Medlib’s Blog Carnival, February 9, 2010 Edition: Free Speech in Health Information, and More

In the context of the looming deadline for comments on the FDA’s development of social media guidelines, the Medlib’s Blog Carnival theme this month was on free speech in health information. Briefly, the FDA has a long history of managing and establishing guidelines to prevent unethical publication of inaccurate or misleading health information from persons or corporate entities promoting the use or sales of drugs or medical devices. The flip side of this is to encourage informed decisionmaking based on high quality unbiased health information. There are some excellent contributions for the carnival looking at various aspects of this complicated issue, and then there were some other contributions that are more along the lines of being useful and interesting for medical librarians. I’m happy to include both groups here.

At MPH Degree, the focus was on managing your medical records and personal health information, absolutely critical content in the age of electronic personal medical or health records. They provide 10 tips for managing not only your personal privacy and access to your data, but also opportunities for “free speech” that you might not want to have available! Basically, the 10 ideas were (1) keep a copy handy, (2) know your rights, (3) correct misleading information, (4) be careful what you share at health fairs, (5) ask your old doc to destroy your records, (6) keep your social security number safe, (7) watch out for sloppy recordkeeping, (8) check HIPAA policies and procedures at your clinics & hospitals, (9) keep an electronic backup, (10) learn about how docs share information. Read it. There’s more.

MPH Degree: 10 tips to help you take control of your medical records: http://mphdegree.org/2010/10-tips-to-help-you-take-control-of-your-medical-records/

The Health Sensei offers a very interesting and provocative post on ‘bad’ healthcare trends. I don’t expect people to agree with all of these, but they certainly raise issues about the potential impacts of too little access to health information, over control of health information, too much access to health resources (such as online drugstores). From the cost of gas to telemedicine, the digital divide to pay-as-you-go access to care, these 17 trends all impact on care, and are all worthy of serious discussion regarding the issues and impacts. You’ll see the FDA mentioned a lot in this post, from issues of pharma compliance (or lack thereof) with already existing FDA policies to problems with awareness of and access to safety information provided by the FDA itself, all important issues in developing future policies. This is a post I not only bookmarked, but downloaded to save for future reference.

The Health Sensei: 17 Healthcare Trends that Are Actually Bad for Us. http://mastersinhealthcare.org/2010/17-healthcare-trends-that-are-actually-bad-for-us/

Laika provided not one, but TWO excellent posts. The first one, “NOT ONE RCT on Swine Flu or H1N1?! – Outrageous!,” discusses the issue of popular news and hype as opinion influencers in comparison with actual research. Taking H1N1 as an example, she begins with a Twitter post and popular press, then discusses when it is appropriate to expect what kind of evidence in support of a question, simple tips for finding better quality evidence, as well as specific scientific and clinical contextual issues that beautifully illustrate not just issues of scientific research and methodology, access to information and information quality assessment, but also quite a bit of useful information about H1N1 itself! Laika provides a strong voice for clear reason and balanced information, but at the same time respects the importance of scientific dialog and communication in shaping the evolution of what we know about any given topic.

Laika’s MedLibLog: NOT ONE RCT on Swine Flu or H1N1?! – Outrageous!. http://laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/not-one-rct-on-swine-flu-or-h1n1-outrageous/

In her second post for this Carnival, Laika again zeroes in on the issue of dialog in science, and the broader issue of respect. This is true not just for dialog between scientists, as in the example she discusses, but even more so among the public and news media. The life lessons learned by Laika in her tale of disrespect and influence among scientists are ones we should all keep in mind when observing disagreements about science. I wanted to cheer when I read her excellent, methodical review of the limits of evidence-based medicine, and when one should or should not apply its finding to a given situation. While EBM is a very useful tool, I also have encountered worrisome instances in which a useful, low-risk, low-cost intervention is not used because there are not yet sufficient RCTs or because it is being researched for XYZ use but hasn’t yet been approved for it by the FDA. When EBM becomes a barrier to good clinical care, we have a different problem. I particularly liked the example she gave of a systematic review finding insufficient evidence to support the use of parachutes when jumping from a plane, and the selection of quotations from comments. My favorite, succinct and clear, was this line from a clinician at my institution, “RCTs aren’t holy writ, they’re simply a tool for filtering out our natural human biases in judgment and causal attribution. Whether it’s necessary to use that tool depends upon the likelihood of such bias occurring.” Read, read, and read this post again.

Laika’s MedLibLog: #NotSoFunny – Ridiculing RCTs and EBM. http://laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/notsofunny-ridiculing-rcts-and-ebm/

In an oblique connection, Novoseek, the innovative biomedical web search engine covering Medline, grants and online publications, offered a post on their new feature, allowing searchers to limit by publication type. While this doesn’t directly connect to free speech (rather the reverse) it does directly connect to quality of health information and control through peer review, both of which are implied contextual issues. Being able to use a health specific search tool automatically focuses results on a narrower and higher quality subset of the information available on the web. Being able to limit by publication type enables the searcher to slice the search even more finely, focusing on just the highest quality health information available.

Novoseek: Tip #1 to improve searches in novoseek – Filter results by publication type. http://blog.novoseek.com/index.php/resources/tip-1-to-improve-searches-in-novoseek-filter-results-by-publication-type.html/

PS. While you are taking a look at that blogpost, you might want to also take a look at an earlier post from Novoseek called The importance of context in text disambiguation. It is a kind of geeky, technical post, but the fundamental concept is central to how humans (as well as computers) identity quality when they see it.

Really not on topic, but the next post is such a handy overview for helping patients in poor economic times that I wanted to be sure to include it. Now, when you read this one remember to keep in mind the privacy overviews mentioned in some of the posts above, ask for help from a librarian for the searches mentioned (many will have lists of local free or reduced-cost clinics), and don’t stress out over the “if you try hard enough” phrase at the end — sometimes things don’t work out even when you try hard, but if you don’t try, there isn’t even a good opportunity. So these are some ideas you can try, a good starting place.

Radiologic Technician Schools: 11 Ways You Can Get Medical Care for Free. http://radiologictechnician.org/2010/11-ways-you-can-get-medical-care-for-free/

Another interesting off-topic post is the following one listing iPhone apps for personal health management. For myself, I might feel a little hesitant to place an overwhelming amount of confidence in these without talking with a healthcare provider to make sure the recommendations are safe with my own personal health background, but no matter what, I want to know these exist and will be interested in checking them out!

Radiology Tech Training: Top 6 iPhone Apps to Manage Your Own Health. http://radiologytechtraining.org/2010/top-6-iphone-apps-to-manage-your-own-health/

Social Media in Education – A Family Photo Album

Last week I gave a presentation at the University of Michigan-Dearborn that was one of those things that didn’t go as planned from step one. The idea of it began as a quiet conversation with a small group of people and just kept growing until they had to switch to a large auditorium. Then it was on the coldest day of the year, and probably would have fit after all in the original room. From my point of view, I’ve done better presentations, but folks asked for the slides and I am providing them. Audio was recorded, and when I get access to that, I will see about converting the slides to a slidecast.

I was originally invited by the UMD College of Engineering, so focused much of the presentation explicitly toward engineering examples. The topic was supposed to be how social media can be or has been used in support of education. What I hoped to do was focus on examples of best practices and common uses, then on more unusual tools to match certain educational niches, and finish up with a brief mention of Enterprise 2.0 in academia. I found that educational common uses of social media and the Academia 2.0 marketing stuff used most of the same tools, so I ended up consolidating those two topics.

There were some interesting conversations after the presentation, with one question in particular that I really wish had been raised in front of a larger audience: “All that Facebook and Twitter stuff? I’m not sure I see how all that stuff could be used for engineering education.” BINGO! I’m not sure I see how either. With educational technologies in general, I am a big fan of matching the tool to the task. The big name social media tools (blogs, wikis, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube) tend generally to be especially good at verbal communication skills and supporting teamwork and collaboration. While those are aspects within any educational topic, they are not the primary focus in engineering, although they might be very powerful for promoting engineering as a profession, marketing, and building a community of support or a community of practice. (There are exceptional examples of their use in engineering education, such as the MIT Open Courseware collection in Flickr and Youtube.)

In education and practice, from my point of view as a non-engineer, the domain is more visual, diagrammatic, and focused on data, project planning, materials, structures, concepts, design and more along those lines. I am not myself persuaded that the main stream social media tools are a good fit for engineering education. I was most excited about showing off the niche tools that I think are good fits for engineering such as ManyEyes for data visualisation and Cacoo for online collaborative diagramming. I should have shown them online mindmapping tools. I should have spent some time with online project management and project planning tools. Well, you have to start with the basics, and then embroider from there. I was reluctant to spend much of the presentation on these niche tools since they are more likely to be ephemeral or unstable (in “perpetual beta” is pretty common with niche social media tools).

With all those caveats, for whatever it is worth, here are the slides. My apologies for not including URLs for the sites listed. I just don’t have enough hours in the day.

Social Media in Education, a Family Photo Album: http://www.slideshare.net/umhealthscienceslibraries/social-media-for-education-3072114

EASI Webinar on Accessibility and Twitter

I attended this webinar on Monday, and captured notes to “liveblog”. I was asked if it is liveblogging when you don’t post it until a couple days later. In my book, I am going to count it as liveblogging if I had computer or life problems that prevented me from posting it sooner! So here it is. Lucky for all of you, while I was fighting my computer and getting sick, Dennis posted the slides, so you get the slides and my notes, both!

Twitter and Web Accessibility
Dennis Lembrée

OUTLINE
issues with twitter
accessible twitter application
accessibletwitter.com
benefits
guidelines for accessible tweets

What’s Twitter:
“Free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters.”

ISSUES

Find 3 items on the Twitter sign in page that could use improvement

1. click here (several
2. no submit button, Javascript
3. text links not underlined
4. poor color contrast
5. “forgot” what?

– not keyboard accessible
– poor use of headings
– core functionality requires JavaScript

Keyboard access
– cannot access favorite, reply or delete links
– mouseover activated, not tab or keybaord accessible

Headings
– missing headings when browsing in headline outline view
– what page is this?
– whose account is it?
– where are the tweets?
– where is the menu?
– why is the footer under the heading “create a new list”?

Reply to tweet works without JS
Does not:
– fave
– delete
– trending
– followers
– following
– lists
– follow/unfollow/block/spam >> so inaccessible he can’t even figure out what it is for

Other issues

– code doesn’t validate
– code needs better semantics
– links unclear (underlines, hover state pseudo class effects but no focus, poor color contrast)
– sidebar navigation is inconsistent
– form markup needs help (form fields missing lables, fieldset tags used without legends)
– layout width is static not flexible
– custom colors may not be readable (need to allow enduser to reset colors, the myspace effect)

Colour Contrast Analyser (Paciello’s???)
summary of failures
luminosity contrast ratio – failures > 85
Can also use another color analyser, but I missed the name

APPS
Accessible Twitter: http://www.acessibletwitter.com/
Slandr: http://m.slandr.net (mobile)
Quitter: http://qwitter-client.net/
Twinbox (previously McTwit): http://techhit.com/Twinbox (Outlook plugin)
BlindTwit

** Accessible Twitter **

web-accessible
standards compliant
XHTML
winner of 2009 Access IT @web2.0 Award
ARIA markup too new – doesn’t validate
Blind Bargains access awards
keyboard accessible

headings
– site IDd
– acct name IDd
– message box IDd (latest tweet / shorten URL)
– Tweets IDd
– TweetRoll: indiv tweet author IDd (clarity & navigation 4 screen readers)
– Footer has own heading

Javascript
– No Javascript required, only used to enhance functions
– Hijax (Jeremy Keith)
– unobtrusive (no inline, external silos are best)
– can add CSS/CSS3 to enhance and make pretty

MORE
– search, saved search, user search
– trends page
– popular links (TweetMeme)
– all pages display logged in user info
– no hidden links (link to tweet’s PURL, fave, reply, RT)
– ARIA landmark roles (nav, banner, search, main, etc)
– skip links
– form fields

Illustrations of needs
major web service can be made accessible by one man, not a team
– easy with braille display
– keyboard accessible = touch accessible
– works in Lynx
– more mobile accessible, shows followers
– clear & easy w/ dyslexia

Future enhancements
– Twitter lists
– caching trends / popular links
– better error handling (Twitter API has some issues)
– functionality to upload pics from Twitpic / yFrog
– OpenAuth (instead of Basic)

BENEFITS of accessibility
– more usable
– better functionality w/ assistive tech – text browsers, braille devices, screen readers
– keyboard accessiblity opens door for various input devices
– clear consistent content and navigation benefits those iwth cognitive impairments
– better mobile device accessibility, more possible

GUIDELINES FOR ACCESSIBLE TWEETS
– don’t overuse abbreviations
– shorten link URLs
– use simple language
– don’t use foreign language without making it obvious (enclose with quotes)

I (pfa) don’t agree with the foreign language recommendation. I recommended also looking at:
Tweak the Tweet: pfanderson.posterous.com/cool-toys-pics-of-the-day-tweak-the-tweet-cri

On Twitter:
@dennisl
@webaxe
@accessibletwitr

Web Pages:
WebAxe: webaxe.blogspot.com
Web Overhauls: weboverhauls.com
Dennis Lembree: dennislembree.com

Goodies for Do Gooders on Groundhog Day

This began life as a New Year’s Resolution spin-off, which is pretty obvious once you get into it. The idea was that for New Year’s most of us try to spend some time thinking about how we can improve either our lives or the lives of those around us, redefining what’s important. I started looking around and found an enormous wealth of sites that claim to support people in becoming change-agents in large and small ways, both local and global.

Obviously, I have not tested out all of these myself, nor have I researched the ones that want monetary donations. Consider yourself encouraged to check them out yourself before taking any personal risks. What I hope will come out of this slideshow is an opportunity to explore some sites that maybe you didn’t know about and possibly clarify your sense of what roles are a good fit for you as a change agent.

Oh, as you go through the deck, you’ll notice the yellow section dividers captured from Monina Velarde’s New Year’s Resolution Generator and used with her permission. Just spending some time clicking refresh on her site is another way to clarify options for re-envisioning your life direction. Check it out!

Monina Velarde: New Year’s Resolution Generator: moninavelarde.com/newyears/

My apologies to all for not including links or titles in the slidedeck or in this blogpost. I am well aware that this is an accessibility issue, and leaves out people who are vision impaired. Anyone have a few hours to compile a list for me? I will gladly append it to this post! I just didn’t have time and thought it better to get this out to some rather than none.

FDASM University of Michigan Campus Forum

UPDATE: The date has been changed. Please see below for details.

---

FDASM = The FDA’s process to develop guidelines for health information in social media and online spaces. I think of it as this:

WHO
can say WHAT
to WHOM
WHERE online
about health information.

EVENT
February 16, 2010, Tuesday
12 noon to 1:30pm
Dow Auditorium, Towsley Center
Directions: http://www.med.umich.edu/meded/towsley/
WikiMapia Directions: http://wikimapia.org/2163107/Towsley-Center-for-Continuing-Medical-Education

SPEAKERS
* Patricia Anderson, Emerging Technologies Librarian, Health Sciences Libraries
* Ted Hanss, Director for Enabling Technologies, UMMS
* Anuja Jain, Medical Student, Social Media Research Project, UMMS
* Brenda Jones, Managing Director, Medical Innovation Center, UMHS
* Mary Kratz, Senior Advisor, Health Informatics, President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, U.S. Naval Health Research Center & UMMS
* Melissa Levine, Copyright Officer, University Libraries
* Jessica Souliere, Senior Public Relations Representative and Social Media Communications Coordinator, UMHS
* and YOU!!!

ABSTRACT
February 16, noon-1:30 in Dow Auditorium, there will be a campus public forum on the FDA’s guidelines for health information in social media. These guidelines will influence who can say what to whom where online regarding health information. Examples of potential impact areas include communications between clinicians with peers or patients, recruitment for clinical research, promotion of research findings or clinical guidelines, and much more. Learn how you can influence the FDA in their process to develop these guidelines by sharing your thoughts, hopes and concerns with your peers here and with the FDA.

PRESS RELEASE

Feb. 4, 2010
For more information, contact:

Jessica Soulliere, jesssoul@umich.edu
734-764-2220

For immediate release
U-M hosts forum on use of social media, Internet to promote FDA-regulated medical products
Public invited to give input for recommendations to FDA

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—The University of Michigan Health System invites members of the public to attend a free community forum to discuss how industry should be allowed to use social media and the Internet to promote Food and Drug Administration-regulated medical products such as prescription drugs for humans and animals, prescription biologics and medical devices.

The event, which includes a panel of experts from UMHS, will take place from noon – 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 16, in Dow Auditorium, Towsley Center, 1500 E. Medical Center Dr.
On Nov. 13 and 14, 2009, the FDA hosted a 15-part hearing encompassing 76 presentations entitled, “Promotion of FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools,” to begin gathering input from the public on how future policies in this area should be developed.

The FDA is specifically seeking input on five questions:
1. For what online communications should manufacturers, packers or distributors be accountable?
2. How can manufacturers, packers or distributors fulfill regulatory requirements in their Internet and social media promotion, particularly when using tools that are associated with space limitations and tools that allow for real-time communications?
3. What parameters should apply to the posting of corrective information on Web sites controlled by third parties?
4. When is the use of links appropriate? And
5. How should Internet adverse event reporting take place?

Public participation is encouraged from any interested party, including consumers, patients, caregivers, health care professionals, patient groups, Internet vendors, advertising agencies and the regulated industry.

Recommendations developed during the Feb. 16 forum will be submitted to the FDA for consideration in making future policy decisions on this issue.

For a complete primer on the issue, including links to Web casts of the original hearings, industry commentary and new developments in the conversation, visit http://fdasm.com/.

Map to the Towsley Center: http://www2.med.umich.edu/healthcenters/gmaps/medcenter.cfm

MORE INFORMATION

FDASM: http://fdasm.com/

ETechLib: FDASM: http://etechlib.wordpress.com/tag/fdasm/
Event (this page): http://etechlib.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/fdasm-university-of-michigan-campus-forum/
Downloadable & embeddable copy of the poster here: http://www.slideshare.net/umhealthscienceslibraries/fdasm-event-poster-feb16

CDC in Social Media: http://www.cdc.gov/socialmedia

FDA in Social Media: http://www.fda.gov/socialmedia

FDA: About the Hearings: http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/CentersOffices/CDER/ucm184250.htm

Comments currently in the docket (Docket ID: FDA-2009-N-0441) at Regulations.gov: http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#docketDetail?R=FDA-2009-N-0441

Introduction to the FDASM (slides from a presentation given in Second Life on December 13th): http://slideshare.net/umhealthscienceslibraries/introduction-to-the-fdasm

EASI Webinar: Accessibility in Social Media: Second Life

I meant to liveblog this when I took these notes, but it has been a crazy week and I am only now getting them put up. These are from the EASI Webinar series going on now about accessibility in social media. I will try to do something like this for the other portions of the excellent series.

Second Life and Opportunities of a 3D Platform
Denise Wood, Janyth Ussery, Charles Morris

3:30AM in Australia!!!

Denise in SL for teaching at U South Australia
funding for researching accessibility issues and solutions
ethnographic, interviews, participant observations

Virtual Helping Hands >> Charles & Janyth
OPEN SOURCE

Objectives:
– Access to education
– opportunities for employment
– increased socialization
– social networking
– entertainment
– equal access for everyone

Janyth from Texas State Technical College

Advantages of SL
training we cannot afford to do
social presence for distance learning
normal chatroms and IM offers some presence, but this extends this

collaborate in real time
learn from others
teaching classes
meetings and conferences
saves travel costs
at least one meeting or conference each week
VHH meetings in SL (one via Skype)

3D worlds:
– engaging environment
– flexibility in attendance
– sense of community
– problem solving skills
– simulations of things no possible in real life
– increased creativity
– team work & communication skills

students design their own learning space “classroom”
– frat house
– roman ruins
– egyptian pyramids

Dance interaction

Why teach in virtual worlds
– changing demographic
– students working more, full time jobs
– less time on campus
– feeling more isolated
– need for community connection with U
– stdts growing up with digital technology
– need for life long learning skills
– multimodal presentations more normative

students creating jungle game in collaborative team, but never met in RL

Activities
– simulations
– game design
– theatre & opera
– machinima
– quests
– historical re-enactments
– politics, governance, civics
– business, financial modeling

Business Etiquette class / simulation
fancy dinner
digital media teaching via SL
job skills
critical thinking
corporate communication
the interview dinner >> dining experience

equal success in simulation environment as in real life
roleplay from cocktails through courses to

ISSUES
– steep learning curve for students
– some stdts found communication difficult
– interface challenging
– bandwidth restrictions
– students must have access to SL
– accessibility concerns
– cognitive load can complicate learning for some
– areas of Australia have no network, or only wireless (hundreds of dollars a month)

must ensure no student is isolated from the desired learning experiences

ACCESSIBILITY
– Virtual word viewers not accessible to screen readers
– graphical texture based interfaces need alt text like descriptions & controls
– user interfaces not accessible to screen readers, don’t support alternative accessive devices
– user generated content not accessible
– tab-indexes need to be provided and organized into a logical order between links and options

solution efforts
– provision of audio message
– text list of avatars in vicinity
– all users to add descriptive text, and long desc for posters and slides
– closed captioning for videos, synchronized streaming captions
– text transcriptions for streaming audio and voice chat

existing solutions
– alternate viewers
– Max Voice Plus application
– Virtual Guidedog project
– SecondAbility mentors
– user contributed tools and solutions
– other organizations and projects
– community at large

how do we make VW accesible to those who are differently abled?
Disabilities Unlimited
Virtual Ability Inc.

AIMS
– investigate accessibility issues for students with disabilities
– ID available accessibility solutions
– extend existing solutions to develop OPEN SOURCE accessible 3d virtual learning platform
– create accessible teaching tools
– develop guidelines for teaching in 3d virtual worlds and designing accessibile learning technologies

DESIGN SOLUTIONS
* develop accessible open source viewer (AccessGlobe):
– enhanced accessibility of menus
– alternatives to mouse driven interface elements
– audio notification of on-screen events
– text-to-speech
– visual notification of sound events

AccessGlobe is modification of SnowGlobe viewer
GPL license
available for OpenSIm

ALTERNATIVE
web-based system enables 3D presentations
– access to chat & message
– screen readable display of slide text
– mobile support (iPhone)
– audio stream information

such a lightweight application runs really well in mobile and poorly networked environments

challenge: have to refresh chat
frame view no good for screen readers
trying Ajax – ARIA solution, some bumps in it

MediaAccess Australia collaboration

ARIA allows ordering of events?
instead of refreshing can append text to end
add button to hear all text chat history if they come in late

O’Reilly Webcast on Enterprise 2.0 & the Social Organization

I haven’t had a full hour to watch this yet, but the names involved are all folk I respect, so I expect this to be excellent. It is on a topic that many folk who follow this blog care about, so wanted to be sure you knew it was available!

O’Reilly Webcast
Social Business: Taking “social” to the core of your organization
Joshua-Michéle Ross, Stowe Boyd, Peter Kim, Jeremiah Owyang

Day in the Life of an Emerging Technologies Librarian

6-7am
Up. Morning ablutions.
Start coffee (forgot to make it last night).
Pack lunch for kid.
Wake kid up (alarm didn’t work again).
Running late, running late, hurry, hurry.

7-8am
Check email.
Schedule meeting.
Send announcement.
Coffee into thermos.
Pack up, walk to bus. Surprisingly warm and wet.
Bus to work.

8-9am
Arrive at work. Unload laptop and wires, plug it in, start it up. Pour a cup of decaf while things get going and skimming email.
Phone to extend room reservation for noon webinar. Confirm. Send reminder to colleague.
Clear a well-hidden spam blog comment.
Receive ping via GTalk to help patron download an article. End up emailing it to them.

9-10am
Email discussion about projected social media report collecting activities of the medical campus. Cool!
Send amazing etech video to a colleague – mini-cameras mounted on eagles for bird’s-eye view video!
Grin proudly upon receiving email that article I peer-reviewed on Second Life in healthcare is now online.
Cringe upon receiving email that my presentation on Thursday (social media in education) has been switched to a larger auditorium.
Chat with colleague.
Decide to skip the Forum Coffee Break, AGAIN, wishing I could make it.

10-11am
Get another one of the MedLib’s Blog Carnival submissions – the first one on topic! Hurray!
Check Facebook quick, “like” a few things, a couple quick comments.
Discuss upcoming faculty workshop in Second Life with cube-mate.
Check Twitter, get involved in discussion with ePatientDave and SusannahFox about why the general approach to participatory medicine and social media may need fine tuning for low health literacy patients with complex chronic medical situations and their healthcare teams.
Fine tune websearch for social media in engineering education. Open 20 windows, start grabbing screenshots.

11-noon
Continue grabbing screenshots, a few articles.
Check clock. Check email. Check Twitter.
Bundle up laptop and myself, head across campus to room for webinar. Temps dropping like crazy.
Grab a Polish Sausage on the way. Too cold and windy to eat outdoors. Eat it in the Chemistry Building while I cut through.

12-1pm
Webinar from EASI on accessible design in Second Life. Let a friend look over my shoulder. Take good notes for peers, will blog later.

1-2:30pm
Friend stays around, I demo the accessible tools in Second Life. Show off guidedog, Marco/Polo scripts/coding, and informal general SL skills.
Talk about Twitter as personal productivity tool. Compare lists of accessibility resources in Twitter.
Talk about increasing use of social media for promoting web accessibility on campus.
Talk about Yammer as campus community productivity tool.

2:30-3pm
Mostly walking back to office, thinking of my fruit salad I want to eat when I get there.

3-4pm
Check email. Forget about the fruit salad. Check article sent by colleague.
Check Twitter. Reply to remainder of morning conversation about participatory medicine.
Check Yammer. Reply to questions from campus folks, comment on conversations, note links to follow up.
Look for Kate to fix our Yammer group set up. Her room is dark. Send her private Yammer message to schedule time to do this.

4-5
Answer email from NETP videographer, mention FDASM event in SL this coming Saturday (fingers crossed!).
Add 2 meetings to calendar from emails.
Troubleshoot ActiveU registration.
Realize I forgot to eat fruit salad, put it in fridge.
Bundle up to go home.
Wait for bus. Too cold to read book in my pocket. Lost my gloves.

5-6
Get on bus. Scrunch in seat. Read a few pages of Green Mars.
Get off at my stop. Go to catch the connecting bus.
Next bus comes early, whizzes by while I run to catch it, 20 feet away.
Wait 3 minutes just in case it was wrong bus.
Walk a mile plus home.

6-7
Remind kid to put away trash bins.
Check laundry.
Check email.
Ask kid what to make for dinner. Discuss options.
Remind kid to put away dishes.
Watch a funny YouTube video with kid.
Ask kid about dinner again.Finally, decision time!

7-8:30
Make dinner for kid. Work on blogpost.
Remind kid to eat. Work on blogpost.
Answer phone. Remind kid to eat. Work on blogpost.
Tweak look of new blog. Fiddle with banner graphic in Adobe Illustrator. Output image as SVG. Convert to JPG. Load. No good – conversion destroyed font. Retry, grab screenshot, crop. Wrong size. Try again. Grab screenshot, load. Finally works. Customize colors, 6 times. Finally OK.
Check email. Send notice of Google Calendar to son’s athletic team. Try to persuade colleague to blog.

8:30-10
Computer crunches. Grab screenshot of open BBEdit files just in case. Computer crashes. Illustrator and Firefox were not happy running at the same time. Restart.
Clear extra files from desktop.
Check updates and installs.
General tidy.
Restart again.
Phone girlfriend while working on computer cleanup. No answer. Phone another girlfriend. Chat while fixing CPU.

10-11
Open blogpost window for Cool Toys.
Computer crashes again. Reboot again.
Reopen Firefox, and NO OTHER APPS! Check Session Manager, grab screenshots of URLs for important pieces, close their windows before resuming.
Do Cool Toy of the Day blogpost. Extra short today.
Send two Momentile posts – one for Cool Toys, one for personal stream.

11-12
Write blogpost on “A Day in the Life of a Librarian”.
Make coffee on timer for morning.
Refill humidifers.
Turn out lights around house.
Evening ablutions. Go to bed.

2009 Social Media Overview

Me, I didn’t plan to do a yearly overview, nor did I plan one of those crystal-ball sets of predictions for the coming year. I ended up getting sick and didn’t do what I planned for the start of the new year, but don’t worry, I’ll get it out sooner or later. Hopefully, if I make it before the end of January, you’ll all forgive me.

This video has been making the rounds the past couple weeks. It is a real joy. Take an expert social media cartoonist (Rob Cottingham) with his finger on the pulse of the high points and low points of social media. Take the cartoons and organize them by month. It makes for a very telling tale, indeed! I actually watched the whole thing, more as a test to see how up I am on things myself. What I discovered is that when I got really busy working on FDASM and articles deadlines during November and December I also lost track of what was going on around me pretty totally. I was doing pretty good up until that point – no real surprises. Time for me to catch up (I hope), and get back into blogging here. (Meanwhile, you can track my daily Cool Toys blogposts over at Posterous, just in case you think I haven’t been blogging at all. ) For now, take a look at this video and see how much you already knew (and snigger just a little, for fun).

Back from Break with Technology Vision

I bet you all thought I was being quiet because I was on vacation or holiday or something like that. Wrong! I spent an unbelievable amount of time over the past couple weeks working on my portion of an article a few of us are submitting about Nursing education in Second Life. My portion of it was intended to be a quick overview of emerging technologies and virtual worlds as used in education (generally), healthcare, and nursing. I think I might have a whole article of its own coming out of this, but, wow, did I find a lot of fascinating things while I was doing the background research for this. I will try to find time to share some of the highlights here over the next few weeks, just short little pieces with things I’ve found.

For today, here is something I found before the nursing article binge, and which I meant to share ages ago. I could spend weeks just talking about the concepts and ideas in this one slideshow, and still feel hopelessly inadequate. Briefly, this is from Cisco, almost a sales pitch but framed in the context of a vision of the impending future of computing systems. Think big fluffy clouds, lots of them, all interconnected. Instead of the InterNet, or the InterWeb, or the “InterTubes”, you get the InterCloud. You won’t really think of your data as having a particular space anymore, not like, “Oh, my stuff lives in that cluster of servers on North Campus.” And I remember the days when people on campus would ask which server you lived on, UB, or UM or MERIT. At Northwestern the servers were named after local popular student restaurants, and my account lived on Casbah. Nope, not anymore. Hope you enjoy it!