided. Key words: Internet, World Wide Web (one key word!),

Resources.

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straight, and can handle large volumes of fast-moving traffic; other roads, such as country lanes are narrow and tortuous, and rapid bulky transport is not effec­tive. The Internet is world wide, and is currently used by millions of people in many different capacities, either as individuals or within organizations. Some­times called 'users', these include universities, gov­ernment departments, commercial enterprises, and schools. Often normal telephone wires form the Internet, but in other cases special dedicated lines are used, as are fibre optic cables and microwave connec­tions. Personal computers (PCs) are connected to the Internet by simple modems, which convert informa­tion from the computer into an audio signal which can be transmitted via a telephone line. Use of this proven technology makes the system relatively inexpensive to use.

The Internet provides a number of communica­tions functions, based on providing, retrieving, and exchanging information:

1. Conferencing involves two or more people at com­puters which may be separated by any distance. The participants use their keyboards to provide informa­tion which appears immediately and simultaneously on the screens of the other computers. It is possible to make connections to enable simultaneous transfer of text and graphics, data, and voice via a separate com­munications channel (Baggott and Wright, 1997, in press). For example, in desk-top conferencing, partic­ipants at a distance can see and interact with the same screen, and hear each other in real time.

Videoconferencing is now possible. Small video cameras mounted on top of the computer monitor enable not only screen data to be transferred, but also live video images of the participants, or some item, perhaps a specimen, piece of equipment or even prac­tical technique they wish to demonstrate. Soon every­one using the Internet will be able to use shared 'white boards' on which teacher and taught can write. Videoconferencing is already in practice in the BEON project (Bristol Education On-Line), sponsored by British Telecom and International Computers Limited and associated with the University of Exeter. This is currendy underway in a group of schools in South Bristol where teachers are engaged in curriculum development work in collaboration with university lecturers via video conferencing. The live interchange of information, both in visual and textual form, that can be simultaneously worked upon, altered, and reconceptualized represents a significant new dimen­sion made possible by the technology. Thus, in a recent case, a teacher and a lecturer pooled ideas about the use of a set of images for teaching a topic, discussing possible teaching ideas, strategies, and pupils' activities. Vidéoconférence links also enable student teachers on school placements to have contact with university tutors without the need for travel.

The 'EuroTurtle' project (King's College, Taunton, and Exeter University) provides an example of a video conference in which teacher trainers discussed ways of using a unique Internet database dedicated to the conservation of Mediterranean Sea Turtles. EuroTurtle can be found at http://www/ex/ac/uk. telematics/ EuroTurtle/

2. 'News ' (user) groups. People with a common inter­est can set up news groups in which they can exchange recent information or hold discussions. In the Higher Education sector 'Bionet' (see Appendix) enables academics teaching biology and biomédical sciences to provide and receive teaching materials and ideas. At Exeter we have established one for our student teachers to exchange material of topical in­terest.

3. Electronic mail. The Internet can be used to exchange electronic mail (e-mail). With suitably installed software, for example, Eudora or ECS Mail, individuals can send and receive mail from other users all over the world. Each Internet user has an e-mail address which is unique and is as secure as a private telephone in a locked room. E-mail began within small local networks of computers, to enable people within organizations to communicate. The advantage was quickly seen of linking together organizations' networks to make links not just with external organi­zations, but also the world information system in gen­eral. E-mail messages can be bounced straight back without being readdressed, and there is also an address book facility in which e-mail addresses can be stored and at the click of the mouse be pasted into a message to be sent (figure 1). It is also possible to send, as attachments to the message, any type of data that can be represented digitally. So long, word-processed documents, pictures, software programs, even sound files can all be sent and received by e-mail (figure 1). The advantages of this type of transfer of information together with textual 'conversations' made possible by e-mail will readily be appreciated.

At Exeter we are using e-mail not only to support student teachers in schools, but also in curriculum development projects around the world, including six EU countries, Australia, Russia, and South Africa. There is a constant interchange of ideas, support, and information, with the teams linked together in an elec­tronic network. Of particular significance for teacher training is the European funded T3 project, which has a developing section on courses for teachers on Science and the Environment. More can be found on http://www.ex.ac.uk/telematics/t3.htm

4. Electronic information. Perhaps the most immedi­ately impressive tiling about the Internet is the amount and variety of the information available. Anyone who has Internet access can retrieve and/or provide any

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type of information which it is possible to represent in digital form. One of the two basic Internet facilities, developed in the 1960s and upon which all other pro­tocols are built is FTP, or File Transfer Protocol. This allows an Internet user to locate computer programs, data files, and documents in plain text on a remote computer and download them to his or her own com­puter's hard disc. It can also be used to transfer files to a server to be put on to the Internet. An example of a biology teacher's use of FTP is downloading hyper­media statistics learning packages from the Teaching and Learning through Technology's (TLTP) CTI site at http://stats.gla.ac.uk/steps/release/biology.html. A particularly good package is 'The case of Luddersby Hall' in which students trace the source of an outbreak of Salmonella food poisoning in a hall of residence, selecting variables from the data, forming hypotheses, and analysing the data with appropriate statistical tests. Other intriguing titles in this series of learning packages include: All creatures great and small; Sterility testing, and Respiration rates in lichens.

The second basic protocol, Telnet, allows Internet users to contact the log-in to a remote computer as if they were directly connected to that computer even in the same room. This facility was particularly useful for searching in the catalogues of libraries in other parts of the world. Apart from merely seeing whether that library held a particular book or article, the cata­logues may have contained sufficient information in the form of an abstract to satisfy the immediate query. A useful application of Telnet for biologists is using it to get into BIDS (Bath Information Data Systems) on which the full text of Current Contents can be found. This provides a weekly overview of new research in life sciences world wide. BIDS gives access to multi-disciplinary citation indexes which contain details of articles from more than 7000 journals, and papers pre­sented at over 4000 conferences per year.

World Wide Web In the early 1990s, CERN, the nuclear research centre in Geneva, developed and released on an unsuspect-

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ing world an Internet navigation system which has become known as the World Wide Web (www), or just simply 'the Web'. It is currently the most usable and used method of giving and getting information from the world's electronic communications networks. The www was initially designed as an environment for the joint authoring and joint publishing of research. The joint authoring has taken a back seat with the involve­ment of commercial interests in simple delivery of information, but the ideal remains and will reappear with planned developments of the most popular browsers. If the Internet can be-likened to a roads sys­tem, then the www may be compared with the shops and services on that network. Within this analogy it is possible to illustrate the two main components of the www: the server, and the client. The server, or shop­keeper/service supplier, provides information in the form of software, text, and graphics. This information is linked to other relevant files by HyperText links, which usually appear on the screen as words in blue, and when the cursor is passed over them and the mouse button clicked, will go straight to that file, retrieving it for the client to see. This makes the www very easy to use, and indeed in a very short time some­one sitting at a computer connected to the Internet can gain access to all sorts of information including text, pictures, moving images, and sound from all sorts of places.

What you need to get connected to the Internet

Connection with the Internet requires four elements: 1. an account with a supplier of Internet services. 2. suitable hardware, 3. suitable software (computer programs), 4. some means of physically connecting the hardware

to the wires of the Internet (usually a phone line). Each of these elements is explained below:

1. An account with a supplier of Internet services An increasing number of Internet service providers are appearing. This is a huge growth area of the economy, and there is therefore rising competition for customers between the companies. This means that a fall in prices may be expected, so it is as well when planning to connect to the Internet to look around for the various packages currently on offer. At the time of writing, good Internet connection costs about £15 per month, although promotional deals appear from time to time. Services vary, but subscribers may have access to some or all the following: • e-mail, • retrieving information, including many on-line

databases (see list of biology urls), • news group bulletin boards,

• electronic conferencing, • free software ('freeware'), • file space for own information ('home pages' —

see below).

2. Suitable hardware Almost any modern computer can be used to link to the Internet, but it is best to use one which has a Graphical User Interface (GUI), i.e. can run 'Windows'. Recent PCs, Apple Macs, and Archi­medes machines all have GUIs. In addition to the computer, a modem is needed to connect to the tele­phone line. Reasonably fast modems are available for under £200. These are able to download information at a rate of 28 kilobits sec"', which is equivalent to approximately one and a half A4 pages of text per sec­ond.

3. Suitable software The necessary software will vary according to the type of computer used and to the link with the Internet. TCP/IP is the Internet's common communi­cations protocol, and communications software sup­porting TCP/IP is needed to dial up the telephone number of the Internet Service supplier. The cost of this will probably be included in the subscription. Other programs are then needed to navigate the Internet. These are currently available free of charge. A popular example of such a www browser is Netscape Navigator, a program which enables the user to move around the www and perform the various functions (see figure 2). Recent versions of Netscape Navigator (Version 2.0 and greater) also contain an interface to newsgroups and e-mail, so the number of different programs needed is reduced. An upgrade to include shared whiteboards (see above) for Internet 'Talk', called CoolTalk is available via Netscape Navigator 3.0. Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 3 offers equivalent features.

4. Connecting the hardware to the wires of the Internet Once the hardware (computer + modem) is connected to the telephone line, the cost of using the Internet is that of the local phone call to the service provider's server. So when visiting, for example, a www site in the USA, the charge is only that of a local, and not an international phone call. Current off-peak rates are lp per minute, and use of BT's 'Friends and Family' ser­vice can further reduce this.

Current problems of the Internet The time taken to get around, i.e. to retrieve informa­tion requested can be erratic and unpredictable. By far the greatest number of Internet users are in the USA, and their time is 5-8 hours behind that of the UK. Using the roads analogy, going on the Internet in the

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M Netscape [EuroTurtte]

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Figure 2 Internet page. This is how the computer screen appears when using 'Netscape', a www browser. The toolbar at the top shows the various functions, such as 'back', 'print', etc. The Netsite bar immediately below this shows the url of the page currently in view. In this case, the site is 'EuroTurtlc' (http://www.ex.ac.uk/telematics/EuroTurtle/homep.htm).

UK in the afternoon and early evening is like hitting the rush hour. There is simply more traffic on the road than can be handled without delays. The best time used to be Sunday mornings, but even then some information, e.g. moving images and sound is too dense to be rapidly retrieved: a big, heavy-laden, slow-moving lorry. Some www sites restrict access to 250 users during the daytime and 100 at night. It is possible to join a queue and wait, but if the queue is already too long, your request to join will be rejected. The best time at present is probably early morning — the early bird catches the worm!

Another problem is that it is possible to steal infor­mation from remote computers via the Internet ('hacking'). IT-literate people who are motivated to cause chaos may also be able to spread computer viruses across the Internet. However, evidence of such occurrences is very rare, and fear of this type of activ­ity should not cause overriding concern to a would-be Internet user.

The Internet is growing rapidly and anarchically. No single body is responsible for it, and so it has

tended to mushroom in an uncontrolled way. This means that it can be very difficult to find specific information, and all too easy to find unhelpful rubbish or undesirable materials. It is very easy to get side­tracked and unstructured 'surfing' can be an enormous time-waster. The small percentage of obscene, violent or opprobrious information quite rightly gives cause for concern for people who are responsible for chil­dren using the Internet. The National Council for Educational Technology (NCET) has published good advice to parents and teachers on this subject. This can be found at http://ncet.csv.warwick.ac.uk/

Curriculum possibilities using the Internet The key issue in teaching is innovation and change: how to respond to a fluid and rapidly changing teach­ing context. Because of the rate of increase of know­ledge in the various fields of academic biology and associated movements in biology education in terms of both curriculum and teaching ideas, teachers' academic and teaching subject knowledge rapidly

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become out of date. Providing opportunities for high-quality staff development is therefore of paramount importance. Every time the biology teacher plans and resources a new lesson s/he is a curriculum innovator. How, then, can biology teachers easily be updated both in terms of academic subject knowledge and linked pedagogic subject knowledge: ideas and infor­mation on curriculum planning (schemes of work); assessment and evaluation; teaching and learning resources; teaching strategies and ideas, and the means with which the biology teacher can implement them? Traditionally the process of innovation and change in teaching has come in the form of external and in-school inset courses, books, papers, film and video, and the services of educational publishers mainly through their representatives and inspection copy service. Overall, such provision is subject to severe budgetary constraints. The Internet may offer a convenient, entertaining, and timely solution.

The Internet is a source of a mass of potentially valuable teaching material from beyond the class­room. Real data from real people can be found. It can provide a good economy of scale, too, because gather­ing relevant resources is time consuming and expen­sive. Use of the Internet for information retrieval can be cost-effective, for example, there is a mass of archival material and information about collections. 'Planet Science' gives short abstracts from the main weekly stories in the New Scientist and is a good way for A-level students to scan the week's scientific news.

Properly used, the Internet can provide pupils with an opportunity to refine and develop their information processing skills. For example, they might e-mail a scientist at The Natural History Museum or get some specific information from the BMNH home page. Much teaching material is passive and dated, and effectively used, the Internet can provide timely and relevant information. A good example of this is the GLOBE Programme (Global Learning and Ob­servations to Benefit the Environment), which originated in the USA with the stated aim of creating a partnership between pupils, teachers, and the scien­tific research community which would serve both edu­cational and scientific goals. Schools in the GLOBE project collect environmental data, such as weather recordings, flora and fauna observations, etc. and send these, via the Internet to the NOAA Forecasting Systems Laboratory in the University of Boulder, Colorado (USA). Here scientists from the Scientific Visualisation Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center collate and process the data collected by pupils from across the world, and put it into appropri­ate graphical form for display on the Internet. Pupils can then see their results as part of a world-wide data collection. The UK has recently joined the GLOBE Project, and more information about it can be found at http://globe.fsl.gov/

Pupils' opportunity to publish their work is usually limited to the school or home. Using hypertext mark­up language (HTML), they can create their own www documents, and make them available for the world to see and, via e-mail, comment upon. There is also scope for interactive documents, incorporating ques­tionnaires enabling replies to be delivered to a partic­ular Internet address. Teachers and pupils can thus exchange teaching and learning materials. EuroTurtle again provides an example of this in action. A ques­tionnaire about threats to sea turtles from tourism in the Mediterranean is filled in by pupils and e-mailed to a teacher who marks and returns it, at the same time recording data from the questionnaire which gives an indication of the effectiveness of the information in the EuroTurtle site as a teaching aid (Poland, Lee, and Baggott, 1997).

The possibility is opened up for sharing work with pupils elsewhere in the world — from different cul­tures and climates. For example, pupils could share an ecological investigation with pupils in the USA or Australia, posting their findings on the www, and con­ducting an e-mail conference to discuss the results. The importance of collaboration in learning has long been recognized, and this is particularly valuable for pupils practising their skills of the scientific process, to say nothing of the value and excitement of communi­cating and working with people from another culture.

Searching for biology resources Searching for information on the Internet can be done using a piece of software called a search engine. Using key words provided by the person making the search, these search engines look through much of the information on the www, and come back with the Internet address (called a universal resource locator, or url) of any document they find containing the key words in the title, subject, author or abstract. The fol­lowing search engines have very large catalogues, and can be most effective in finding relevant material.

Internet Search Engines • Lycos http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/ • Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com/ • Ultraseek http://www.ultraseek.com/ • Altavista http://altavista.digital.com/

Teaching and learning strategies

A key aspect of the biology teacher's professional development is to act as a doorkeeper to the Internet for pupils. The metaphor is appropriate, for the Internet is in reality a 'secret garden', that contains not only the good and wholesome, but also the evil and poisonous. Much of this discussion of curriculum opportunities for use of the Internet has referred to 'proper use'. It is simply not appropriate to allow

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Update

pupils unlimited access to it. They must be directed to previewed information, and prevented from the possi­bility of being enticed away from the set task. This had led to the necessity to create what have become known as Intranets or walled gardens in which pupils can 'surf in a limited domain'. Schools can use their server to store down-loaded information from the Internet which can be made available for pupils to search. It may become an important part of the school librarian's job to search the Internet for suitable mate­rial, and organize the structure of the school's own internal www (Intranet). When this has been built up with a considerable amount of coursework, searching in it gives the impression of being unconstrained by the 'walls of the garden', but because it is still local without the need to use the shared 'motorways' of the Internet, access to information is very much faster. Since the pupils are not actually on-line when using the school's Intranet, there is no possibility that they will wander off, or gain access to unsuitable material. And, of course, as the work is done off-line, there is no telephone cost, and it does not require use of the school's only modem! These internal Webs need not be very large, but care needs to be taken when balanc­ing words with pictures, because of the amount of file-space needed for graphics.

The teacher's work is then to provide structures to enable pupils to take control of their search. In turn, this has the effect of increasing the pupils' sense of purpose in learning. They come quickly to under­stand the need for accuracy and effective communi­cation, and by practice gain expertise in these infor­mation-handling skills which will be important to them as they face employment in the next millennium. This approach has been envisioned by a number of commercial companies with an educational interest. For a fee of about £150 per annum, schools can join such walled gardens as BT's Campus World, RM's Internet for Learning or Acorn Intertalk. The value of these to any particular school must be the profes­sional decision of the staff concerned however, because the school manages its own resources, a spe­cially tailored and regularly updated Intranet within that school will have considerably more flexibility. The creation and maintenance of the Intranet has important implications for the on-going subject edu­cation and pedagogical reflection of the current gener­ation of teachers.

It should be emphasized that use of the Internet for teaching and learning, sometimes called educational infomatics, is new and expanding rapidly. Everyone working in it is learning, and as yet, there is no care­fully worked out pedagogy for its use. It is not impos­sible that because of an understanding of the need for change inherent in the evolutionary process, and because of their subject training which embraces this type of idea, biology teachers are particularly well adapted for this!

Appendix Education-related biological science resources on the Internet Adam's Fox Box: http://tavi.acomp.usf.edu/foxbox.html Australian Environmental Resources Information Network:

http://kaos.erin.gov.au Bermuda Biological Station for Research Inc:

http://www.bbsr.edu/Weather Biocruising the Internet: http://www.shout.net/-

koeltz/websites.html Biology in 3D:

http://galaxy.einet.net/galaxy/Science/Biology.html BIONET TLTP: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/bionet.html Botanical Gardens and Arboreta: http://aggie-

horticulture.tamu.edu/introhtml/botgard.html British Library: http://portico.bl.uk/st-pancras/overview.html CTI Centre for Biology — This is the central UK source for

biological information relevant to education: http://www.liv.ac.uk/ctibiol.html

Entomology Image Centre: http://www.public.iastate.edu/-ento-mology/ImageGallery.html

Enzymes: http://www.novo.dk/enzymes.htm EuroTurtle:

http://www.ex.ac.uk/telematics/EuroTurtle/welcome.html FINS — Fish Information Service:

http://www.actwin.com/fish/index.html Flora-for-Fauna: http://rs306.ccs.bbk.ac.uk/flora/welcome.htm Frog dissection, 3D: http://curry.edschool.Virginia.edu/~inst-

tech/frog/menu.html Froggy page: http://www.cs.yale.edu/HTML/

YALE/CS/HyPlans/loosemore-sandra/froggy/html GeneWeb: http://ncet.csv.warwick.ac.uk/WWW/

geneweb/index.html Harvard Biolabs: http://golgi.harvard.edu Interactive Microscope Laboratory Project:

http://www.ex.ac.uk/education/research/projects/imlO.htm Maths and Science Gateway:

http://www.tc.comell.edu/Edu/MathSciGateway/ Mart's UK Nature Pages:

http://www.rfhsm.ac.uk:81/golly/naturpag.html Missouri Botanical Garden: http://mobot.org/welcome.html Natural History Museum: http://www.nhm.ac.uk Nature: http://www.nature.com New Scientist: http://newscientist.com Rainforest Action Network: http://www.ran.org/ran RM Internet for Learning: http://www.rmplc.co.uk/ Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: http://www.rbgkew.org.uk Schools on Line: http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/

sci/sol/contents.htm • Smithsonian Institute: http://www.si.edu Visible Human Project: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/

visible/visible-human.html World Conservation Monitoring Centre:

http://www.wcmc.org.uk WWW Virtual Library: Biosciences:

http://golgi.harvard.edu/biopages/html

References Baggott, L. M. and Wright, B. (1997) Tutoring in school biology

by computer conference. Journal of Biological Education, in

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Poland, R. H. C , Lee, H., and Baggott, L. M. (1997) Euroturtle — use with school pupils of an interactive key for biolo­gical identification. CAL97 International Conference Super­highways, Super CAL, Super Learning? Conference Proceed­ings Abstract No. 175a p. 420-421.

The authors Linda Baggott is a Lecturer in Biology and Education and Jon Nichol is a Reader in History and Education, at the School of Education, University of Exeter, Exeter EX I 2LU. Paul Ellison is Deputy Director of Information Technology Services at the same university.

Managing biological and chemical risks A strategy for working in biomédical, laboratory and clinical environments

Published by the Institute of Biology and based on a symposium organized in association with the MRC

MANAGING BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL RISKS

A strategy lor working in biomédical, laboratory and clinical environments

MRC RM

Life scientists and clinical colleagues working in laboratories and clinical environments, in universities, research establishments, industry and the health care sector, risk exposure to a range of potentially hazardous chemicals and biological agents. In recent years, health and safety legislation has introduced the fundamental concept of risk assessment as an essential step in managing and reducing risk; meanwhile, new risks from prions and genetically modified organisms have to be assessed and managed. The Institute of Biology's Biomédical Sciences Committee, in association with the Medical Research Council, therefore thought it timely to organize a meeting to address the question of occupational safety. This publication arises out of that meeting and will be of value to a range of professionals, including biomédical workers, safety advisers, managers and training officers, and students. Contents: Preface; Editor's Foreword; Opening Remarks; Health and Safety Commission in Practice; Implementing Health and Safety Legislation in a Multinational Company; Assessing Occupational Health Risks in Practice; Major Blood-Borne Viral Hazards; Dealing with Hazardous Chemicals; Managing Biological Risks in a Research Environment; Genetic Manipulation- Can Genes Really Escape, and Does it Matter?; Introducing 'Universal Precautions' into Clinical and Laboratory Environments; Respiratory Allergy in Clinical and Laboratory Research Workers; Managing Risks from Prions in the Laboratory and Post-mortem Room; Cancer Risks in Biological Research Laboratory Workers; Chairmens' Summary. ISBN 0-900 490-34-9 £9.00 members' personal orders only (with IOB membership number) £13.90 non-members and institutions

196 Journal of Biological Education (1997) 31 (3)

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