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

I’m writing this after having read Christina’s post on her thoughts on the PhD process, and following a few of her links to other PhD students who are blogging their own progress. As I’m going through a little slump at the moment, I thought it might be useful to write a short post on where I’m at right now, to review what I’ve done so far.

A few weeks ago I spent 3 days on a writing workshop with colleagues in my department who are also registered for their PhD’s (there are 4 of us), where I worked on my systematic review (see the proposal). I managed to trim the original 103 articles that I gathered during my first, second and third search rounds, to about 60. Then I went through those 60 with a more critical eye, removing what wasn’t appropriate. Finally I narrowed the list down to 20 articles that we eventually conducted independent critical reviews on, and came to consensus with my supervisor, where we finally agreed on 7 articles that matched my inclusion criteria. The article is now ready to be written up, although I’m uncertain of the format. The outcome of the systematic review will be a peer-reviewed publication that identifies some of the ways in which blended learning has been applied in clinical education, and which will inform the development of my own module (one of the later objectives).

My fourth year research group has just finished capturing the data they gathered from a survey we drew up together, where they looked at the role of social networks to facilitate reflective learning. This survey forms part of my first objective, as well as the first component of my SAFRI project (which will later include focus group interviews with staff members, and an additional survey of the students). Immediately after conducting the survey, I have also held workshops with 2 classes so far, to facilitate the process of working within the network, and will be completing workshops with the last 2 classes in the next few weeks. Tomorrow the group will submit an outline of the first few sections of a draft article, and I’ll be presenting some tentative results at the SAAHE conference next week (see the abstract).

I’ve also recently finished a first draft of an article based on a small, wiki-based project I ran in our department last year (you can still comment on it). Strictly speaking it’s unrelated to my PhD as it doesn’t fit into the proposal, but is still work in a related field. Finally, I gave a presentation on PLE’s to the Centre for Teaching and Learning at Stellenbosch University. Again, PLE’s are not explicitly addressed in my PhD proposal, but as I’m leaning more and more towards that concept as having great potential in reflective learning, I think it might ultimately end up playing an important part in the project.

Now that I look back at my progress over the past 6 months, maybe a short break is in order…?

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to be invited to present at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at Stellenbosch University. I chose Personal Learning Environment’s (PLE’s) as the topic, not because I knew very much about them, but precisely the opposite. Considering that my PhD research is inevitably going to make some use of this idea in some detail at some point, I used the presentation to explore the concept and to deepen my understanding of PLE’s.

Thank you to Francois and everyone else on the team for the warm welcome yesterday and for the opportunity to share my own experiences in this space, however limited they may be.

Here’s the abstract and presentation:

Note: The first part of the presentation tries to contextualise the conversation within the scope of current ideas around the changing nature of education and information technology. The second part of the presentation provides some insight into how I use certain services, devices and concepts within my own PLE. The final part briefly explores challenges within this approach and provides basic guidelines that may facilitate the implementation of a PLE nonetheless.

I was recently asked about my views on the credibility of Wikipedia as  an academic resource, and soon realised that the question isn’t an easy one to answer. Since Wikipedia was launched in 2001, academics have generally decided that it’s suspicious at best, and many responded to students’ use of it with blanket bans on the site. I’m not going to try and weigh in on that debate here, or to cover it’s history, except to mention the Nature study that compared Wikipedia to Britannica (here’s an in-depth summary of the controversy that emerged). You can also read about the reliability of Wikipedia, but you have to make up your own mind about the credibility of articles about Wikipedia that are created using Wikipedia. My comments are around the use of Wikipedia as a source of content, and not as a platform for discussion or collaborative learning, and to take it further, I’m only considering the encyclopedia, and not any other associated Wikimedia properties.

I think it’s difficult to talk about the academic credibility of Wikipedia in general, only to say that some articles are brilliant, and others not so much. It’s kind of like saying that some cars are more fuel efficient than others, or that some teachers are better than others. Wikipedia is a collection of articles that have many, many authors of diverse backgrounds and motivations, and some of those articles are credible, while others are not. I personally encourage the use of any resource that can help my students, either as a starting point, or as a primary source that can be referenced.

The key (in my view anyway) is in teaching students and colleagues how to tell the difference between something that can serve as background information, and something that is an authoritative, credible voice. This in itself is a problem because articles on Wikipedia are composed of many voices, and so make authorship impossible to establish. Traditionally, academics have valued the voice of an expert who has been established over time through peer-reviewed publication. They find it hard to accept that the group may be just as credible as the individual.

In the previous paragraph I mentioned the importance of also teaching colleagues how to recognise  online credibility because I’ve found that they generally fall into one of two camps:

• Everything online is true, because it’s online
• Everything online is false, because it’s online

I don’t know how to get around this.

There’s also a psychological block against the fact that it can be edited by anyone. There’s an assumption that because an article can be corrupted by vandals, it will. An analogy would be to assume that everyone in a restaurant is armed and dangerous because they have a knife and should be locked in cages to prevent them from harming other customers. My response is to highlight the advantages of the “anyone can edit it” approach, and take a phrase from open source software development: “With many eyes, all bugs are shallow”, meaning that when enough people are looking at a problem, it becomes easier to solve. Mistakes are corrected and the resource grows more quickly than if the system was built around bureaucratic bottlenecks.

In conclusion, I would suggest that the tools you choose as an academic should depend on what your objectives are. If you’re looking to “prove” that Wikipedia should / could be used, it’d be easy to find a very credible article as an example. But that would be a weak argument because someone else will just as easily find a terrible article. I try to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia (or any other online resource) and let people make their own decisions. I used to try and convince people of the error of their ways but quickly realised that they often weren’t ready to listen. I got a great comment on another post that spoke about “warming people up to the concept”, which is really what we need to be doing. This is a not a shock and awe campaign, it’s a stealth mission using guerilla warefare.

I guess that in response to the question, I’d say it’s a bit like Schrodingers cat in that Wikipedia both is, and at the same time, isn’t, credible as an academic resource. You have to open the box to find out.

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?

Mendeley just included a feature I’ve been waiting for for a while now…public collections of articles that you can manage from within the desktop client.  You can subscribe to the feed or embed code into your site to keep up to date with relevant articles of whatever public libraries you’re interested in.  This is potentially very useful for teachers who have reading lists that students need to be aware of.

In the spirit of a transparent research process, I’ve created and made public the library I’ll be using for my systematic review of the literature for my thesis.  It’s very limited right now, as I’ve only created it for this post.  Over time and together with my research assistant, I’ll obviously be adding new articles regularly.