Digital Med-Ed: Educational Technology in Medicine

Blogs @ Anywhere: High fidelity online communication

Anne Bartlett-Bragg and James Farmer

Abstract

Since early 2001 several institutions and many individual teachers have incorporated blogging into their online pedagogical strategies. During this time, weblog (blog) publishing technologies have evolved towards accessibility and ease of use and the technological barriers preventing adoption have dissolved. Blogs and their associated technologies are arguably heralding the most significant technological development in online teaching and learning since the introduction of enterprise level Learning Management Systems (LMS).

This development is all the more significant as a result of the communication dynamics inherent within blog technologies. Whereas an LMS stores and presents all information on a centralised and hierarchical basis, bound within the subject and the organisation, blogs are distributed, aggregated, open and independent. Through the use of blogs, it is suggested that teachers and learners are becoming empowered, motivated, reflective and connected practitioners in new knowledge environments. The balance between individualised and centralised technologies is restored.

The application of weblogs in an education setting will, at best, have a limited impact if due consideration of these developing communication dynamics are ignored. This paper includes a brief review of some of the institutional and individual blog projects that are taking place in higher education. In doing so it examines the different types of blog environments that are being used in terms of their communication dynamics and subsequent impact upon teachers, learners and pedagogy. Further, a more detailed examination is made of the use of blogs in teaching and learning in courses at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). In light of these studies and examination, possible approaches to implementing blogs in institutional settings are outlined in the form of an alternative Online Learning Environment. In addition, a study to be undertaken in 2006 examining the impact of blogs on teaching and learning at Deakin University will be described.

http://incsub.org/blog/2005/blogs-anywhere-high-fidelity-online-communication

RSS Feeds Available from PubMed®

NLM Technical Bulletin, May-June 2005, RSS Feeds Available from PubMed

p ubMed offers RSS 2.0 (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. RSS is a Web standard for the delivery of news and other frequently updated content provided by Web sites. An RSS reader is required to use this service on your computer and retrieve new items from PubMed. There are numerous RSS readers from which to choose and many are available to download free from the Web. Different RSS readers behave and display data differently. The following is an example of the process for setting up an RSS feed. Not all readers will behave the same way."

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/mj05/mj05_rss.html

Hieraki - Hierarchical Wiki Software

By sleslie on The Rest

http://www.hieraki.org/

Just one of those things that I stumbled across through a dedicated Google search feed; Hieraki is an open source, Ruby-based (hence the reason you've probably never heard of it; many who try Ruby seem to rave about it but it never seems to gain traction versus its competitors) wiki-like system that structures pages by 'Chapters' and sub-sections to assist with collaborative book authoring. Someone has even tried building a 'learning object repository' named Noc on top of it. Not an endorsement, just a pointer to an interesting experiment.

Using RSS in WebCT

Some links to info about using RSS feeds in WebCT:



- RSS in WebCT

- Displaying RSS Links in WebCT

- How to Get a News Feed into Your WebCT Course

- Using Blogs/RSS in WebCT Courses

Blogs in Higher Ed: Personal Voice as Part of Learning

By Ruth Reynard

The use of Internet technology to facilitate interaction, communication, and collaboration is well documented but its use in establishing and developing "personal voice" as part of learning is also now being addressed through the use of blogs. Finding personal voice as a pedagogical method is important to establish learner identity and focus, and journaling has long been recognized as an effective way to provide space for this to occur. The blog, however, provides a context in which personal voice can be "published" by the student, which means that attention is given to content, relevancy, and connection with learning outcomes to a higher degree than a traditional journal submission. The idea that more than one person will view the work is quite powerful in promoting a sense of ownership from the student. Teachers can also benefit from "hearing" the personal voice of their students to begin to really understand the learning path of each student through a course.

In our initial studies we have been interested specifically in asking:

* Is blogging perceived as a good way to establish personal voice by both students and instructors?
* Is there a tension created by the published nature of the blog?
* What do instructors need to do to contextualize blogging in a course?

http://www.campus-technology.com/news_article.asp?id=10473&typeid=156

A Bloggers' Code of Ethics

Model for a code of ethics for bloggers, adapted from the code of
ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists. From the
CyberJournalist.net blog of the American Press Institute's
nonprofit think tank, The Media Center.

http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/000215.php
http://lii.org?recs=024337
Subjects:
* Weblogs
* Journalistic ethics

Reposted from Librarians' Index to the Internet, lii.org

Journal RSS feeds

The University of Saskatchewan has a list of journals that offer RSS feeds.

Wikis in education

EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5
Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not

It’s risky to talk about wikis as if they’re all the same. In practice, the term wiki (derived from the Hawaiian word for “quick”) is applied to a diverse set of systems, features, approaches, and projects. Even dedicated wikiheads engage in perpetual arguments about what constitutes true wikiness. But some fundamental principles (usually) apply.

- Anyone can change anything.
- Wikis use simplified hypertext markup.
- WikiPageTitlesAreMashedTogether.
- Content is ego-less, time-less, and never finished.
-

Newcomers to the medium may find it easiest to start with simple tasks. Wikis work great as shared online sketchpads or as spaces for brainstorming. They are perfect for creating perpetually updated lists or collections of links, and most users can instantly grasp their utility as informal bulletin boards. Because it takes only a couple of seconds to set up a new page, no purpose is too trivial.

One common way to use wikis is to support meeting planning: a provisional agenda is drawn up, and the URL is distributed to the participants, who are then free to comment or to add their own items. Once the meeting is under way, the online agenda serves as a note-taking template, and when the meeting is completed, the notes are instantly available online, allowing the participants or anybody else to review and annotate the proceedings.

With some planning, more complex processes can easily be supported.

[...]

Wikis are already making their mark in higher education and are being applied to just about any task imaginable. They are popping up like mushrooms, as wikis will, at colleges and universities around the world, sometimes in impromptu ways and more often with thoughtful intent.

Educational Blogging

EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5
Educational Blogging

The Web is by now a familiar piece of the educational landscape, and for those sites where personal publishing or chronologically ordered content would be useful, blogs have stepped to the fore. Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell identifies five major uses for blogs in education.

First, teachers use blogs to replace the standard class Web page. Instructors post class times and rules, assignment notifications, suggested readings, and exercises. Aside from the ordering of material by date, students would find nothing unusual in this use of the blog. The instructor, however, finds that the use of blogging software makes this previously odious chore much simpler.

Second, and often accompanying the first, instructors begin to link to Internet items that relate to their course.

Third, blogs are used to organize in-class discussions.

Fourth, some instructors are using blogs to organize class seminars and to provide summaries of readings. Used in this way, the blogs become “group blogs”—that is, individual blogs authored by a group of people.

Finally, fifth, students may be asked to write their own blogs as part of their course grade.

opensourceCMS.com

opensourceCMS.com allows users to "'try out' some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs."

Lots of interesting-looking portal, e-commerce, blog, groupware, forum, e-learning, and wiki software is listed.

RSS Calendar

RSSCalendar is a way to share calendars using RSS.

Personal + collaborative publishing

Links, notes, and references related to personal and collaborative online publishing, from James Farmer, an educational technologist in Melbourne, Australia.

Bloglines redesign

ClickZ News
Bloglines Bows Redesign, Ad Model as RSS Heats Up
By Zachary Rodgers | July 7, 2004

RSS feed aggregator Bloglines has redesigned its interface and launched a blog creation tool, called Clip Blog. The company also said it plans to roll out advertising on its popular RSS reader at some unspecified future date.
[...]
Clip Blog is the first blog creation tool to be fully integrated with an RSS reader. Other new or upgraded features include Bloglines Directory, a listing of all news feeds indexed by Bloglines; Bloglines Top Links, which picks out the most popular links on any given day; and Recommendations, a personalization service that delivers feeds and blogs a user might value based on his or her current subscriptions.

Wiki example: UCLA CMS group

UCLA Course Management Systems Consortium, see Wiki Site section.

Paul Gannon,

This isn't quite at the level you're talking about, but we're using wiki sites, sometimes combined with blogs and pretty html up front for a couple campus groups where we're trying to build communities among staff.

UCLA Programmers Exchange - http://programmers.ucla.edu (though the wiki site is restricted to UCLA IPs)

Course Management Consortium - more of a campus project -
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/classweb/consortium/ open to the world, except you need to login to edit the wiki site or blog.

Instructional Technology Forum - private for those who support course management systems and other instructional technology applications here at UCLA.

And I've been using a wiki for several years with my student programmers to keep track of their projects.

The wiki software we got from the book "The Wiki Way" and adapted heavily. For the blog we use MovableType.

I've been pushing these kinds of tools for the groups I'm in because we're way decentralized here at UCLA and we need to stay in touch without a ton of meetings.

Mike Franks
Social Sciences Computing, UCLA
homepage: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/ssc/franks/

Wiki roundup

By James Farmer, in the service of choosing a wiki for an online undergrad course.

News feeds for universities

Date: Tue, 01 Jun 2004 10:40:46 -0500
Author: DeWayne Purdy <dewayne.purdy@uni.edu>
Subject: News Feeds
Body: On our News page (http://www.umpr.uni.edu/News.asp) and our portal,
we've been using a news feed from Moreover.com that selects news from
various media outlets around the country that reference UNI and
aggregates them into a list on our site. They had been delivering a
free service and a paid service, but now their free service includes an
advertisement (that looks like the other news links). Ads of that type
are against our university policy. Does anyone know of any other
services, paid or free that we can investigate? The basic cost for the
paid service from Moreover starts at $6,000. Using a Provided by...
link is acceptable under our policy, but not the ad they are slipping
in at the top.

DeWayne

Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 06:00:30 -0400
Author: David Carter-Tod <dcartertod@vccs.edu>
Subject: Re: News Feeds
Body: Yes, Yahoo News Search returns results as RSS, for example:
http://news.search.yahoo.com/usns/ynsearch/categories/news_story_search_rss/index.html?p=%22virginia%20community%20college%22

Or in this case:
http://news.search.yahoo.com/usns/ynsearch/categories/news_story_search_rss/index.html?p=%22university%20of%20northern%20iowa%22

David

Product Review: FeedDemon

Digital Web Magazine
Bradbury Software FeedDemon 1.0
By Paul Scrivens
Published on May 26, 2004

A couple of weeks ago I was in search of an RSS Reader because my ability to visit all my favorite Web sites, to check if they were updated, began to conflict with the mere 24 hours that come in a day. When asking people what RSS Reader to check out, many people immediately said NetNewsWire, but this was ruled out since it was an OSX application and I was running a Windows Desktop. The next most popular choice was FeedDemon, made by Bradbury Software.

Blogs in the workplace

InfoWorld
Blogging behind the firewall
InfoWorld’s internal Weblog started as an experiment. Already, it’s indispensable
By Chad Dickerson
May 21, 2004

What a difference a few Weblogs can make. In January, I wrote about the importance of leveraging the inherent simplicity in technologies such as RSS for enterprise information-sharing, and I mentioned a particular effort I had in mind: experimenting with a simple intranet Weblog. Mentioning a future effort in my column tends to solidify my own commitment, so we set up an internal Weblog system driven by Movable Type. Then, in response to a later column, I got quite a bit of reader e-mail asking me for more details on our use of Weblogs because that anecdote just scratched the surface. Consider this installment a closer peek behind the scenes here at InfoWorld.

Our internal use of Weblogs has greatly accelerated, and we’re beginning to see more tangible benefits as we’ve begun to reach a critical mass of internal contributors. At the end of March, my team held an off-site retreat and created a rolling six-month plan for IT initiatives at InfoWorld, which we posted to a Weblog available to all employees. For each month in the plan, we created a checklist of projects we would be working on and noted which ones would be completed in that month. We also scheduled what we call “fire drills” — our internal term for the intentional failure of a specific key system to test fail-over capabilities in the event of an unexpected outage of that system. Posting this plan on a Weblog made three key things happen. First, it forced the team to strategically organize its IT initiatives into a coherent roadmap fit for broader internal consumption. Next, it created a sense of accountability for these initiatives within the IT team because we had collectively agreed on the initiatives and documented the process. Finally, posting our plan for the entire company to see helped foster a sense of accountability to our non-IT colleagues within the company.

Wikis in the workplace

BusinessWeek Online
JUNE 7, 2004

Something Wiki This Way Comes
They're Web sites anyone can edit -- and they could transform Corporate America
By Robert D. Hof in San Mateo, Calif.

When software developer Nicholas Pisarro Jr. saw his first wiki late last year, he knew it was unlike any Web site he had ever seen. On the site, a free online encyclopedia called Wikipedia, thousands of volunteers had written a breathtaking 500,000 articles in 50 languages since 2001 -- all thanks to the defining feature of wikis. To contribute, all they had to do to was click on an "edit this page" button and start typing.

Now, Pisarro has wikis transforming the way people work at the company he founded, software maker Aperture Technologies Inc. Two dozen of the Stamford (Conn.) company's 100 employees use them to brainstorm, track projects, write and edit documentation, and coordinate marketing. That has eliminated countless meetings, conference calls, and back-and-forth e-mails. Says Pisarro: "Wikis allow this collaboration much better than anything else, so we get things done faster."

The amazing thing is that wikis work at all. Created in 1995 by Oregon programmer Ward Cunningham, who named them for the "Wiki-Wiki," or "quick" shuttle buses at Honolulu Airport, wikis are special Web sites on which anyone can post material without knowing arcane programming languages. Likewise, anyone can edit them. This can lead to mischief: Jokers have posted images of male anatomy on Wikipedia. But graffiti is usually gone within minutes, because the previous version of a page can be restored with a click. In sensitive corporate situations, access can be controlled, too.

Blog Software Breakdown

The chart on this page displays attributes of different user-installed blog software packages side-by-side for comparison. Only server-installed scripts are included. Many attributes of many different packages are listed.

SitePoint: What Is a Wiki?

SitePoint: What Is a Wiki? By Nathan Matias November 3rd 2003 Wikis can be used for a large variety of tasks, from personal note-taking to collaborating online, creating an internal knowledge base, assembling an online community, and managing a traditional website. What's so Good About Wikis? * Wikis Simplify Editing Your Website * Wikis Use Simple Markup * Wikis Record Document Histories * Creating Links Is Simple With Wikis * Creating New Pages Is Simple With Wikis * Wikis Simplify Site Organization * Wikis Keep Track of All Your Stuff * Many Wikis are Collaborative Communities * Wikis Encourage Good Hypertext

http://www.sitepoint.com/print/what-is-a-wiki

Weblogs

Weblogs: "Educational Technology UpDate:Weblogs" Article on weblogs that lists some Blog software companies, specifically see Manila at http://manila.userland.com/

Blogware Harnessed as Course Management

Blogware Harnessed as Course Management Software

Elizabeth Lane Lawley, assistant professor at the department of information technology at Rochester Institute of Technology, is experimenting with using Moving Type, an open Web content publishing system, as a course management development tool. Her efforts demonstrate the advantages blogs hold over conventional course management systems, as well as what commercial course management systems offer that blogs lack. Movable Type (MT) is a Web content
publishing system, though often difficult for beginners to implement. Here are the links I have found most useful while implementing Movable Type Weblogs. This list will grow as I continue to add features to my MT powered sites and need resources beyond that which the MT manual provides.

http://mamamusings.net/archives/2003/08/22/mt_courseware_documentation_and_templates.php

iUpload Mailby RSS generates RSS

iUpload Mailby RSS generates RSS feeds from email. "Using MailbyRSS is simple. [Users] need only to sign up to the service to receive a special e-mail address and password from iUpload and can immediately begin to
AUTHOR content for their RSS channel by sending it as an email. When MailbyRSS receives an
AUTHORized e-mail message, it automatically creates or updates an RSS channel and generates any supporting web pages required." One interesting use: Yahoo Groups to RSS in Three Easy Steps

http://www.iupload.com/product/mailbyrss.asp

Collaborative Platforms: Say Aloha to

Collaborative Platforms: Say Aloha to WikiWiki

What is WikiWiki? It is a collection of Web pages which can be edited by anyone, at any time, from anywhere. Wiki is a composition system, a discussion medium, a repository, a mail system, a chat room, and a tool for collaboration...

http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?AdventuresInWikiland

Blogging and RSS

Blogging and RSS " The "What's It?" and "How To" of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators

The internet has long been valued by teachers and librarians as a powerful research and communications tool, and in the last 10 years, it has brought about a sea change in the way students find, manage, and use information. But the promise of the Web as more than just a readable, searchable resource has been slow to be realized ... until now. Two new Internet technologies, Weblogs and RSS (Real Simple Syndication), are redefining the way students and teachers use the Internet, turning them from mere readers into writers to the Web as well, and making it easier to filter and track the ever-growing number of resources coming online each day. In fast-growing numbers, educators across the country and throughout the world are finding just how powerful this new interactive Internet can be.

http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan04/richardson.shtml