Heiko Spallek

Assistant Professor
Center For Dental Informatics
School of Dental Medicine

“Dental Informatics - An Emerging Discipline"

Tuesday, February 1, 2005
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon
Room 501, IS Building

You are invited to meet the speaker before the talk
from 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM in the Large Commons Room of the IS Building

Abstract: Dental informatics, a specialty subfield of medical informatics, is the application of computer and information science to improve dental practice, research and education. The first part of this presentation will describe dental informatics as an emerging discipline which faces many challenges. One is the improvement of dental education by means of information technology and informatics. Dr. Spallek’s research focus is on improving educational software in dentistry utilizing adaptive hypermedia. Adaptive hypermedia (AH) is a learner-centered approach to instructional design and delivery. AH technology first considers the learning goal(s), evaluates the user's abilities and determines the user’s individual learning style. This information is used to custom tailor the curriculum to each individual user, for maximum pedagogical efficiency. The second part of this presentation describes a new learning environment which exploits various concepts of AH and how it is integrated into the predoctoral dental curriculum and used for continuing dental education.

Bio: Dr. Heiko Spallek is an assistant professor at the Center for Dental Informatics and a core faculty member at the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh. He has a DMD and a PhD from the Humboldt University Berlin (Charité). In 2000, he earned a Master of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Computer and Information Science, from Temple University's Fox School of Business and Management.

His research focuses on the use of informatics and information technology to improve dental education. His current projects exploit adaptive hypermedia to customize and individualize instruction. This learner-centered approach begins with the self- selection of a learning goal, an evaluation of learner abilities and a determination of the individual learning style. This results in individualized content and instruction, structured in a such a way as to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of learning.

A visual representation of his research interest can be found at: http://www.spallek.com/heiko/research.html