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

Yesterday I was talking to my supervisor about how I’m having difficulty designing a protocol for my systematic review.  The guidelines I’m looking at are very good for designing a structured process for searching through the literature, but they’re not very good at helping me to define a search that includes social media.  The JBI Manual doesn’t mention Twitter or Facebook at all, and Cochrane is equally useless to me in this regard.

As if in response to that conversation, I had the following experience earlier today.  I got an email from Twitter informing me that I had a new follower.  I clicked the link and was taken to the profile of someone interested in similar things to me.  I followed him, went through a few of his tweets and ended up following a few of his followers.  One of those followers had tweeted about a page on danah boyd‘s site that was a collection of Research on Twitter and Microblogging.  I found 18 useful papers on that page that I probably would never have found if I’d had to stick to a review protocol that was designed to search commonly recognised sources (e.g. PubMed, CINAHL, library databases, etc).

How can I define the process that I went through today in generic terms (because the same thing can happen when I’m going through news feeds, Delicious, Slideshare, etc.) when it’s so serendipitous?  There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to describe that process in terms that my Dean of Research would understand (I’m uncertain, but I suspect that he’s not on Twitter).

There are other issues.  For example, I can use the blog of an expert in the field to extract an opinion about an intervention, which is great (let’s exclude the problem of defining an expert).  So I can make a list of the blogs of all the experts that I’ll consult, which will never be even close to comprehensive anyway.  How do I then get around the problem of the blog that I add tomorrow, which I might find because of a Google Group that I subscribe to?  Or the “non-expert” blogger I come across who links to a recently published report that I must include?  How about using Mendeley as an article database?  Will my examiners accept it as an appropriate source of literature?  And I can’t even imagine the chaos that’s going to erupt when Wave really gets going in education.

It seems that I can define my protocol loosely, which means that no-one else will be able to reproduce the study and will therefore negate the whole point of a systematic review.  Or, I can define my protocol strictly and potentially miss a hundred important articles, which will make my review equally poor.  Do we need to re-evaluate established research methodologies to take into account the disruptive nature of social media, or am I missing something?

• My profile for TEDxJohannesburg – hoping to be accepted as a speaker based on ideas for networks in teaching practice http://bit.ly/1JHt6c #
• Don’t teach your kids this stuff. Please? – Dangerously Irrelevant http://bit.ly/411wOy #
• Forget the Business Card. Just Google Me – Gina Trapani – HarvardBusiness.org http://bit.ly/STxX4 #
• @sbestbier just saw your recommendations now, thanks for that, will have a look as soon as I can in reply to sbestbier #
• Comment from David Warlick re. use of technology in education http://bit.ly/131sXw #

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I finally managed to submit my application to participate in the FAIMER programme for 2010.  I’m not sure when the applications will be processed, but I’ll be sure to announce it here.  See below for the Introduction to my project proposal:

“A traditional curriculum is based on an accumulated body of knowledge that has been acquired, collated and verified over a long period of time, with experts in a particular field being determined by comparing their assertions to those of the established canon. This method of acquiring knowledge isn’t possible in a society where content is becoming available faster than the ability of any one individual to process.

While the emergence of the internet and a fully networked society have ushered in a period of convenient access to vast amounts of content, this has often been misinterpreted as access to knowledge. Even though  the distribution of massive amounts of data is certainly welcome, it misses the point that the power of the internet is not in being a content repository, but as a platform to facilitate communication through social networks and communities of practice.

The internet has created a realistic opportunity to share and exchange learning experiences, not only beyond the walls of the classroom, but across oceans and continents. As a result of a densely connected society, our acceptance of conventional wisdom is being challenged, as the concept of knowledge is increasingly being seen as a negotiated outcome of social learning experiences that are tightly integrated within the network.

These ideas do not only force us to reconsider the traditional meanings of “curriculum”, “education”, and “teacher”. They also challenge us to find innovative ways of guiding students through a curriculum where memorising the prescribed content is less important than their ability to make meaning through knowledge sharing within their professional community.”

Sources

• Fitzgerald, R., & Steele, J. (2008). Digital learning communities – Investigating the application of social software to support networked learning. Australian Learning and Teaching Council, PO Box 2375, Strawberry Hills, NSW 2012, Australia.

• Fox, R., Yeung, L., Law, N., Yuen, A., Yeung, A., Kong, H., et al. (2006). Sustaining and transferring curriculum and pedagogical innovation through establishing communities of practice. Proceedings of the 23^rd annual Ascilite conference (pp. 251-255). University of Sydney.

• Siemenns, G. & Tittenberger, P. (2009). Handbook of emerging technologies for Learning. Learning Technologies Centre, University of Mantiboba. Available online at http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wikis/etl/index.php/Handbook_of_Emerging_Technologies_for_Learning

I’ve had my Samsung NC10 for almost 2 weeks now and am loving it.  I’ve been using it for taking notes at meetings and seminars, as well as at home for simple online tasks.  I thought I’d put up a few notes about the different operating systems I’ve tried so far, because I couldn’t find a whole lot when I was starting out.

The first OS I tried was Moblin, which I was very excited about initially.  I love the innovation of the UI and the fact that the developers are starting from scratch to really do something new with the netbook form factor.  I probably would’ve kept it if it had any sort of presentation software, which is important for me when I’m traveling and need to work on presentations.  There’ll probably be a port of OpenOffice Presenter in the Moblin Garage soon, but I just couldn’t wait.  So, even though I really, really, really wanted to use Moblin, I had to ditch it.

My next project was to try the Ubuntu Moblin Remix, an attempt to integrate the new Moblin UI on top of the development release of Ubuntu’s Karmic Koala, which has been getting decent reviews.  I thought this would be what I needed.  The stability of a Debian-based distribution with the cool new interface from Moblin (and it came with OpenOffice installed).  Unfortunately, I had issues with both Firefox and OpenOffice, the two main reasons that I decided to move from Moblin.  Far from the stability I was looking for, UMR was buggy to the point of being unusable, so unfortunately I had to move on (I did manage to get OpenOffice installed after changing the filesystem from ext4 to ext3, but it would freeze for up to 20 seconds at a time).

I finally tried the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and I have to say that it is beautiful.  I’m running the Karmic daily build, rather than the Jaunty release, so there are lots of usability / design improvements that go along with that.  Besides looking amazing (I’ll add some screenshots soon), everything just works straight out the box, from the webcam, to the sound, to the wireless.  At this early stage, I just can’t fault it on anything (Disclaimer: I’m a hopeless Ubuntu fanboy).

Just got back from watching 6 groups of 4th year physiology students present the results or their research projects at a competition.

There were a few things that struck me:

• The “examiners” were all clinicians with few research credentials
• Many of the the students who presented had little understanding of the results they presented, especially those who made use of statistics (the examiners were just as clueless)
• Most of the studies were methodologically flawed, a point that was lost on the examiners
• Our students really struggle with confidence and presentation skills, which comes across clearly when pitted against students from other universities (there seems to be an inferiority complex that they inherit when they arrive…many complex socio-economic factors involved)

All in all I think our students did well and am proud of their achievements.