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

Here’s the abstract I submitted for SAAHE ’09.  It was submitted for consideration in the Innovations and work in progress category.

Title
The use of blogging as a reflective tool in physiotherapy ethics.

Context
The use of social software in higher education facilitates collaborative learning practices and mirrors the social constructivist principles of education by encouraging deeper engagement with both content and individuals. Reflection promotes higher order cognitive skills that promote critical thinking, and together with ethical reasoning has been shown to contribute to professional development and clinical practice. A blog is a service that allows a user to post ideas online, as well as solicit feedback from others that serve to contribute to an ongoing discussion. This allows for a rich, diverse stream of ideas that provide further inputs into the reflective process.

Aims
The main aim of this study is to evaluate the use of blogging as a tool for enhancing physiotherapy students’ reflective practice during an ethics module. By participating in an online, networked conversation on human rights in healthcare, students will discuss some of the problems inherent in the South African healthcare system, as well as recognise and acknowledge the different viewpoints of others.

What was done
A blogging environment was created to allow only students and the lecturer access to post, read and comment on reflections. Articles relevant to the ethics module were provided for students to read and to inform their reflections. They are required to read and comment on the reflections of their peers, facilitating an ongoing conversation around the topic. On completion of the assignment, students will be asked to evaluate the process.

Impact
With the move towards a more networked society and the increasing use of online tools in education and practice, educators must take cognizance of new approaches to teaching and learning. The use of blogging as a tool for reflective practice has shown positive results in other disciplines but has not been evaluated in physiotherapy education.

Take home message
The use of blogging as a tool for reflection brings significant advantages to the process that are not easily leveraged with any other medium. The characteristics of the platform allow for collaborative discussion, immediate feedback and encourages deeper engagement with the content, all of which facilitate more meaningful interactions and stimulate professional development.

• @sbestbier but it’s by MS…how good could it be? in reply to sbestbier #
• Open research? Transparent approach to research may be good for knowledge sharing, collaboration and innovation http://bit.ly/1229Ap #
• One reason I prefer to keep important stuff out of the “cloud”, if the terms of service change, what am I left with? http://bit.ly/ZG2pv #
• Just added myself to the http://wefollow.com twitter directory under: #physiotherapy #education #technology #
• “Great minds are evenly distribute. Great textbooks are not”. Flatworld knowledge: open college textbooks http://bit.ly/RbWnn #
• US healthcare in crisis. (No) justice . SA healthcare not great, but the grass is almost never greener… http://bit.ly/aGt3O #
• Just finished up Earth hour in Cape Town, South Africa http://bit.ly/16x5GN #

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I’ve noticed that I’m getting a few hits from search engines with people searching for “SAAHE”, so I can only assume that with the conference coming up in a few months time, interest is on the rise.  The SAAHE conference is an annual meeting of the South African Association of Health Educationalists in Cape Town (I always thought “Educators” would be better, but who am I to judge).

I’m busy putting together an abstract for a presentation that I’d like to give at the conference, but can’t decide what I want to talk about.  In the physiotherapy department at my university, we’re using blogs for reflective practice in the ethics module that I teach, wikis for collaborative group assignments in applied physiotherapy, Google Docs for collaborative authoring and peer review both within the physiotherapy department and in the faculty journal, Twitter and Google Docs with undergraduate research groups and finally, a comparison of the use of social media in education among South African and American undergraduate physiotherapy students.

With all of that on the table, it’s difficult to choose a favourite.  Maybe “An overview of the use of social media for education in a South African physiotherapy department”?  That way I get to talk about them all

Here’s a link to the conference site:
http://www.saahe.org.za/

I first mentioned Zotero a while ago but didn’t go into very much detail in that post.  Since then, I’ve been experimenting with it a bit and am really starting to enjoy it.  It’s a Firefox extension that facilitates the research process by streamlining the collection of information accessed through the browser.  With more and more academic content becoming available online through open access journals, it’s an innovative method of aggregating and managing content for research.

Zotero has a decent set of content management features that really do a good job of making it easy to work with the information you save.  I won’t go into the specifics here because the quick start guide makes it really clear.  As well as the content management features, it’s also very good at recognising semantic content on the web and giving you options to import that content into it’s database.  For example, if you’re browsing PubMed, Zotero is able to import citation information and then to export it in many different formatting styles, including APA.

I actually don’t use Zotero for any academic content at the moment.  What I find it really useful for is annotating and working through ideas I come across in blogs.  I find that I can clarify my own thoughts around educational technology, using Zotero as a scrapbook to develop those ideas.  Which brings me to my only problem with Zotero.  I only use it for blogs right now because it’s only really useful for content you access through the browser, which is a major limitation for me.  While it’s true that most of my literature is accessed through the browser initially, I still keep local copies that I prefer to work with.

Although I think the application is great in it’s current form, I’m really hoping that the developers expand it’s scope.  Maybe make it a standalone tool that I can use to manage all my articles, no matter if they’re on- or offline and no matter what format they’re in.  I also need more space within the app because sometimes it can feel crowded (especially the right hand panel), and making it standalone will free up a lot of real estate by taking it out of the browser.  Note: you can run Zotero in a full tab, but I like to be able to read the blog while making notes.

Those things aside, this is a great browser extension that I’d definitely recommend checking out.

Screenshot of Zotero

• RT @cami13 Blogging as Academic Publication http://url.ie/196n. Also, the changing nature of academic publication at http://bit.ly/14dgFv #
• @cami13 Lots of great stuff on that blog you suggested. Too many smart people out there, too little time to follow them all in reply to cami13 #
• @sbestbier “Animal experts have dispute that theory”. Funny stuff in reply to sbestbier #
• I think I might be in love…http://bit.ly/Lyi8 #
• @benwerd I think you’ll find that the Linux version of everything is better in reply to benwerd #
• Open access vs. traditional publishing? “High costs restrict access”…is there anything else to say? http://bit.ly/tPMHa #
• Who owns the sky? Theft of the public commons by government / corporations. Most important commons? The internet. http://bit.ly/18o745 #
• What constitutes the “commons” and why it’s relevant for us all. http://bit.ly/nG6rq #
• Interesting keynote from iSummit ’08 by David Bollier, on the Commons and other social movements. http://bit.ly/MndbM #

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