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

I’m a physiotherapy lecturer at a South African university, with an interest in the use of new technologies to enhance teaching and learning.  This blog is an attempt to clarify my thoughts around the use of technology in healthcare education and perhaps to spread a few ideas at the same time.  I integrate it with Twitter, so that my tweets are posted on a weekly basis.  And I use Twitter because sometimes I want to put something out there that doesn’t warrant a full post, yet is an integral part of what I find interesting or important in education/technology/healthcare.

I’m also interested in how copyright affects content and it’s distribution, and how together this affects not only the content we create as educators, but in how this content is distributed and used. It started when I switched my computer operating system from Windows to open source software (specifically, Kubuntu) and have come to realise that the principles embodied in the open source movement are just as easily applied to content.  The movement towards “open content” was brought to the fore with the Wikipedia project and has continued gaining momentum.

Another important factor in this movement was the creation of copyright licenses that gave content creators the ability to grant certain freedoms (as well as restrictions) on the use of their content (see Creative Commons).  I try to make sure that every project I’m involved in has the potential to add to the greater body of knowledge out there, or at least to foster discussion on some of these issues.

I changed the name of the blog from Physio 2.0 to /usr/physio, which is a play on the Unix / Linux filesystem heirarchy, where /usr/ stands for Unix System Resource.  This is far more geeky than the cliched “2.0″ that’s popping up everywhere on the web now.