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

I just got my invite for Google Wave and I feel like a little kid with a new toy, only I don’t know what the toy is, or how it works, or what (if anything) I’m supposed to do with it.  Apparently I’m not alone (keep hitting Refresh to get different comparisons).  I’m not going to try and describe Wave, because others have done that to death.  I’m more interested in the educational use case/s, which I’ll try to discuss briefly.

Possible use cases in higher education

I read a comment from a high school student that Wave could be the one “master notebook” that all students could contribute to and validate.  I’m thinking of the subject readers that we hand to students in the beginning of the module…hard copies and difficult to modify.  How about using Wave for each course reader, with staff commenting on improvements, and students making contributions?  Images and video can be embedded into the Wave.  Does anyone know if data can be exported from the wave, and if so in what formats?  I’m sure that with Wave being an open platform, it’s only a matter of time before writes an extension that allows users to export content in a variety of formats.

To take this further, how about using Wave as a curriculum template, with physiotherapy educators and students from around the country working collaboratively to maintain and improve a standard curriculum?  Not everyone would need to teach or learn from the same modules, but everything could be available as “extras”.  We could even include additional modules that are not necessarily part of the curriculum but that students (and staff) might find useful.  For example, as part of their final year, our students must complete a research project that involves working with large documents.  Most of them have little or no experience with this and lack the skills to automate the more tedious tasks (many of them create Tables of Contents manually).  Other problems are teaching them effective search strategies using multiple online sources and methodologies, which will be immensely helpful for them but which will definitely not be approved as part of the official curriculum.  Using Wave to design the curriculum seems like a great opportunity to be innovative and dynamic in what we can provide for our students.

Planning conferences also seems like an area that Wave would be useful, not only for conference organisers, but participants.  You could submit abstracts into the wave, with the potential for comments and feedback directly.  Imagine submitting an abstract and being able to have a conversation with participants (or those unable to attend) before and after the conference?  Maps and venue photos could also easily be placed within the wave.

Surveys and feedback mechanisms seem like a useful fit for Wave, which is essentially a collaborative authoring environment.  Students could begin waves on topics they find challenging, or even departmental procedures that they find problematic.  Other students’ comments would aggregate in the wave, lecturers could respond and (hopefully) resolutions found through discussion. I have come across this collection of posts that discuss the use of Wave as a scholarly document editor, and the conclusion seems to be that it isn’t that promising, at least at this early stage.

Challenges

The user interface for Wave has been called “universally confusing” and makes me wonder how our students will engage with it.  I have enough trouble trying to teach colleagues and students about blogs (forget about micro-blogs) and wikis, without trying to talk about waves too. Not all of our students have internet access at home (although everyone has access on campus), which would almost certainly place some students at a disadvantage.

Additional resources to help you figure out if Wave in education is useful, or a load of hype:

• Gina Trapani’s Complete Guide to Google Wave, which is looks like the best place to start figuring out how Wave works
• Mashable’s Google Wave: a complete guide, much shorter version of the first point above
• ReadWriteWeb – Google Wave use cases: Education
• There’s some interesting discussion on Wave by Leo Laporte on This Week in Google, which I’ve been listening to for the past few months
• Google Wave official help page
• This list of best use cases from Lifehacker.

• Arora, yet another browser (http://bit.ly/11ww24). Instead of writing new browsers, why not contribute code to established projects? #
• I love xkcd http://bit.ly/7Qbv5 #
• Box of Tricks, website around using technology in education http://bit.ly/bpo6e #
• Collaborating with students on journal articles? Here’s a useful guideline for determining authorship http://bit.ly/M6k8 #
• Soccer in South Africa – some beautiful photos http://bit.ly/HHoIQ #
• Africa alone could feed the world (New Scientist article), the comments section is the best part http://bit.ly/3LhsZI #

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If you’ve been following my recent posts, you’ll have realised that I’m participating in the Mozilla Open Education course, jointly hosted by the Mozilla foundation, ccLearn and the Peer to Peer University. The course has involved participating in online seminars over the past 6 weeks with the objective of creating a project blueprint that takes into account the concepts of open education, open technology and open licensing.

I decided that my project was going to involve something I’ve been thinking about for a few months and saw the course as an opportunity to take the first few tentative steps. The idea was to create an online, distributed authoring environment that would allow physiotherapy clinicians, educators and students to participate in collaboratively writing a national physiotherapy textbook. The problem with imported (American and British) textbooks is a complete lack of cultural and contextual relevance, as well as being associated with a high cost and not being adaptable to local needs (think, multiple languages).

I won’t go into any more detail here (check out the blueprint page), only to say that the idea is taking shape slowly and that I’m quite excited at the prospect of refining it over the next month or so. The course was so information-heavy (not so much from the organisers, but from the back chatter of participants) that it’s going to take some time to review the aggregated content.

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.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of open research since listening to Jon Udell’s interview with Jean-Claude Bradley on his open notebook science project.  The idea is similar to the open approach to writing software in that the process is transparent and open to scrutiny by anyone.  This could have important implications for the soundness of the methodology behind the research, the distribution of results and the potential for massive collaboration on research projects.

Open research makes use of social tools like wikis (wikiresearch), blogs, Google Docs and social networks of like-minded individuals, that allow for collaboration, rapid publication and increased access to information for anyone with an internet connection.  There is also the suggestion that openness in research could lead to more innovation by stimulating ideas that allow others to make contributions to the body of knowledge that may not have been the original intent of the researcher.

However, not everyone is comfortable with the idea of conducting research in an open environment, that is subject to scrutiny by everyone and largely against the culture of secrecy in scientific research.  There are definitely issues with the process and one example of how conflict could arise is by publishing primary data openly.  This has the obvious benefit in that anyone could take that information and use it in ways not intended by the researcher, taking data that may have never seen the light of day and creating new knowledge.  The downside is that someone else could beat you to the finish line by publishing your results and negating your work.

There are other approaches that aren’t as “open” as publishing everything concerned with the project.  For example, you could choose to publish only your methodology or ideas around where the project is headed and request input around that, or raw data could be summarised before publishing online.  Other, similar fields are also becoming more mainstream, like open peer review, in which the peer review process of publication is made public, and open notebook science.

What will the world be like when all knowledge is freely available?