So is this the first of many more open medical education courses to come?  Is anyone in the UK planning on doing anything like this in medicine?  Are any UK medical students planning on signing up for the stanford course?  It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.  The video below gives more info on the course and you can sign up here.

My hunch – and it’s just a hunch at the moment based on some quick reading of sample policy documents and discussions with colleagues at Kingston University – is that the development of social media policies has been taken in response to both the promise of social media in promoting university brands as well as the threat to institutional reputation. The creation and implementation of social media policies are, therefore, playing a role in helping universities manage both the risks and benefits of social media at a time when reputation or brand management is key.

Whilst this may well be the case for institutional policies there are some disciplines where the issue of professionalism may be the driver for developing a social media policy. This is certainly the case for medical schools.  The BMA recently issued some guidelines and ethical guidance for doctors and medical students on using social media which we’ve highlighted to our students.  These practical guidelines focus on areas such as patient confidentiality, the boundaries between public-private and how social media might impact on employment. This guidance is helpful and welcome but there isn’t much mention given to the potential social media has to support learning, so we’re looking to build on the BMA docment and look at some of the possible benefits.  A key to developing more localised guidelines is the involvement of students and we’re building on a previous student project, which highlighted that many students would welcome more guidance from the medical school on using social media.

I’d be interested to know if other medical schools already have social media policies/guidelines in place and also whether students have had any involvement in shaping these guidelines or are involved in peer teaching on issues around social media and digital professionalism.

Yesterday Alan Cann tweeted a link to a post about Scoop.it that he’d written back in June. Like many others I’ve been trying out Scoop.it to curate content.  I’ve only only got one topic on the go at the minute pulling together snippets on elearning and medical education, but I’m starting to think about whether we should be trying out Scoop.it to curate content for our students.  Recently I’ve been bookmarking sites with Diigo and pulling the feeds from lists into some of our medblog sites. The idea behind using social bookmarking was to create a faux-repository for students of open online resources that have been recommeded by our clinial teachers. The SHEEN project collated resources on employability using Diigo and pulled RSS feeds from Diigo and other sources into Netvibes. The key thing missing from this faux-repository was support for social interaction.  Alan Cann also highlights the social sharing deficienices of Delicious in his post and hence why he likes Scoop.it.

Last week at AMEE, an international medical education conference, whilst I was in a symposium on student engagement I was following the tweets from a short communications session on social media and was disappointed to see the digital natives myth was still being peddled. One of my twitter meded circle mentioned that in another session there was a question from someone with concerns about the open nature of the web and the resources students were using on the web and whether they were good or reliable.  The speaker’s response was to highlight that one of the roles of teachers is to be a ‘guide on the side’ and that they could play a role in quality assuring stuff on the web.  At the end of the week I was at a much smaller medical education meeting and had a conversation with a colleague about the wealth of great medical education resources available online.  My colleague suggested there must be a way to collate these and include some sort of star rating to give an indication of how good a resource is and share with medical students across the UK.

This has got me thinking about whether teachers should actively be curating content supporting their role as the guide on the side.  Lecturers do recommended reading lists and links to useful websites posted in VLEs or listed in paper study guides, but tools like Scoop.it allow ongoing curation of content and could, like social bookmarking tools, help build up a quality assured faux-repository to support learning. Students can react to content and share it to others via Twitter and other social platforms.  Scoop.it is pretty easy to use, though like Alan I wish you could add tags when you scoop the content rather then having to remember to add tags once you’ve published it. The other thing about Scoop.it is that you can suggest an item to another topic, which would allow students to share content with their lecturers for review who in turn can go on to curate and share with other students.  Another option might be to curate content on a wordpress site that could serve as a repository and include a star ratings plugin so that students could rate how good the resource was in supporting their learning as well as leaving comments.

Is anyone actively curating content for their students in medicine or other subject areas?  I’m going to see if I can find one of our clinical teachers to give Scoop.it a go.  If I get a volunteer I’ll hopefully get round to posting an update of how we get on.

This is the first time I’ve had a go at making a video like this and although I lost count of how many attempts I had at doing it, the good thing was that it was easy to do and this is why I think it’s important  not to be afraid of using technology.  So many tools and technologies are relatively easy and intuitve to use now and so if you’ve never had a go at using some of tools that are around now have a go and see how you get on.

If you’re going to ASME, I look forward to seeing you there.

Reading James Clay’s latest blog post about how Posterous had the potential to be used to capture the learner’s voice got me thinking  about how some of the features in Posterous would be good to have in an e-portfolio.  One of the features of Posterous, that’s appealing to many, is that you can post by email.  It’s easy to attach images or web clipings to a post.  You can also attach video and audio files and these will be embedded too.  For those who want to post online they can and posting via your smartphone is easy.  Shouldn’t this sort of functionality be standard in any student e-portfolio?

Thinking about the tutors who need to review student portfolios, again for me usability is a key issue.  Working in medical education where many clinical tutors have so many demands on their time ease of use and access are particularly important.  Looking again at Posterous, it supports commenting by email.  Should e-portfolios automatically send the latest post by a student to their tutor and allow the tutor to post their feedback by replying to the email.  With increasing interest in audio and video feedback could such a system make it easier for tutors to give feedback in these ways.  With most doctors used to using dictaphones being able to record their feedback to students and email it to their e-portfolios might help improve the level of feedback that students receive.

Another feature of Posterous is autoposting to other sites.  Where students are producing their own learning content like video they could autopost to YouTube or Vimeo and share these with the wider medical education and student community and start to accrue some scholarly recognition for the resources they’ve developed.

The other element needed in a medical student portfolio is the abilty to link or map the student’s work to the learning outcomes set out on the GMC’s Tomorrow’s Doctors 2009.  Tagging of entries could help with this, but something a bit more sophisticated might be helpful with templates for different types of entry.

Is there an e-portfolio system out there already with all this sort of functionality and ease of usability?

I can see that there could be educational value in this, but is Twitter the most appropriate tool for this?  Wouldn’t a private channel be more appropriate than a public broadcast via Twitter.   Whilst I think Twitter can be used in teaching I’m not sure that I’ll be pushing for it to be used to tweet live surgery.

Doctor Bailey introduces Twitter as a learning tool to broadcast surgeries over the internet. The chief on the other hand, is not very happy about the idea. At least not at first.

• to access the growing amount of open learning content available  on sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and blogs and
• to make use  of Web 2.0 and social media tools.

These sites, tools and technologies  make it easier for teachers to produce and remix online learning content.  They also offer many opportunities to support collaborative work, research and to share information with patients and colleagues. The reality, however, for those involved in teaching in the NHS and for our students on clinical placements is that access to many of these sites and tools are blocked by NHS firewalls. In some cases health boards have made them accessible but only to those clinical staff using them for research.

The outcome of our presentation and the following discussion at the November NHS-HE Forum meeting is that a short life working group has been set up to look at NHS-HE connectivity best practice.  The group includes IT managers, librarians, medical educators with responsibility for elearning and  we’ll be putting together our work plan when we meet later this week.

One of the things I’ve been tasked with doing is coming up with a starter for 10 list of tools/sites that should be accessible from the NHS.  I know the sorts of sites that my colleagues are keen to be able to access for example

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• WordPress sites
• Blogspot sites
• Posterous
• Social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Diigo
• Google docs
• Slideshare
• Ning
• Twitter

I’m also interested to hear what the wider NHS community involved in teaching and research would like to access.  Which tools would you like to access that are currently blocked in your health board or trust and why would you like to have access them, what benefits would they bring to your work?

UK snow

The University is formally closed again today because of the snow. This is just as well as I’m pretty well snowed in, the only cars getting out of our road are 4x4s.  This is the first time I can remember the University being formally closed.  We do seem to have had large amounts of snow fall, the buses aren’t running today and the roads are a mess.

So far this week our students will have lost two and a half days of teaching, for our 3rd year medical students that’s half of their week long block on aging.  With more snow forecast we could lose another day tomorrow and, if this keeps up, possibly almost a full week.

It’s yet to be seen how much more snow and disruption to teaching we’ll see this winter, but this current dose of UK snow has made me think about whether we should have some sort of contingency plans to ease the disruption to teaching.  I know that some medical schools along with other schools across Universities are already recording lectures and so students can access these easily online and via hand held devices.  At the moment we don’t record our lectures, but maybe we should record the ones that were due to be delivered this week with Camtasia so that students can at least receive some of their timetabled teaching.  Or perhaps it’s at times like this that we should be capitalising on our Adobe Connect licence and delivering the teaching online so that students can still be taught whilst at home.  These sessions can also be recorded for students who don’t have access to the internet from home.  It would be more difficult to run virtual clinical skills and ward based teaching sessions online, but there are other small group teaching session which could be delivered virtually.

What do you think?  Do you have contingencies for delivering teaching in the midst of closures due to UK snow?

I posted a few tweets about Lazyscope and thought I’d take a screenshot and tweet this and then remembered reading on ReadWriteWeb yesterday about new Twitter guidelines. One section of the article looked at how you could now refer to tweets without needing to consult your lawyer.  It seems that we’re not supposed to use screenshots of other people’s tweets unless we have their permission.  Checking the guidelines on the Twitter help centre confirms this.  I then tweeted this and a couple of people tweeted back saying they hadn’t heard about this before and that it seemed a bit silly.  As I haven’t asked them if I can display their tweets I can’t show you them here.

In some respects it’s nice that someone might ask you for permission to take a screenshot of one of your tweets, but is this Twitter guideline a bit over the top?  Tweets are in the public domain, they are also googleable so does someone really need to to ask my permission to take a shot of my tweet.  Many of us working in education frequently take screenshots of applications and websites to use in educational resources and we also make screencasts showing people how to use various tools including Twitter.  Does this now mean that if we want to make a screencast for our students or colleagues that we need to get permission form everyone that’s tweeted into our Twitter stream whilst we were recording!!!

So what do you think?

As for Lazyscope it’s worth giving it a try.  Here’s a screenshot, which is a bit cropped and only shows one of my tweets, but hopefully it will give you an idea of how you can view links in tweets.