What are your top tips on #FOAMed?

Tomorrow I’m co-running a workshop on using free open access meducation – #FOAMed with my colleagues Annalisa Manca from Dundee and Rakesh Patel and Terese Bird from Leicester at the ASME Annual Scientific Meeting being held in Edinburgh.

Encouragingly the workshop is fully booked.  Our plan is to give an overview of open medical education and networked open learning, some examples of #FOAMed, address issues such as digital professionalism in developing #FOAMed resources, highlight how the use of a #FOAMed approach can support the development of communities of practice/learning collectives in medical education. We’re also going to ask the participants to design a #FOAMed resource/approach around some scenarios we’ve put together.

I’m just getting myself organised for an early start tomorrow and thought it might be good to touch base with the #FOAMed community and see if anyone might want to give some advice to our workshop participants on getting the best out of #FOAMed that I could share in the workshop.  For example

• why do you use #FOAMed?
• what do you think is the biggest benefit of #FOAMed?
• what’s your favourite #FOAMed resource/site?
• what tip would you give to someone who’s new to the #FOAMed approach?
• what do you like most about #FOAMed?

I’d welcome comments on the blog or you can tweet me at @nlafferty.  If tweeting you might want to say where you’re from and what you’re specialty is or whether you’re a students and perhaps use the hashtag #FOAMedtips and then I can curate the tweets in Storify and publish these later and share with everyone.

If you have spare couple of minutes and can pass on a few tips or thoughts on #FOAMed that would be great 🙂

P.S. – Some updatesfor recommended viewing & reading

Simon Carley has suggested this video by the Mike Cadogan who’s been a key inspiration to many who’ve engaged with #FOAMed including me!

Various blog posts are linked here too which are recommneded reading

• Remember the consciously incompetent: defining what Social Media is and isn’t by Damian Roland
• Free Open Access Medical Education – by Terese Bird
• Trends in online learning: #FOAMed – by Natalie Lafferty

Exporting Kindle book clippings to Evernote

I’ve been using my Kindle for reading PDFs of papers and it’s been very handy being able to harvest clippings from these via the text file these aggregate in to support various documents I’ve had to write.  Most of the books I’ve read on the Kindle have been fiction, but more recently I’ve been buying Kindle versions of some academic books. I’ve preferred reading these on the Kindle app on my iPad as I find it’s much easier to highlight and take notes on the iPad than on the Kindle.  The other day I was wanting to reflect and make some notes around some of the highlights I’d made in a book in Evernote and tried to see if I could export my highlights.  I was a bit disappointed and frustrated to not see an obvious way to do this.  I could see all my highlights and notes but couldn’t see a way to copy them or export them.

Searching on Google highlighted that one way to capture your highlights is to log into your Kindle account select the book in your library, which takes you to a page where you can see your highlights and notes and then clip these to Evernote.  This is ok but it doesn’t extract all of the text in your highlights.  So some progress but not completely what I was looking for.  A bit more searching and I came across this post by the Savvy Technologist about NoteScraper, an Apple Script he’s written to run in Safari which extracts your highlights and notes in full and exports them directly into Evernote.

You can download Note Scraper on the Savvy Technologist software page.  It’s easy to install and works a treat on the Mac OS and supports exporting your highlights individually into separate notes or all of them into one note.  Another problem solved and another way to incoporate Evernote in my workflow.