Category: Social media
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Summary of PhD progress
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…
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PLE: experiences in personal learning
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…
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Facilitating Communities of Practice in the Network Era
Amy Jo Kim, Barry Wellman, community, community of practice, cop, etienne wenger, game mechanics, gaming in physiotherapy, george siemens, granovetter, howard rheingold, john david smith, legitimate peripheral participation, Lilia Efimova, lpp, manuel castells, nancy white, online communities, online community, Online companion, online groups, online interfaces, online social networks, pdf, physiotherapy, referral systems, slideshare, Sociological Theory, strength of weak ties, virtual communityTwo days ago I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to attend a workshop at UCT facilitated by Nancy White (1), who co-wrote Digital habitats: stewarding technology for communities (2) with Etienne Wenger and John David Smith. Presentation slides from the workshop can be downloaded / viewed here. Unfortunately, I could only stay for…
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Wikipedia as a credible source?
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…
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Thoughts on Geekretreat 2010
I got back yesterday from Geekretreat in Stanford Valley (beautiful, by the way) and these are some of my thoughts after reflecting on the experience. The theme of this year’s retreat was (broadly) the role of the internet in South African education, which is what motivated me to apply for a scholarship. I have to…
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An anthropological introduction to YouTube
I recently watched “An anthropological introduction to YouTube“, a 56 minute long insight into some of the amazing stories being told through the social video site. While there are many great ideas, these quotes caught my attention: YouTube is about new forms of expression, new forms of community and new forms of identity It is…
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Can established research methodologies cope with social media?
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…
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Social networks as platforms to establish communities of practice
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…
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Public libraries on Mendeley
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…
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Is blogging the “new” lifestream?
A little while ago I was wondering what platform I could use to aggregate my various online properties (Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, etc.) in a so-called “lifestream” and someone suggested that Friendfeed might be feasible. I looked into it for a while, but couldn’t commit to it because something didn’t feel right about using one service…
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Wiki marking rubric
I just finished putting together a grading rubric for a wiki-based assignment that my fourth year students did earlier this year. After I couldn’t find one that suited my needs, I developed my own and thought I’d post it here (see below without formatting) in the meantime. If you have any suggestions to improve on…
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Giving good presentations
I gave my first conference presentation in June, 2008 and thought that it was terribly boring. I presented the results of my Masters thesis and since I’m quite new to the whole “being an academic” thing, I did it the same way that everyone else was doing it. In other words, I fired up OpenOffice…
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Reflective blogging assignment – finished
Earlier this year I gave my final year physiotherapy students a blogging assignment as part of their Professional Ethics module. The goal of the assignment was to read a selection of articles that were relevant to coursework that had been discussed in class, to reflect on those readings, and then to post a blog entry…
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New version of Mendeley
Quick post to mention the new 0.9 release of Mendeley. I’m not going to go into too much detail, because the blog post announcing the release covers it all quite nicely. I just wanted to mention my 2 favourite new features: the internal, tabbed PDF viewer and the ability to annotate and highlight documents (see…
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Sharing documents and profiles
I’ve been meaning to play around with Scribd for a while now but never felt I had anything useful to put up. After uploading some conference presentations on Slideshare a week ago and seeing the steadily climbing views, I finally decided to get a few abstracts together and upload them publicly. You can see them…
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My presentation at SAAHE 2009
My presentation at SAAHE looked at the use of blogging as a tool to facilitate ethical and clinical reasoning among final year physiotherapy students in my department. The abstract is available here, and I’ve shared the presentation slides on Slideshare. You can either view it online, or download it. I’ve shared it under this Creative…
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Twitter clients: Choqok
I’ve always used Tweetdeck to follow what’s going on with the people I follow (on Twitter, not stalking). I have Seesmic installed, as well as Twhirl and I’ve experimented with Gwibber. I’ve known about Choqok for a while now but haven’t really played around with it very much, until recently. First of all, it’s not…
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TWiT and Twitter conversations (no relation)
I listen to a podcast called This Week in Tech (TWiT), hosted by Leo Laporte and few other tech writers and hosts of their own shows (if you don’t listen to TWiT and you’re interested in tech, I’d definitely recommend it). There are 2 things I specifically want to mention about 2 of the recent…
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Disseminating research results
I attended a short seminar a few months ago that reviewed the academic publication process. At the time I thought it was reasonably informative and useful. Now, after having spent a bit more time thinking about the nature of formal, academic publication, I wonder if there isn’t a better, more efficient way to distribute new…
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Results of a reflective blogging assignment in physiotherapy ethics
Earlier this year I gave my 4th year Ethics class an assignment in which they were required engage in a reflective exercise that not only encouraged interaction with others, but allowed them to see that their own perceptions of the world were different to others’. Reflection has been shown to be a significant factor in…