I've been using del.ic.ious now for a few weeks, but I have bookmarked very little that is relevant to my other life as a GP. By searching for tags such as appendicitis, bts (for british thoracic society), and rosuvastatin I am establishing that there are few tagging clinicians out there.
It may be hard to convince medical students that social bookmarking will be relevant to their lives unless there are a few examples of early adopter clinicians using it well.
Are there clinicians out there using social bookmarking? I'd be interested to find you. And if there aren't, why not?
I used it for the categories of my previous blog on blogger and still use it for my new blog. You could use it making categories for your blogger blog. With del.icio.us the posts gets automatically after tagging published to del.icio.us and your blogroll categories get updated on your blog. I believe there is information in the FAQ how to do this.
ReplyDeletePeople do subscribe to certain tags is my experience, everytime i put up some postst to the categories this results in visists (google analytic). For serious scientific work citUlike and certainly connotea.org are better alternatives.
Kind regards Dr Shock
I have been using social bookmarking sites for a year now, and have tried many different methods to try to get medical students and junior doctors interested or stimulated enough to 'join' the conversation.
ReplyDeleteI use diigo to tag with keywords and leave 'sticky notes' and highlight text on pages viewed and then store to delicious (automated). Specific categories of sites are collated with stumbleupon to appeal to the more visual learners.
Success rates were low at first, but with web 2.0 tutorials every second week, the students are now beginning to appreciate that twitter and social bookmarking can be extremely useful tools which will save a great deal of time and effort in researching 'revision' topics. We use connotea, mednar, gopubmed for more traditional 'research paper' review but have yet to formulate the formal integration for 'rapid bedside review'
Have written 'how to' posts on blog and an editorial due to be published in February in Emergency Medicine Australia.
Geny think differently and 'do' differently - but once a perceived benefit is demonstrated, there is no barrier to conformity
MedBlog: http://sandnsurf.medbrains.net
Review blog: http://sandnsurf.wordpress.com
Sandnsurf
@dr. shock. Thank you for the tips. I am not so interested in increasing access to my blog. My curiosity centres on whether social bookmarking really works for medicine, especially primary care. Does its model fit with the reality of how most doctors find information to answer clinical queries? Even if they don't use it now, do we think that it really offers potential? I think the jury is out on that at the moment.
ReplyDeleteThe top tags in delicious are still overwhelmingly techy.
@sandsurf. Thank you very much. You cover a lot of ground in that comment and I would love to know more detail about what you have achieved with students. Is your learning journey recorded in your blog... or which one?
I did check your bookmarks on Delicious but couldn't find anything under COPD or angina (these were my 'test' clinical tags). So I am not so sure how you are using it to record info for clinical work. Would be great to hear more if you have time.
You can link/integrate delicious with facebook. So when you make a delicious entry it also posts the link onto your wall in facebook.
ReplyDeleteTools like delicious and facebook and twitter help support learning communities (Etienne Wenger's communities of practice).
Colin Lankshear writes about blogiing and new literacies.
David Weinberger writes about how knowledge is ordered in the digital world.
Colin Lankshear
Etienne Wenger
David Weinberger
Hello again Kenneth
ReplyDeleteI do actually get my delicious account to post to my Facebook profile- but Facebook is essentially a personal space for me. It also posts to Friendfeed which is somewhere that could generate more comment or discussion.
I still haven't came across any good examples of clinicians using social bookmarking to support clinical work so if you happen to know any please let me know!
Thanks for the links
AM
After reading your article I have been inspired. I have signed up for del.ic.ious and will be seeing what kinds of useful information I can steal from the web!
ReplyDelete