An occupational therapy blog about the role of online & digital technology in OT education and practice.
VirtualOT
Anita Hamilton
Alberta, Canada
I am an occupational therapist and teach occupational therapy at the University of Alberta. Before starting here I was at Deakin University, Australia. I am passionate using online technology to enhance the knowledge and growth of the occupational therapy profession.
Views expressed and stories shared on this blog are my opinion and do not represent views of my employer or professional registration body.
Some people who are new to the online environment are concerned that others may use their content and not cite them, so they simply refuse to put any information online, keeping all their knowledge in the formal literature... inaccessible to the masses.
The fear of having your work stolen is real and it happens! Many people either don't know how to cite or maybe they don't want to cite (and in fact are stealing your work to pass it off as their own). Either way, that is plagiarism and should not happen!
So a dilemma exists for many people who want to use their wiki or their blog to share their small project, or their ideas or maybe even the results of a large study... they may not get any "glory"
This is how I view the dilemma (today) about what to put online and what to try to publish through the "formal channels"...
Primarily my role is to find and make sense of information and translate this for use by others
It is not about "glory"... even though I love a bit of a spotlight :-)
Sharing my work through journal publications is one way to get new information to the community andpublishing in journals and books is still the most accepted form of currency for my employer to understand that I am contributing
Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs and podcasts etc are excellent tools for quick dissemination of information, and it is a good idea to promote your published material there for people who don't have ready access to databases and journals etc
Thinking "out loud" about this dilemma further maybe there is a time and a place to withhold information that I want to publish, but should really go through the formal channels of publication.
Question to the ether... "in the professional arena what do you withhold from your blog or wiki and why"
This link was sent to me by Susan Burwash... interesting article from the BBC about medical students using Twitter and Blogs to inappropriately share information about patients or institutions.
Medics posting messages on networking websites like Facebook and Twitter are breaching patient confidentiality, a leading journal reveals.
Research in the Journal of the American Medical Association found examples of web gossip by trainee doctors sharing private patient stories and details.
Over half of 78 US medical schools studied had reported cases of students posting unprofessional content online.
One in 10 of these contained frank violations of patient confidentiality.
Most were blogs, including one on Facebook, containing enough clinical detail that patients could potentially be identified.
Did you ever see the words TinyURL in a web address and think "what is that?" I often wondered, and saw it coming up more and more on Twitter. So tonight I got around to looking it up and found a great description on Wikipedia "TinyURL is a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs" It basically truncates long URLs with the words TinyURL.
What a great idea! So next time I want to list a URL but it is really long... I will try putting it through the TinyURL website for a truncated URL that looks tidy and is less likely to have transcription errors!
Update: I found another site called Tiny.cc which does the same thing.
Click on this link to go to source of photograph (not from the news report but a separate website)
Roxanne Stein from US television station WBPTV reported on an advanced "walking training" machine that can assist teach people with neurological damage, such as cerebral palsy, to improve their walking. You can see in the video footage that the child featured in the story seems to enjoy using the machine and her gait improved. Of course as OTs we're not just interested in simply "walking" per se, we're interested in the location, the reason, who with and so on. I did get the impression from this report that the child in the story was going to be able to walk more easily around her school and community. Take a look at the report on this link
The above statistics and “Social Media Revolution” video tell the story, social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Please feel free to share with any non-believers!
My blog became a place for me to download (my brain) of information of interest that passed over my desk, came through my email or arrived in my Google alerts, it is a "filter blog" not a "reflection blog". Today I visited OTBlogs.org again (created by Joan G. UofA MScOT graduate next month) and this time I started to read a range of other people's blogs and posts and felt compelled to comment.
I think this is an interesting developmental stage in becoming a blogger, it is becoming a blog commenter. As an extroverted person I can easily spend my day filling my blog with information I find interesting, now it is time for some reflection and interaction... I'm growing up as a blogger!
I'd love to know what developmental stages other bloggers have noted in themselves? Did you start as a commenter and move to your own blog? Did you start a blog straight away? How do you feel when someone comes and comments? What if someone doesn't agree with you?
