Michael Timmons:
Making textbook history

The result was Human Anatomy, a 10- 7/8 by 12 inch, 844-page textbook with life-sized art, visual cues, and supplemented by a full color lab manual, a CD-ROM and a laser disc. "The oversized atlas format allows for larger medical illustrations and cadaver dissection photos to help students visualize the components of the human body," Timmons said.

The first science book done electronically by the publisher, it gave Timmons and Martini the luxury to resize things to get everything to fit. "By doing it electronically, we were able to tweak the size of the art and photos and position the narrative to get the most out of the space available," Timmons said. Coordination wasn't easy, with Timmons living in Illinois and Martini in Hawaii: "We worked through many nights and time zones developing illustration concepts that would give students multiple views and perspectives of complex structures. The resulting figures should reduce the need for an anatomy instructor to juggle chalk, slides, photographic atlases, models and a text to help students 'see' human anatomy."

The accompanying laser disc contains more than 2,000 still images, animations and video segments. It is accompanied by a bar code manual, ATLAS: Anatomy Text Learning System, which corresponds to each piece of art, animation, photo and x-ray, organized by where they are placed in the book, which has corresponding bar codes. The instructor can swipe the bar code with a wand and display the art from the book on a large screen during the lecture. The best thing about laser discs, compared to video or CD-ROM, says Timmons, is that when an image is stopped, it's a perfect image. "Laserdisc images are the most perfect form of electronic visual images to date," he said.

The text also has red dots in the text as visual cues to look at a figure number and then help students return to where they left off reading. "We had fun picking out the dot," Timmons said. "We spent half a day looking at different sizes, fonts and colors. We wanted something not too red, not too orange, not too pink, not too big, not too small."

Teaching is greatest reward

Even though Mike Timmons enjoys writing textbooks, he finds teaching more fulfilling: "I look forward to seeing my students each day." Students look forward to class too. One secret to Timmons' success is that he's kept himself up-to-date with the electronic age. He has an electronic classroom complete with two huge screens that drop out of the ceiling. He also has an electronic presenter, a device that projects lecture notes and other presentation materials onto one of two 10-foot screens. His Human Anatomy textbook, in its second edition in 1997, is accompanied by a 2,000-image laser disc containing art, photos, animations and video clips that can be used to illustrate, for example, the leg as it looks with skin, without skin, inside the bone, microscopically, on a cadaver, as an x-ray, and animated. A two-minute video clip can also be popped onto the screen to teach students about osteoporosis. "I organized the laser disc in a teaching/learning sequence to be available to instructors and students at the swipe of a bar code," Timmons said. "Students today are very high on technology."

Timmons has always been fascinated by biology. "I marveled at the body in that it is a marvelous chemical machine," he said. Teaching seemed a natural route after working as a teaching assistant in grad school. Timmons received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Loyola University in Chicago and taught there two years. He is currently at Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois, where he has taught more than 20 years. "I'm very happy to be here," Timmons said. "My longevity teaching anatomy has given me insights into how students study and best learn." A vast majority of students are visual learners, Timmons said: "They don't have trouble taking a 3-D object and putting it back together again, but they have trouble doing it in the reverse, for students to go from a microscopic view up to the large macro view."

That's why, Timmons said, he was eager to write Human Anatomy: to give students a visual way to learn. In Anatomy, Timmons and his co-author Ric Martini added something that wasn't done in any other anatomy text: Beginning visuals with a part of the body and working downward to show the surface, the muscles and vessels as seen in a cadaver and 3-D art, an x-ray, and then microscopically.

The first edition of Human Anatomy won a Texty from the Text and Academic Authors and the excellence award for medicine and allied health from the Association of Medical Illustrators. "I was in shock when we won the Texty. I never even expected the possiblility of a first edition winning," Timmons said.

Timmons has also written A Photographic Atlas of Cat Anatomy and prepared its accompanying 124 color slides, A Visual Guide to Dissection: Cat Anatomy Slides, published under his own company, Spyglass Publications. The atlas is a photographic atlas of actual-size specimens in a dissect-by-number sequence. A third text, Human Anatomy Laboratory Guide and Dissection Manual, published in 1997 by Prentice-Hall is a 520-page lab guide and atlas that "uniquely combines the features of a traditional anatomy laboratory text with those of a dissection manual and an anatomical atlas."

His books are hand-crafted

Mike Timmons says he enjoys "the craft of authoring books." One of his books won a Texty from Text and Academic Authors and an Award of Excellence from the Association of Medical Illustrators in 1997. He has turned writing into an art form. His Human Anatomy textbook was hand-crafted with the use of electronic publishing. Each page was individually done, fine tuned over and over. "The first eight chapters went through seven different passes until we achieved the layout originally envisioned," he said.

"It's really a pleasure, an honor, to be able to communicate information effectively," Timmons said. "What I find to be the most gratifying is helping students learn the subject of human anatomy and have fun doing it. It's an energizing process with which I can ignite a spark of interest in the field by preparing books that are both inviting and have real utility." He spends a lot of time traveling to talk about the book with other instructors. "Hearing about common difficulties and coming up with solutions together, helps Ric and me with future editions of the book," he said.

In 1996, Timmons represented Moraine Valley Community College in Illinois, where he is an associate professor, at the League for Innovation's annual Conference on Information Technology. His presentation, "A Recipe for Dynamic Multimedia Presentation for Lecture and Laboratory," demonstrated the integrated use of laser discs, bar codes, CD-ROMs and electronic visual presenter devices to enhance student learning and motivation. His Human Anatomy textbook uses these instructional innovations.

— reported by Kim Pawlak, 1997