ReadWriteWeb (RWW) have posted a piece highlighting that one of the interesting technology trends of 2009 has been the growing decline of RSS Readers. Richard MacManus, who wrote the post, mentions that whilst he maintains a Google Reader account, he doesn’t check it everyday but does check Twitter for news information multiple times a day.
So is Richard typical? Do you increasingly turn to the Twitter stream to pick up news and links to interesting blog posts or are you still having a look at the RSS feeds you subscribe too?
Looking at the comments the RWW article has generated it looks like many are still using good old RSS readers, indeed a number say that they came across the piece in their RSS feeds. I for one am still using an RSS reader, but over the year I’ve changed my reader. At the start of the year I was reading my RSS feeds in my web browser, I use Flock, which yes is a bit slow to start up in comparison to Firefox and Safari (and no doubt Chrome which I’ve yet to try) but I like the way it allows me to manage my blogs, email, delicious accounts etc. I also like the way it organises RSS feeds and supports Firefox extensions. Over the past 12 months I’ve also used Netvibes and Pageflakes to share RSS feeds with others and to show them what RSS feeds are as many of the staff and students I speak to have never heard of RSS feeds and don’t know what they are. I’ve also used Bloglines, but tried to resist setting up a Google Reader account, (I think because I see Google as the new Microsoft). Then around about 6 months ago I heard about Feedly. I liked the look of Feedly as it gives you more of a magazine feel to reading RSS feeds. I started using it and now it’s my default RSS reader. As it runs off Google Reader I had to give in to my resistance and create an account, but I manage all my feeds in Feedly rather than the clunky Google interface. At the moment Feedly runs on Firefox and it also now supports Chrome. There have been requests for it to run on Safari and for an iPhone app and you get the sense that if enough of the user community shout for this the Feedly guys will support these developments .
Feedly cover page
I dip in out of Feedly during the day, I can post articles to Twitter, bookmark them to Delicous or Diigo, post to Posterous, Tumblr, Evernote etc and share articles, as you can with Google Reader.
So do I think RSS in in decline? It isn’t for me. I do pick things up from Twitter and start subscribing to some blogs websites because of the links I pick up for my Twitter network, but my RSS feeds are my magazine shelf which I dip in and out of. Also with the the vast majority of individuals who use the web still not knowing what RSS is, whilst it maybe in decline for some there’s may be also a sense in which it’s still waiting to be discovered.
An RSS feed from The Hospital Dr website caught my eye last night. The feed detailed a feature interview with Mr John Black the President of the Royal College of Surgeons in England. Mr Black was invited to answer a series of 12 questions. You can read the full interview here. Being involved in medical education it was the first question which grabbed my attention, ‘What is the biggest challenge the profession faces?’ Mr Black’s response was
Restoring all that has been thrown away in the modernisation fervour of the last decade. An awful lot of babies have gone out with the bathwater. Basic sciences and acquiring factual knowledge have to be restored to the medical school curricula; in postgraduate training, educational theory has to be replaced by classic apprenticeship; and whatever the health care model the country chooses it must be based on achieving the best outcomes not irrelevant targets and political expediency.
Is he right in what he says about the basic sciences in the undergraduate medical curriuclum?
As part of a staff development course I’ve been doing we were encouraged to discuss a paper about computer assisted assessment and the barriers to adoption. The paper made reference to the 1997 Dearing Report into Higher Education (HE), which highlighted the need for institutions to develop information strategies, and that training and support were key to the effective use of computers and IT in HE. The Dearing Report also recommended that it should become the norm for all new full-time teaching staff to undergo training in teaching in higher education on accredited programmes. Universities were also encouraged to review and update their staff development programmes. Reflecting on this I included this in one of the comments I posted to the discussion,
Whilst lecturers as a group stay up to date in subjects they teach and practise in do they stay up to date with advances in teaching and learning? Do we just complete the LTA course because that’s the hoop we have to complete or do we stay engaged with learning, teaching and assessment? There are optional staff development sessions, but should there be compulsory CPD/staff development sessions in the way that doctors, dentists, lawyers etc need to do CPD to keep practising. I can imagine that many would think this is a completely outrageous suggestion!
Is this outrageous? What do you think? I did get some support for this suggestion of compulsory CPD for teaching staff, including from a colleague in the medical school, who also commented that there was an assumption that doctors can suddenly become good teachers.
Having had this discussion a tweet from Rod Lucier (@thecleversheep) on Twitter last week caught my attention.
Back in July Steve Wheeler posted a tweet asking, what is the most important issue in e-learning?Sarah Horrigan said ‘one of the most important issues in e-learning is the gap between innovators & lack of real engagement by the majority’. This was a view which I supported and I also argued for more staff development to help lessen the gap. Is this gap as Rod proposes, increasing or are the majority catching up?
The JISC report Higher Education in a Web 2.o World identified the need for targeted staff development opportunities aimed at identifying and spreading best practice in the use of Web 2.o tools in pedagogy. How do we encourage teaching staff who already feel over stretched to take part in these opportunities, particularly in areas like medicine where teachers have heavy clinical commitments. Should it be compulsory?
My PG Cert in Teaching in Higher Education kicked off last week with a workshop and one of the group activities involved us all delivering a short 5 minute micro teaching slot. We had been forewarned about this so most of us had prepared a few Powerpoint slides to support our slots. After we’d done our stint we had to evaluate our own efforts and then we got feedback from the other members of our small group and a course tutor. This exercise stimulated some interesting discussion around student engagement and whether students today expected to be spoon-fed, in contrast to when we were all students when you had to take your own notes during lectures as there wasn’t the luxury of being able to download from the VLE what was written on the OHP or blackboard. This discussion continued in the plenary session. Some lecturers highlighted that they tended to use keywords on Powerpoint slides rather than have lots of text, which all seems to make good sense, but students weren’t happy because there wasn’t enough information for them on the slides. Were they unhappy because they would actually have to listen and make notes … I don’t know.
The debate about lecture Powerpoint handouts continued with some colleagues at the end of last week. We currently make our lecture Powerpoint handouts available after the lecture has been given. In a poll (run with Turning Point) in the last lecture of a 4 week teaching block one of the questions we asked was, ‘When did students want the Powerpoint handouts for lectures uploaded to Blackboard’. The options we gave them were before the lecture, after the lecture, at the end of a teaching block or not at all. 95% of them said they wanted them uploaded before the lecture. Discussing this with a couple of lecturers there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for doing this. The reasons for this are that, one they think that students won’t bother coming to their lectures if the handouts are available beforehand, and secondly as many of our lecturers are also busy NHS doctors they often don’t have their Powerpoint slides completed until just before the lecture.
I’ve had a very, very quick squint to see if I can find any literature that provides any evidence that releasing the lecture notes before the lecture affects learning outcomes for students and their performance in assessment etc or their attendance. I haven’t really found much on this yet that I can get access to, but intend to do a bit more serious searching.
I’m interested in whether other institutions have protocols or guidelines on whether lecture slides should be made available prior to lectures, what are you encouraged to do? What’s the rationale for making them available before hand rather than afterwards? Does this approach affect attendance at lectures or learning outcomes. Does giving out the handouts before the lecture encourage the students to come to the lecture more prepared and stimulate more interaction in the lecture or do you think it’s just spoon-feeding them?
Today I became a student again as I started my Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education. The course is run by my institution, the University of Dundee, and there are about 30 of us enrolled in this cohort. We kicked off today with a one day workshop, and whilst we predominantly study by distance learning there are a series of further half day workshops and we are all in small group study sets which will meet approximately monthly.
I’m looking forward to doing this course and in particular to reflect on the role that the Web 2.0 type tools that I use everyday will play in supporting my studies and helping to develop my personal learning environment. It will also be interesting to experience Blackboard as a student, as opposed to a teacher. Will my view on whether the VLE is dead or not change? Watch this space!
Each of the children in this Junior School class was given an iPod touch and could connect to the school’s wireless network. Here’s the video which shares reflections on how it’s all going from teachers and pupils.
I came across this video via David Hopkins‘ blog e-Learning Blog//Don’t waste your time. It’s the fourth in a series of videos which have looked at current and future global trends relating to technology and populations etc.
One of the things that stood out to me in the video was the statement at the end,
The mobile device will be the world’s primary connection tool to the internet in 2020.
I used to be quite sceptical about mobile learning, but since getting an iPod touch last year I’ve increasingly seen the potential that mobile devices have to deliver learning and to support learning. Is anyone using these or smartphones to support medical education? If you are I’d be interested to hear about how you are using them.
I’ve been in my new post for almost 10 months and it’s been an interesting time. I’ve been working with several clinicians who have been developing virtual patient cases around some of the core clinical problems which form a key part of our undergraduate curriculum. We’ve also been looking at other areas where the application of technology can help to enhance teaching and learning and developing new online teaching resources to support the face to face teaching.
Another development has been the interest in using blogs to support teaching. My colleagues in respiratory medicine were the first to show interest and over the summer set up DundeeChest. Over the summer the principal lead on this has been posting useful links and summaries of interesting bits of research from respiratory related journals etc. We’ve started to show Dundee Chest to others in the Medical School and it seems to have sparked off quite a bit of interest and we now have others wanting to start their own blogs to support their system or theme running through the curriculum. Colleagues in psychiatry were the first to follow the pioneering Chest team, followed by our GPs and cardiovascular physicians. I’m not sharing the links to these sites yet as they aren’t yet up and running but will hopefully remember to come back and update this post with links to DundeePsych, DundeeGP and DundeeHeart. Also in the offing is DundeeBones together with The Plexus which will look at hot topics in medical ethics and will have students involved contributing posts. I’ve also set up Dundee e-MedEd to share ideas and news about online learning and Web 2.0 with my colleagues. As I mentioned in my last post there are doctors who are interested in Web 2.0 and how technology can generally support teaching and learning but they have identified that they need support and staff development in these areas. This new blog will hopefully begin to address some of their questions and share what else is going on in e-learning.
The next step will be to see what the students think of these blogs. My DundeeChest colleagues will be using their blog to follow-up questions which come up in lectures and from Adobe Connect drop-in sessions which they are hoping to run. It will be interesting to see if the students find these new blogs a better way to support the teaching than the discussion boards in the VLE.
A couple of weeks ago there was another round in the VLE/PLE debate. Steve Wheeler kicked things of with his two fingered salute to the VLE, where he concludes that it’s inevitable that the personal web will win a straight fight with the VLE. On a comment Steve has posted in response to a piece by Mark Notess on eLearn Magazine he does admit he is being deliberately provocative to get the debate going. James Clay responded with his post It’s not dead … yet … followed by Matt Lingard with VL-istically speaking and Lindsay Jordan with The VLE/PLE debate. There is some consensus across these four posts and I find myself agreeing with many of the points raised by Steve, Matt, James and Lindsay.
Whilst I make use of the personal web to support my own personal development and think (hope) that ultimately it will win the so called fight against the institutional VLE, I too feel this is still some way off, particularly for medical education. There are two main reasons for thinking this
the current low level of use of Web 2.0 tools to support teaching and learning amongst both teachers and students and
firewall issues in the NHS which prohibit the use of a number of personal web tools to support teaching and learning.
In his post James responds to Steve’s piece by saying,
The concept that the majority of learners are adept at using Web 2.0 tools and services, are engaged with social networking and importantly are able to apply these skills to learning is a flawed concept at this time.
This is a view I would go a long with and the report on Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World published by JISC in May 2009 highlights these same points. For example the report identifies that nine out of 10 students will be regular users of social networking sites on entry to University, but they have little sense of how Web 2.0 technologies might be used to support their learning and they are not pushing for changes in traditional educational approaches. This report also identifies the need for targeted staff development opportunities aimed at identifying and spreading best practice in the use of Web 2.o tools in pedagogy.
The results of a study by Sandars and Schroter in the PMJ in 2007 also identified the need for staff development on the use of Web 2.0 technologies in medical education. They presented the results of an online survey which sought to identify the current familiarity and use of web 2.0 technologies by medical students and qualified doctors to identify barriers to its use in medical education. This study found that whist there was a high awareness and high interest in web 2.0 technologies there was generally low use. Sandars and Schroter concluded that for the potential of these technologies to be realised in medical education there needed to be increased training in how to use them. A couple of weeks ago I used this paper to kick off discussions at the Journal Club run by my colleagues in General Practice. Rather like the doctors in Sandars’ study my colleagues had an interest in web 2.0 technologies and how they could use them to support their teaching but all identified the need for staff development in this area. What was also interesting in the discussion was to hear their feelings about the institutional VLE with clunkiness and usability highlighted as issues.
Working in medical education there is an additional barrier to adopting the personal web to support teaching and learning and that’s the NHS firewall. A challenge that medical schools face is making content available to students in the clinical phase of the curriculum when students are on clinical attachments based in NHS hospitals and GP practices. Our students can access the institutional VLE from local NHS Trust PCs (albeit very slowly on IE6) however they cannot access the University’s webmail and there are problems accessing commonly used blogging sites, wikis, social bookmarking sites etc because of the NHS firewalls. A few months ago I was invited to do a staff development session with the psychiatrists involved in teaching our students and asked to demonstrate some web 2.0 tools and show sites where free content was available. I couldn’t access about 80% of the things I wanted to show and had to rely on back-up screenshots that I’d prepared as a standby.
I don’t know how we get around the NHS firewall issues but I think there are positive steps we can take to increase the use of personal web tools to support teaching learning. We need to provide more opportunities for staff development but also identify how we can encourage students to see how these tools can support their learning and not just their social lives. It’s also important to keep the debate going and to encourage and support the early adopters of technology and pioneers in e-learning to keep on innovating and being creative in how they use technology. There probably needs to be some sort of centralised VLE-type system which looks after managing cohorts of students and providing a secure environment for some activities, particularly in areas like health professions education where there are important issues relating to patient confidentiality which must be considered. At the same time the VLE of the future should be more open and support the integration of open tools so that students can pull together their own content to support their learning using tools which they can continue to use after they’ve graduated.
‘The VLE is dead‘ debate continues at the ALT meeting in Manchester in a couple of weeks time. Unfortunately I won’t be there but will be following on Twitter.
Many medical students will be getting ready to go off on their medical electives this summer. Whilst some will be going off to exotic places there are others who choose to go to resource poor countries. At Dundee we have links with Malawi and some of our students go there for their electives. The key issue is how to best prepare medical students for what they will face in these resource poor countries. The conditions and resources will be different to what they have experienced in their undergraduate careers to date.
This summer one of our 3rd year students, Anthony – who has a keen interest in international health, is working on a summer project and aiming to develop an online resource which will help to prepare students for electives in resource poor countries. As part of his project Anthony is looking at what online resources are already available to help students prepare for electives as well as thinking about the different types of resources that could be developed and also how Web 2.0 tools could be used. Anthony is also interested in hearing what other students think would be useful types of resources to help them prepare. To facilitate this he’s set up a short survey on Poll Daddy and if you are a medic or medical student it would be great if you could take a few minutes to complete it. During the course of the project Anthony is also planning to blog and feedback some of the comments from his survey at Elective Research.
If you can pass on these links to students in your school or to colleagues who’ve worked in resource poor countries that would be great.
