National Educational Technology Plan Second Life Public Forum Final Report

The National Educational Technology Plan event was held on November 5th from 9-11pm Eastern Time, with approximately 200 attendees across the 4 main sims, 2 overflow sims, and the livestreamed webcast. The audience included participants from across the USA as well as an international audience, with some event volunteers coming from Canada, England, Australia. One of the most active participants was an American educator working in Israel who stayed up until sunrise local time to be part of the event.

The final report is posted here:
http://www.slideshare.net/umhealthscienceslibraries/national-educational-technology-plan-netp-2009-second-life-public-forum-final-report

The livestream is archived on the web here: http://tinyurl.com/netp09/

The Flickr group is here: http://flickr.com/group/netp09/

The chatlog is here:
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ATBUwgZWTTZ6ZGM0ZmYyYnFfMTkzY2duZDZxZHA&hl=en

There is another video of highlights by Draxtor Despres still in development.

The event succeeded in achieving both of our two primary goals:
– for the Second Life educational community to provide useful and relevant input for the Obama edtech team; and
– to highlight the potential of Second Life for education as well as for “rapid prototyping” of this type of large scale social event.

Along with the positive feedback from the event attendees, the event resulted in new professors adopting Second Life for teaching and great feedback from the the Obama team representative. Feedback from various members of the Obama team included:
* “That was great!,”
* “What a wonderful experience,”
* “The ideas I heard during the event are already influencing my thinking!,”
* “A terrific contribution to the input process.”
Last but not least, the final report from the Second Life event has been requested for use on the public website for the NETP project:

National Educational Technology Plan: https://edtechfuture.org/

Event sponsors and support came from the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), Metanomics, New Media Consortium (NMC), Virtual Ability (VAI), Cedar Island and the Justice League Unlimited (JLU). The contributions of the many volunteers and participants are what went beyond making this event possible to making it SHINE! Bravo, bravo to you all!

If anyone wasn’t able to get a copy of the souvenir tshirts from the event (I <3 EdTech), I'd wager we could probably make those available somewhere. If anyone makes the tshirts in real life, I want one.

Kay Connelly on Mobile Health Applications for Special Audiences

Today I was torn between attending a mobile health presentation and a mobile libraries brainstorming session. I chose the mobile health one, and was privileged to hear Kay Connelly lead off the Bartels Health Informatics Speaker Series with a presentation on the long drawn out research process involved in designing an effective mobile device application for a chronically ill low-literacy population.

SI launches Bartels Health Informatics Speaker Series: http://blog.si.umich.edu/2009/10/29/si-launches-bartels-health-informatics-speaker-series/

A couple of us were live-tweeting the event, and had folks watching the hashtag stream from the UK, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. Here is the Twitter stream, courtesy of my new fave Twitter tool, What the Hashtag.

#mobhlth
wthashtag.com/mobhlth
Transcript from November 16, 2009

11:11 am pfanderson: WARNING: Live tweeting from Kay Connelly presentation on mobile health application for chronically ill low-literacy population #mobhlth
11:15 am litebulb11: Kay Connelly-mobile health apps for chronically ill low literacy populations #mobhlth
11:17 am pfanderson: hemodialysis patients is population, highly restricted diet. Kidneys clean toxins fr body. 80% can’t adhere #mobhlth
11:18 am pfanderson: Patients told to make a paper diary of what they eat/drink, but can’t read/write. Ahem. #mobhlth
11:19 am SeerGenius: RT @pfanderson: Patients told to make a paper diary of what they eat/drink, but can’t read/write. Ahem. #mobhlth

11:20 am pfanderson: Application based on resrch fr informatics in diabetes, forthcoming bk. Dietary Intake Monitoring Application. Icons for foods #mobhlth
11:21 am litebulb11: Bar code scanner and icons on mobile device to help monitor dietary intake #mobhlth
11:22 am pfanderson: Neat – using barcode scanner in mobile device for some foods. #mobhlth Iterative design – patient feedback, redesign.
11:23 am pfanderson: First question: can target population use PDAs, can they press buttons, play games. Coordination & “pincer” strength, error rate #mobhlth
11:24 am pfanderson: 2nd question: visual acuity. On mobile devices, what size of icons is most viewable / pt prefs. #mobhlth Large icons preferred by elderly

11:26 am pfanderson: Question 3: could patients use a voice recorder? No problem. Yay!!! Elderly needed two hands for this task. #mobhlth
11:28 am pfanderson: Question 4: SDIO Barcode scanners vs bluetooth device pen scanner. Surprise finding: women cdnt use pen because of nails #mobhlth
11:30 am pfanderson: Patients had never realized that most prepackaged foods have barcodes. Had trouble finding barcodes on foods. #mobhlth
11:30 am pfanderson: They made a “game” BarcodeEd to help folks practice finding and scanning barcode foods. #mobhlth
11:32 am pfanderson: Patients were incredibly protective of their PDAs, lived in unsafe environments, high theft. #mobhlth

11:33 am pfanderson: Scanning, even w/o feedback, changed behavior. 60% foods not in open source database. Pts ate more than they thought (LOL) #mobhlth
11:34 am litebulb11: Low literate populations had difficulty reading actual food item brand names, had to describe ‘cereal with leprechaun and rainbow’ #mobhlth
11:34 am pfanderson: Interesting. Pts cdnt voice ID foods eaten because they cdnt rd labels. Voice input was stream of consciousness, unstructured #mobhlth Oops
11:36 am pfanderson: Participants preferred voice input, but performed better with scanning and they didn’t like using it. #mobhlth Turns out they wanted phone
11:37 am amcunningham: interested in health inequalities/ health literacy? follow #mobhlth today

11:37 am pfanderson: She mentioned a website that IDs foods & dietary input from uploaded pics. I want to know what it was!! #mobhlth
11:40 am pfanderson: Patients sorting food cards noticed what they can/can’t eat, ignored side dishes. Awareness was key in training 4 app. #mobhlth
11:41 am pfanderson: For organization of food input, patients preferred a combination of input types – Time of Day & Food Group #mobhlth
11:41 am MarkOneinFour: @amcunningham do you know the context of #mobhlth?
11:43 am pfanderson: Patients liked to show off medical knowledge they’d picked up, and would use jargon they didn’t actually understand #mobhlth

11:43 am litebulb11: Patients proud of obtained medical knowledge, affects design of interface/icons try not appear ‘dumbed down’ #mobhlth
11:44 am pfanderson: Important to make interface sophisticated, not childish, but with tricky balance between what pts liked / what they understood #mobhlth
11:44 am pfanderson: @MarkOneinFour #mobhlth is presentation by Kay Connelly on mobile hlth app for chronic ill low literacy patients at UMichigan
11:47 am pfanderson: Patients could use any nontext widget, as long as they were large enough for vision / dexterity #mobhlth
11:48 am litebulb11: Project abstract and biography of presenter for mobile health app from previous presentation: http://tiny.cc/T93oe #mobhlth

11:48 am pfanderson: Patients favorite part of tool was HOME button (used as an escape/help). NOTE: TV remotes lack this functionality #mobhlth
11:49 am pfanderson: Patients tended to use it either out of home or in home, but not both. Plan: one device for each loc #mobhlth
11:50 am litebulb11: Pride affects choice, patients often preferred interface they used incorrectly #mobhlth
11:50 am pfanderson: Advantage of #mobhlth device is to not attract attention, avoid stigma. But, this population loved showing off. They had cool toy, status
11:51 am litebulb11: Technology is a status symbol, patients showing pda off to neighbors by scanning everything ie paper towels. #mobhlth

11:51 am pfanderson: Patients would show off device by scanning non-edible items, meant muddy data to clean. #mobhlth Pts lie to caregivers to look good.
11:52 am pfanderson: Patients confided in tech geeks because they felt they would not be judged for poor food choices #mobhlth Pts want privacy, not nagging
11:53 am pfanderson: Patients *will* cheat on diet because disease is so miserable. They don’t want to be made to feel bad for cheating. #mobhlth
11:54 am pfanderson: Made it harder to use voice record, accessible only after navigation to food type failed to locate actual food. #mobhlth
11:55 am pfanderson: Organize common foods as easiest to find (ice). #mobhlth

11:57 am pfanderson: Self management and monitoring was empowering. 6 wk trial. Will results persist? Don’t know yet. Pts want to keep device. #mobhlth
11:59 am pfanderson: Future directions: add portion sizes for nonliquids (size comparisons); acceptance by higher-literacy pts? Does design change #mobhlth
11:59 am pfanderson: Can you design for lowest common denominator and find acceptance by others? #mobhlth
12:00 pm pfanderson: OK, she’s taking questions. Anything you want me to ask? #mobhlth
12:01 pm pfanderson: Aha – had star so they could add list of favorite foods. #mobhlth

12:02 pm pfanderson: Suggestion from audience. Use photos not for ID and feedback in realtime, but for validation. #mobhlth Compared data to 24hr recall
12:04 pm pfanderson: Navigation structure – patients were confuse by anything other than linear design #mobhlth Audience: cd use with children?
12:05 pm pfanderson: Brainstorming – taking these design guidelines to create authoring tool for low literacy mobile device apps. COOL!!! #mobhlth
12:07 pm pfanderson: Audience: is it harder to get info to low literacy, low SES, rural, chronic ill or combo populations? Answer: we don’t know yet. #mobhlth
12:09 pm pfanderson: Talking about assumptions of working w/ low SES population, blaming patient for illness. #mobhlth DONE, talk over.

12:17 pm inetnurse: RT @amcunningham: interested in health inequalities/ health literacy? follow #mobhlth today
12:40 pm SeerGenius: @pfanderson thanks for tweeting #mobhlth ! Lovin’ it like Mickey Deez… oops, #notgoodfood.

Making Social Media Economically Viable, Part 1

With the economy downturn locally, nationally, and globally, one of the things I’ve been hearing is, “Oh, we need to rebuild those industries that are failing so people can get back the jobs they’ve always done,” with “we” usually being someone else. I am the furthest thing from any kind of economic expert, more a distant dabbler in the concepts. Still, the idea of trying to force success out of something that has already failed hasn’t made sense to me. I’m also uncertain that I like the idea of trying to continue an enterprise model (industrialization) that has proven to have severe negative effects on the health of the species.

Instead of the factory models of production and education and healthcare, I’ve been pondering the potential for micro and local entrepreneurship, implementing the “long tail” approach to diversifying goods and services. I know, the trick will remain how to preserve infrastructure. Still, a more personalized approach to economic growth interests me.

I mentioned this to a frustrated friend a few weeks ago, and his colorful reply boils down to, “Darlin’, not everyone has as much talent as you do. You can’t expect folks to be entrepreneurs, they don’t have as much to offer.” That seemed even MORE wrong to me. Everyone has something to offer. Everyone has special skills, abilities, talents, gifts. Sometimes the value we place as a culture on the “Magpie” bright and shiny gifts undervalue the strength and purpose of the basics in keeping things running. As someone who is perhaps over-endowed with glitzy gifts and talents, I have a profound appreciation for people who are good at the tasks I am NOT good at — who can manage their house, keep things tidy and on schedule, repair the broken dishwasher, keep their checkbook balanced and lawn mowed, upholster the couch, take care of their friends and family, etcetera. I’d be delighted to barter some of my time and talent or cooking in exchange for someone else’s time and talent when those talents fall into areas where I am weak.

I started to look at the following slide presentation because it said “Web 3.0″ which, to most of the folk I talk with means the semantic web, but these folks used it in a completely different way. (That is a good argument for completely ignoring the jargon phrases of “Web 2.0″ and “Web 3.0″, by the way.) They were looking at Web 1.0 as establishing the infrastructure, Web 2.0 as focused on user-created content, and Web 3.0 as making the user-created and user-generated content economically viable. Bingo. So I wanted to share it with you, just to provoke thought, more than anything else.

Twitter and the FutureLibCon

Last Thursday afternoon, while part of my brain was preparing for the National Educational Technology Plan Public Forum that night, another part of my brain was thoroughly engaged in the Eric Dey keynote for the FutureLibCon series on social computing.

FutureLibCon: http://www.lib.umich.edu/futurelibcon-social-computing-events

Eric was unable to complete the journey here in a way that would allow him to attend, but the co-presenters (Chris Chapman and Marc Stephens) had Eric’s slides and his notes, and built off of these to do a wonderful job of engaging the audience in a really dynamic conversation and learning experience. I ended up quoting some of the conversation from the FutLibCon during the NETP forum, because it was so incredibly relevant.

Before the presentation started, Marc had set up a second screen with a Twitter visualization tool that displayed tweets from a given hashtag with a variety on screen at the same time in boxy text bubbles, with randomly selected tweets growing big and then shrinking again. This was pretty engaging for at least some of the audience, having the back chat available on screen during the talk. With two speakers it meant that interesting questions that appeared in backchat could be addressed in realtime during the talk without requiring the person at the podium to be the one tracking the second screem. I have had no luck tracking down this particular tool, but while I was hunting, I did reacquaint myself with some old Twitter tool friends and find some new-to-me twitter visualization tools of varying utility.

The only tool I could find that would have worked for engaging a live audience with their own charm and cleverness is VisibleTweets. It only shows one tweet at a time, and has transitions between tweets. The problem for using it during a presentation is that the message is obscured during the animation and people have to actually pay attention to the animation to see what is being said, which distracts from the actual presentation. With the tool Marc used, you can occasionally take a quick glance, see what is happening, and return your attention to the presenter.

Visible Tweets:http://visibletweets.com/

Twitter StreamGraphs is not useful as a support for a presentation, but is very useful in tracking discussion over time. In this image it is very clear that this was a short one-time event and not an ongoing conversation. It does a nice job of pulling out what the audience thought were the most important concepts: tools, 2nd life / virtual, Dewey, education / teacher, social / cooperation, change.

Twitter StreamGraphs: http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterStreamGraphs/view.php

Social Collider “reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.” Which explains in part why it is the only visualization tool shown here that supplies a visualization crossing several days for an event that was two hours long. This is probably the most lovely and least useful of the visualization tools I tried. It took a lot of finagling to get it to actually render an image, and the image kept having large chunks disappear. I am guessing that it might be more robust with a different browser or platform, since the ability to interact with it and drill in to see what words / people / concepts were connecting didn’t seem to work for me in Safari on a Macintosh.

Social Collider: http://socialcollider.net/

People are doing some surprising things using Twitter as either a content source or a data source. This one is the latter – Tori’s Eye allows you to define a tag or a term, searches for that, and the frequency of the term determines the density of origami birds flying across the screen. Really. Not very productive, but I do love origami.

Tori’s Eye: toriseye.quodis.com/

MORE:
Flowing Data: 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe: http://flowingdata.com/2008/03/12/17-ways-to-visualize-the-twitter-universe/

At long last I came up with the idea of searching instead of through Twitter visualization tools, looking for hashtag presentation tools. Aha!

Event Manager Blog: How to Visualize Twitter at Events: http://www.eventmanagerblog.com/event-management/visualize-twitter-at-events

Speaking about Presenting: 10 Tools for Presenting with Twitter: http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/twitter/10-tools-presenting-with-twitter/

I finally found the tool Marc had used – Wiffiti! I think the name is supposed to be a blend of wiki and graffiti, but it makes me think of WiFi, so part of me wants to call it why-feet-ee, and another part tries to say whiff-ee-tee. Still, this was pretty nice exactly for beingn incredibly slow about refreshing the selection of tweets. During the presentation, it typically took 6-15 minutes for a tweet to show up on screen, which frustrated the audience and impaired the sense of real time interaction.

Wiffiti: wiffiti.com/

However, once the events are over, for general utility and metrics, it all comes down to my number one favorite Twitter tool – What the Hashtag.

What the Hashtag: FutLibCon: wthashtag.com/futlibcon

WTH provides detailed metrics on who is using the hashtag, a distribution of frequency, other metrics, and best of all, a complete transcript of the relevant tweets in the correct time sequence, while most Twitter tools give the tweets in reverse chronological order as they would appear in Twitter itself. This makes the following possible – the transcript of the FutLibCon event as viewed via audience tweets.

November 5, 2009
12:40 pm Wrenaissance: Next session: faculty-student conversation #futlibcon
12:40 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon at event, forgot my mac so tweeting slowly fr phone
12:48 pm Wrenaissance: What do think about when you hear “social networking” #futlibcon
12:50 pm Wrenaissance: Web as platform, collective intelligence, #futlibcon
12:50 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon Eric Dey is speaker, delayed. @marquea2 & chapman doing heroic job filling in
12:52 pm Wrenaissance: #futlibcon. Make sure the social media train doesn’t derail you.
12:53 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon bmacadam has gd idea – think of socmed in ed as matrix
12:54 pm Wrenaissance: John not Melville at good time charlie’s #futlibcon
12:58 pm britain: First year med students are not reading this. #futlibcon
12:58 pm Wrenaissance: Are Macs taking over the med school? #futlibcon
1:00 pm Wrenaissance: Dewey: sometimes play is a good way of teaching/learning #futlibcon
1:00 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon chapman says he didnt expect hissing ,)
1:01 pm Wrenaissance: Demo: family centered experience group team tool #futlibcon
1:03 pm Wrenaissance: Cooperation vs collaboration #futlibcon. Tool supports both
1:05 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon egbert 2009 article on cooperation collaboration 4 UMMS course
1:06 pm marqueA2: “Education is not prep for life, education is life itself” -John Dewey #futlibcon
1:08 pm Wrenaissance: Tools not always used as planned. Scratchpad yes; discussion tool no. #futlibcon
1:09 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon changes workflow, not pedagogy #socmed
1:09 pm Wrenaissance: #futlibcon. Med students adapt & use; next goal: change teaching
1:18 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon interesting, CC says “doctors dont wk that way” collab
1:21 pm Wrenaissance: Advanced medical therapeutics online class; geographic distrib dicussion + asynch modules. Bldg more collab. #futlibcon
1:22 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon @marquea2 like Dewey quote. Ed is life. Lrng is play =)
1:22 pm Wrenaissance: Goal: get students to be thinkers and learners not just absorbers of current knowledge. #futlibcon
1:22 pm britain: And away we go to Second Life. #futlibcon
1:24 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon @marquea2 says #sl is socmed cuz user generated content =)
1:25 pm Wrenaissance: #futlibcon @marquea2 speaking abt med ed in 2nd life
1:26 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon want 2 know what anim tool @marquea2 is using to put hashtag stream on screen
1:27 pm Wrenaissance: Histology lab: no more microscopes. Power, Ethernet and virtual scopes #futlibcon
1:29 pm Wrenaissance: 2nd life – wolverine island. 1st session boot camp. 2nd session play2train first responders. #futlibcon
1:29 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon Yay! @britain joined in. He txts faster than me. Watch fingers fly
1:30 pm Wrenaissance: 3rd session at the cave: virtual reality first responders in 3D #futlibcon
1:31 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon marvelous video of virtual disaster triage sim in #sl w/ our stdts
1:34 pm britain: I thought this would be a live demo in SL but I’m glad they just showed highlights. #futlibcon
1:35 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon thrilled that peer asked abt haptics in #sl – smart lady
1:35 pm Wrenaissance: Q: are there haptic systs that work w 2nd life? A: may be some in dev #futlibcon
1:37 pm Wrenaissance: Intrigued abt 2nd life? @pfanderson leads virtual brown bags on Fridays #futlibcon
1:40 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon bmacadam has neat thot – sim/#sl gd for ed of “inherently messy” tasks/domains
1:40 pm britain: @zaren a big group of us librarians are talking with some med school guys about Wolv Island and virtual first responder training! #futlibcon
1:45 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon gd ? Fr joehrli abt socmed integration in ed being best when goal specific
1:52 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon what are best ed tools to promote? Is it abt the tools?
1:53 pm Wrenaissance: A bad teacher with good tools is still a bad teacher. #futlibcon
1:53 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon or is it abt the teacher? Gd teacher can mk miracles w/o best tools
1:55 pm Wrenaissance: A good teacher with good tools is awesome. #futlibcon
1:59 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon @davereadscomics sd no accident gt8 innov came fr higher ed but outside mainstream
2:01 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon <3 tht he sd most impt role of higher ed is intellectual playground
2:03 pm pfanderson: #futlibcon neat – CC says techs like tools, but not always ones stdts like
2:03 pm britain: One of students' favorite study tools: watching the lectures at higher speeds to process faster. #futlibcon
2:13 pm LRC_Phill: #futlibcon is the last slide from today's plenary available anywhere? Those questions seem hugely important but i didn't write them down
2:14 pm LRC_Phill: @pfanderson #futlibcon higher ed's main (core) purpose has always been teaching people how to play in 'grown up' spaces. (cont'd)
2:14 pm LRC_Phill: students in most jobs don't remember 90% of their chemistry I course, but they do know how to pull all nighters when a boss asks them to…
2:14 pm LRC_Phill: just like getting a final project done if some-one/thing else didn't come through!
4:57 pm pfanderson: @LRC_Phill What I notice is people who are successful in higher ed environments are those for whom HE activities ARE play! #futlibcon
9:15 pm litebulb11: Reflecting on my uber techie day… @a2b3 and #futlibcon

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National Educational Technology Plan Public Forum in Second Life

Very briefly, we just completed the event that has been keeping me so busy the past couple weeks. I’ll say more over the next few days, but for right now, just a tiny pointer to more info.

There was an awful lot of excitement that Barry from the national team actually came into Second Life, listened and conversed with the audience for the whole thing (over 2 hours). Here is a picture of Barry.

We will be archiving chatlogs and other content at SimTeach. Expect this will appear over a few days or weeks.

The Flickr group is started. If you were there, please add your images of the event.

Second Life – National Educational Technology Plan Event: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1283817@N23/

There will be a variety of videos that will become available. Miraculously, the first one IS already available! I can’t embed it here, but I can sure point you to it. Enjoy!

http://tinyurl.com/netp09/

Best Explanation of US Healthcare Plan Controversy on Slideshare

I tried to resist, I really did. A friend of mine often quotes the old guideline that politics and religion should never be discussed in polite company. The US healthcare reform debate has become emotionally volatile and provokes strong reactions. This means, of course, that it is everywhere I look. So, I was avoiding bringing the topic into this blog.

Then I found the Healthcare Napkins All presentation on Slideshare. Very impressive. I opened in a browser window and debated whether I wanted to put it here or not. I’ve been having computer problems with lots and lots of crashes, and each time I restarted my browser, there it was. I noticed that the stats for it were, well, impressive.

That made sense, since it had won an award for best presentation. The topic is obviously timely. The presentation is attractive, colorful, and creative. The presentation is about as unbiased and bipartisan as anything I’ve seen, while clearly explaining many of the concepts in the process in simple easy-to-understand words and images. But what has really got my attention the conversation.

A rich conversation full of most of the populations represented in public online communities, from right wing, left wing, trolls, persons with stories to tell, persons with axes to grind, folk who want more, folk who think the images are silly, … So what is all the talk about? Why don’t you check it out yourself.

A Historical Overview of Edtech Trends

I know, I know – Slideshare embeds, two days in a row? I try not to, but this one is (a) too good not to share, (b) has been sorely neglected and underappreciated, and (c) is really relevant to the National Educational Technology Plan event in Second Life this week. Oh, I haven’t mentioned that, have I?

Facebook: National Educational Technology Plan – Second Life Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=163866392474&ref=mf

SLUM: NETP Public Forum: http://slum.wetpaint.com/page/NETP+Public+Forum

The backstory is that I attended the recent public forum for the NETP here in Ann Arbor. I will share my notes here in the blog soon. One of the pieces I didn’t hear there was talk about how educational technologies have changed over time and how rapidly they are changing now. As someone tracking emerging technologies in general and educational technologies specifically I’m wondering how we make a five-year plan when the hot new technology for education two years from now will probably be something most people would have trouble imagining now? So when I was clicking related links on a different presentation this morning and found this one that steps through a variety of educational technologies and how they have evolved over the past 100 years, I was fascinated and wanted to share it with all of you. I am thinking of it as background for the meeting on Thursday. Don’t let the title confuse you – it really is about broader tech issues and not specifically web 2.0. I suspect that might be why it has been underutilized. I hope you enjoy!

Educational Uses of Web 2.0 Based Applications: http://www.slideshare.net/mqaissaunee/educational-uses-of-web-20-based-applications-presentation

Pew Internet Has Also Been Busy (Healthy Internet)

I stumbled onto a slideshow from Pew Internet that sounded amazing, all about health information on the Internet. This has been an interest of mine for many years, even going so far as to write a book about it, and this show was actually really practical for me. I downloaded it, then clicked through to the account to see what else they Had. Wow, more and more. Not that Pew isn’t always good, but this was more than that. I wanted to embed them all in the blog, but forced myself to be thoughtful and just choose one. Don’t worry, I’ll give you links for the others.

The Rise of the E-Patient (Lee Rainie): http://www.slideshare.net/PewInternet/2009-10-7-09-medical-librarians

Trends in Online Health Activity (Lee Rainie): http://www.slideshare.net/PewInternet/trends-in-online-medical-activity

Trends: The Social Life of Health Information: http://www.slideshare.net/PewInternet/trends-the-social-life-of-health-information-10262009

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!! Ah Bin Bizzy!

The original plan was for me to do a blogpost everyday during October, specifically on teaching tools. Well, not only has that not happened, but I have fallen way, way, way below my normal frequency of posting. What’s going on? Am I sick? Did a family member get hurt? Some sort of crisis? Nope. Well, what then? Ran out of ideas, lack of inspiration? No way, José.

The problem is that there is TOO MUCH to say, too much going on, too many great ideas. The dam is clogged with leaves, and the river is about to burst through. Very very briefly, here are some of the things that have been keeping me away from the blog, each of which I hope to post on eventually (but no promises).

It all started when I saw Danah Boyd. I came away wanting to talk about (1) her presentation, (2) the back channel conversation during her talk, (3) a profound comment by Ed Vielmetti about groups behaviors in online social spaces, and (4) a curious conversation with Danah after the talk about limitations to use of Creative Commons images in her presentation. That’s four blog posts I wanted to do, right there. At this point, I still thought I was going to get one a day on teaching tech!

Next, I attended two meetings in one week about ways to use augmented reality on campus, in libraries, and for education. One was the Instructional Designers group on campus, and the other was the Library 2.0 SIG, both of which have monthly meetings. My other similar monthly meeting is with the campus Web Accessibility team, that haven’t yet talked about augmented reality, but, well, probably ought to. I actually started that blogpost, but haven’t finished it yet. Basically, if you aren’t paying attention to augmented reality, if it isn’t on your horizon as something worthy of attention, START paying attention.

The CCMB/HIRO group on campus has a regular invited speaker series on the topic of informatics, almost always bioinformatics. Yves Lussier was the most recent speaker. While his talk focused on stuff for bioinformatics geeks, there was a persistent thread on the importance of science collaboration across discipline and geographic boundaries. He said some really important stuff that connects to the whole open science / Science 2.0 movement that I am so passionate about. Not only did I want to blog about what Yves said, but this reminded me that I promised several people to blog about Garrett Lisi, and haven’t done it yet.

Speaking of Garrett Lisi, there was the first meeting of the Open Educational Resources reading group (basically a journal club). It was a really great conversation! Many many ideas, provocative conversation, issues to explore. A focus was on not just the changing environment of higher education, but also on the changing roles of educators and mutating concepts of professionalism. Garrett was mentioned again (I really need to do this!), as was my daughter, who has a 3.9 GPA from the University of Michigan which is completely (98%) irrelevant to her professional work and mostly ornamental. That’s the hook, line and sinker later.

A couple days after that, I attended a presentation at School of Public Health that was billed as being on risk science and emerging technologies. Sounded pretty relevant to this Emerging Technologies Librarian, so I went. Want to blog about that, too, so much! Short story, there are some really amazing opportunities for applying emerging technologies librarian skills, environment scanning, information filters and stream management skills, and social media to identifying potential public health risks and disseminating relevant information. If you aren’t already following Andrew Maynard on Twitter (@2020science), well, good stuff. I was already following him long long before he hit campus for this talk.

It felt like as soon as that happened, I attended the local Public Forum to funnel ideas to Obama’s team working to revise the National Educational Technology Plan. That turned into an opportunity to repeat the forum in Second Life and build up the national conversation.

While all this was going on there was, of course, life “as usual.” The #HCSM meetings on Twitter every Sunday evening always generate at least enough content for 2 weeks of blogposts, and I never get time to do any of it. Metanomics and ISTE Eduverse in Second Life are also weekly events that are provocative, informative and blogworthy every single time. We have the School of Dentistry Bootcamp series starting up again, which means I’m both recruiting other presenters and promising to present myself. Working on the grant for Delta Dental, guest lectured in a School of Information class on systematic review searching, supporting the Health Literacy Month events here, and got the IRB approval on our consumer health for seniors project.

Speaking of teaching, there is a new project I’m involved with that is a collaboration between the University Libraries and the Office of the Vice President for Communications and the Communicators Forum. The focus of that project is to provide teaching and training on social media tools and best practices. More on that later, but suffice it to say that there are a lot of project team meetings both with the Forum and with the Library team, as well as having started to develop some of the classes and implement them, and recruiting experts to teach from other parts of campus.

Collaborations are just crawling out of the woodwork. I am a pretty intense supporter of collaborations and conversations as both productivity tools and consensus building. Our administration seems to agree. There are new projects going on with the School of Public Health (I provide backup support, and am not a lead on that one, thank goodness) and with the Office of Medical Education.

There is more, but my brain hurts even trying to think of what all is on my plate, so … I think I’ll go back to pulling my gray hairs out of my coffee cup.

Systematic Reviews: Methodology, Overview, Sharing

In my previous job, a big part of what I did was systematic review searching. This is still going on as I am on a Cochrane team and a few grants. Technically, this isn’t probably emerging technologies. On the other hand I’ve found that with many “new” technologies it is all about who thinks it is new. For example, I’ve been teaching classes on using Delicious for at least five years, and there are still many people I work with now who have never heard of it. For them, Delicious, now approaching its 6th birthday, is an emerging technology.

Despite the popularity of systematic reviews in the medical literature, it is just now starting to really make the leap from being something a bit on the obscure side to something everyone has heard of. I think what is making the difference has been the push in many schools to include evidence based health care in the training of new clinicians, and to encourage graduate students to do systematic reviews as their research project.

My personal experience with systematic reviews goes back to roughly 1999 or 2000, when I was contracted by NIH to do systematic review searches for 13 of the teams preparing for the first Consensus Development Conference to require use of systematic review methodologies for all presenters.

NIH: Consensus Development Conference on Diagnosis and Management of Dental Caries Throughout Life (2001): http://consensus.nih.gov/2001/2001DentalCaries115html.htm

NIH: Consensus Development Conference on Diagnosis and Management of Dental Caries Throughout Life (2001) (University of Michigan, University Libraries): http://www.lib.umich.edu/health-sciences-libraries/nih-consensus-development-conference-diagnosis-and-management-dental-carie

I’ve lost track of how many systematic reviews I’ve worked on since that time, but it is a lot, ranging from graduate student projects to Cochrane teams, searching on topics with large research bases to those with almost no research. The techniques appropriate for searching in these various areas are very different. My particular area of expertise is searching in topics where there is a very small research base, meaning instead of seeking clinical significance the researchers are doing a preliminary project to define the levels and quality of evidence available on that topic. What I’ve noticed for many years now is that many of the articles published as systematic reviews do not actually follow an appropriate methodology for the topic being investigated. Another challenge is that many of the published systematic reviews do not include enough information about the search strategy for it to be replicated or verified by other research teams. I’m far from being the only person who has noticed this! Here is the most recent article I’ve seen examining the quality of published systematic reviews.

Song F, Loke YK, Walsh T, Glenny AM, Eastwood AJ, Altman DG. Methodological problems in the use of indirect comparisons for evaluating healthcare interventions: survey of published systematic reviews. BMJ. 2009 Apr 3;338:b1147. doi: 10.1136/bmj.b1147. PMID: 19346285

The methodological “Bible” for doing a systematic review to determine clinical effectiveness is the Cochrane Handbook.

Cochrane Handbook: http://www.cochrane-handbook.org/ OR http://www.cochrane.org/resources/handbook/

Like the actual Bible, it takes a long time and a lot of work to actually read the Cochrane Handbook, making it impractical for many of the busy clinical researchers who are exploring the idea of publishing a systematic review. On many of the Cochrane systematic review teams the primary role of the librarian is to provide the data being analyzed. I have been finding that my experience having worked on so many teams and systematic review projects has placed me also in the role of providing assistance and insight to new systematic review team leaders with respect to the process and methodologies that should be followed. This actually makes a lot of sense, since both the statistician and the librarian on these projects are more likely to participate in large numbers of reviews, across a variety of topics. It also means that I have a large personal collection of search strategies I’ve developed for other reviews that can be quickly tapped or reworked, making the time required for the search process sometimes much faster.

Increasingly, when I work on a systematic review team I ask permission for the search strategy to be archived (post-publication of course) on a public web site to make it easier for other librarians to find and use. The NIH CDC on Caries was the first time we did that.

EBHC Strategies: http://ebhcstrategies.wetpaint.com/

A more fully fleshed out wiki is here:
EBM Librarian: http://ebmlibrarian.wetpaint.com/

EBHC is focused on creating a collection of search strategies to share
among other librarians so folks don’t need to reinvent the wheel; EBM
Librarian is more a tutorial, a detailed how-to as a collaboration of several of the most expert EBHC librarians and teachers.

I like the idea of both using social media and technologies (my ‘new’ job) to help share information both on methodologies and findings from systematic reviews (my ‘old’ job). The wikis are a great start, and I very much hope more medical librarians get involved with both of them. I’d like to see a more active online community of people working in evidence based health care, as well as placing findings more aggressively in social media spaces. Again, others thought of this first.

Cochrane Collaboration:
– Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=63721740498
– Twitter: http://twitter.com/CochraneCollab

You can find out more about Cochrane’s social media presence and strategy in these slides from Chris Mavergame at Cochrane.

I’m actually writing this blogpost as a sequel to a guest lecture I recently gave for Tiffany Veinot’s class on medical librarianship at the University of Michigan School of Information. To put my money (time) where my mouth is, I’d like to share those slides also. Creative Commons 3.0 licensing applies, so feel free to download and share.