Category: Social media
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Mozilla Open Education project blueprint
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…
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Mendeley: research paper / PDF management
citeulike, collaboration, cross platform, data from both services, desktop tool, internet-enabled computer, Manitoba, mendeley, Mendeley library, online library, pdf, PDF library, reference management, reference manager, remote server, research, social media, social networking aspect, social networking tools, web service, zoteroA little while ago I wrote about Zotero and how I felt it came short of my expectations for a reference manager (my main contention was that it wasn’t very efficient at managing my offline content, for example, PDFs. Incidentally, see this interview, which also mentions this shortcoming of Zotero). Today I came across Mendeley,…
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Physiopedia: awesome physiotherapy reference site
I came across Physiopedia when the site creator, Rachael Lowe, followed me on Twitter. Physiopedia is a free (to access, not edit) physiotherapy reference that has a great emphasis on being evidence based. You must be a registered physiotherapist to get an account that enables you to contribute, which is how the site maintains quality…
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SAAHE ’09: abstract for oral presentation
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…
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Zotero
I first mentioned Zotero a while ago but didn’t go into very much detail in that post. Since then, I’ve been experimenting with it a bit and am really starting to enjoy it. It’s a Firefox extension that facilitates the research process by streamlining the collection of information accessed through the browser. With more and…
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Google Docs for collaborative writing
buzzword, cloud computing, collaboration, copyright, desktop work processor, Firefox, Google, Google Docs, google gears, greasemonkey, journal, microsoft, microsoft office live, missouri, online version, online word processing environments, peer review, physiotherapy, publication, research, thinkfree, twitter, undergraduate, word processing, zohoWe’ve recently started using Google Docs for collaborative work in the physiotherapy department and it’s been great so far. There are other online word processing environments with different feature sets (Zoho, Thinkfree, Microsoft Office Live, Buzzword), but after playing around with all of them, I found that Docs offered the best mix of features, usability…
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Twitter in undergraduate physiotherapy research
I’ve spent the past few weeks experimenting with Twitter, a micro-blogging service that allows users to post short “tweets” of up to 140 characters. I’ve been following it’s development for a year or so but never really got it. I finally saw it’s potential in education when I realised that it’s only a small leap…
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Facebook: all your data are belong to us
Just a quick link to update my concerns over the heinous new Facebook terms of service. It basically grants Facebook the right to do whatever they want with your content…forever…even if you delete it…or close your account. It does seem to be subject to your privacy settings, so if you are uploading content to the…
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Reflective blogging assignment
A few months ago, I wrote about the use of blogging as a reflective tool. I’ve since developed an assignment for the Professional Ethics in Physiotherapy module I teach, in which students will blog as a form of reflection on some of the topics we cover in class. Every student will then read every other…
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Some activity at last
It’s been a pretty busy morning so far, catching up on all the feeds that I’ve neglected over the past month or so. Here’s a list of a few things I found that might be interesting to you. Found Academic Earth, an online repository of video lectures by international scholars, which could be a useful…
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The social construction of knowledge using a wiki
I’ve started a few projects in my department, one of which revolves around the use of wikis to create environments for students to engage more dynamically with both the content and each other. The rationale is that deeper learning occurs when there is an understanding of the content that goes beyond the ability to recite…
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Blogging as a reflective tool
As part of their clinical placements (short term working placements in either hospitals or health clinics), the students in our department must write reflective pieces on their time at the placement where they look at things like their strengths, weaknesses, learning opportunities and clinical situations that raised issues for them. This reflection is usually a…
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Facebook privacy and copyright issues
I know that there’s quite a lot of interest in using Facebook, the social networking site, as a platform for interaction with students (1, 2). Whether that interaction is going to be on a social level (and the implications of that alone are certainly food for thought) or academically, it’s worth taking note of Facebook’s…
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How web 2.0 is changing medicine
The British Medical Journal published this article in December (2006), which may not seem like a long time ago in the traditional approach to academic publication but which in terms of the Internet is already old news. It asks, “Is a medical wikipedia the next step?”, a question I think is becoming more and more…