TOP 10 TOOLS 2007
Ulrik Juul Christensen

Ulrik Juul Christensen, MD, has been involved in the use and development of medical simulators for almost 15 years and has experience with both full-scale simulators and microsimulators (PC simulators). Primary interests are instructional design, human computer interfaces and applied educational science.

Ulrik now serves as the CEO of Area9 that has a controlling interest in Comapping A/S (online collaborative mindmapping), Area9 Healthcare ApS (advanced educational internet simulators with a heavy emphasis on intelligent debriefings) and Area9 Business Applications (internet simulators for education of sales people). Ulrik originally founded Sophus Medical (later sold to Laerdal Medical and continued as Laerdal Sophus) which is the world-leader in emergency medical computer simulators

Ulrik's Top 10 Tools as at 7 August 2007

1. Comapping.com - I use this both to design educational curricula, mapping learning objectives as well as collaborating with subject matter experts globally.

2. Internal development tools to build simulators and electronic simulation based curricula. We make almost all of the tools to make simulation based curricula internally and the majority of the work is done using these tools.

3. Skype - The main way to keep in contact with collaborators globally.

4. Subversion - A database for documents and files with version control. Gives the team central place for saving and keeping documents. We have used a variety of version control systems, but Subversion is pretty easy to use

5. Firefox - A browser that actually allows you to browse fast and multithreaded - and does not 'steal' the keyboard shortcuts from applications run within the browser such as Internet Explorer does it.

6. Photoshop - For prototyping and proof-of-concept.

7. PowerPoint - To help explain the flow (or other aspects) of the simulators we make to the sometimes more than a hundred international collaborators. Also a great prototyping tool.

8. Word - Even being a true believer in agile development, it is still necessary to describe the framework of what we are developing. Previously, most specs where made in Word, but comapping has taken over.

9. Excel -  For prototyping (technical prototypes) for programmers. I usually only review other's work made in Excel, but it is very fast to do (being the leader of the gang with budget responsibility and on several boards of directors, this is not my primary use of Excel though ;-) ).

10. LinkedIn - A nice way to keep in frequent contact with collaborators, friends and colleagues as well as to network effectively.