Social media, the democratisation of knowledge and physiotherapy. Can they play nice together?

I’m on holiday for a couple of weeks so I’ll probably be posting less than usual, although I’ll still try to put up anything that’s vaguely interesting.

I’m going to try and put some work into OpenPhysio, adding more articles and improving the ones already available (up to 61 articles so far).  While the project is getting a reasonable number of visits nationally and internationally, it gets very few contributions to the articles.  While I’m happy to keep plugging away at the site myself, it’s going to take a very long time to aggregate a useful amount of information.  If you happen to visit it and are qualified (not necessarily as a physiotherapist) to make a small contribution that is either original or an improvement, please consider registering as a user and leaving the site a little better than you found it

Other than that, I plan to do a little gardening, visiting with friends and reading anything that isn’t an article, textbook or remotely work-related.

As part of their clinical placements (short term working placements in either hospitals or health clinics), the students in our department must write reflective pieces on their time at the placement where they look at things like their strengths, weaknesses, learning opportunities and clinical situations that raised issues for them.

This reflection is usually a typed page or two inserted into a file and submitted at the end of the placement.  Recently I’ve been wondering about the possibility of using blogging as a tool for our students to write their reflective journals, and encouraging other students on the same placements to to comment on each other’s work.

On one level I’m hoping that this will encourage further reflection based on feedback and discourse on both personal and clinical learning situations.  On another level, I’d like to use it to get students (and staff) to think about other concepts, such as the peer review process, the changing nature of academic publication and how knowledge is constructed through discourse.  I’m sure there’ll be plenty of other issues that are raised.

I also have anecdotal evidence that our students find it difficult to express themselves in clinical settings, for a variety of reasons, including not having English as a first language, which brings a subsequent lack of confidence when speaking in a group, as well as what seems to be an inferiority complex when confronted with students from other universities.  I’ve love for our students to be able to use this as an opportunity to find their own voices and tell their own stories in a semi-public space, which will still be a safe environment.

Here’s the article linked to in the post:
Academic blogging opens new world

The last day of HESS 2008 has come and gone.  It was a short day, but interesting nonetheless.  I had the opportunity to see the following presentations:

• Keynote: Higher education “failing the majority”: Is a four year degree the solution?
• Keynote: Education as politics
• Principles for effective professional development in higher education institutions
• Factors impacting on student learning at UWC

All in all, this was a really exciting place to be over the past few days.  I met some very interesting people and had some great conversations, which I hope will continue in the coming months and years.  It’s going to take me some time to go through my notes and reflect on what I’ve learned.

On top of that, my first visit to Grahamstown and Rhodes University was a wonderful experience and I hope to be back this way sometime soon.

OK, so we’ve finished the first day of the conference and it was pretty interesting.  Almost every speaker had something to say that I found interesting.  I attended the following presentations, most of which were in the e-learning track:

• Keynote: Opening up spaces for research and enquiry
• Introducing the construct of “conceptual infrastructure” to support higher education development
• Developing communities of practice in large class teaching using tutorials and forum discussion
• A theoretical exploration of the potential use and benefits of social software as an emerging technology in support of e-learning in tertiary education
• A model for ensuring the quality of multimedia learning materials
• Superstars to teach large classes
• An overview of teaching and learning in geomatics
• Uniting life and education
• Computer skills for university entrants
• Implementing mentoring using ICT tools
  

When I get home from the conference, I’ll have a few days to collate all my notes and will try to provide a summary of the conference, or rather, the conference as I experienced it.

I learned a lot today, but the main thing I learned is how much I really don’t know.  The problem with these conferences is that you get to hear about all the really cool things that other people are doing, and in the end your brain explodes because you can’t do everything you want to, not matter how much you really, really wish you could.

Sigh…

Here’s a few pictures from day 1

[View with PicLens]

A few weeks ago my department began a “Writing for publication” workshop, in which each participant would both write and review an article for publication.  In theory, this has two distinct advantages: 1) Everyone gets to submit a peer-reviewed article at the end of the workshop, and 2) Everyone gets to experience the process of reviewing other people’s work.

Each week, every person in the group writes a section of the article, beginning with the Introduction and finishing with a Conclusion, so the process takes about 6-7 weeks, allowing for a little extra time here and there.  Each participant was given a file with guidelines on the writing of each section, as well as reviewing of that section.

On the whole, I think the process is definitely worthwhile and could have potentially great results if undertaken at a departmental level.  I also think it might make an interesting cross-disciplinary project, with participants at a faculty level exchanging articles for each to review (feedback would obviously then be about the writing, not the content).

Here are a few notes about how I experienced the workshop:

• I liked the idea of the set timetable.  For me, it was easier to make sure I got the work done, rather than find excuses to do those other things that were “more important” (read; procrastinate).
• Since I don’t have much experience in academic publishing (or any publishing for that matter), going through the writing and reviewing process was a useful learning experience.  The guidelines we received were absolutely essential to me for this.
• Getting feedback from each member of the group was interesting, as everyone brings something different to the process, which was also a good learning experience.
• I liked getting feedback on a regular basis throughout the workshop, rather than writing an entire article myself, with feedback coming at the end.  This allowed me to begin refining the article from the start, which was also new.

All in all, not only was it a good learning experience in terms of writing and reviewing an article, but the result is a finished, peer-reviewed article ready for submission.  With the move towards evidence-based practice (be that teaching practice or physiotherapy practice), research and publication is clearly high on the agenda in higher education, and a workshop like this has clear advantages.