reddit for #meded

Reddit is one of those sites that seems to have been around for ever but that I have not understood. More recently it has been popping up in my Twitter timeline and elsewhere more often. So in the interests of learning by discovery I became a redditor a few hours ago and promptly set up a #meded subreddit.

Why?

Well, there seems to be a few good things about reddit.

It allows threaded discussions. 

It contributes to altmetrics on research articles. 

It allows community members to vote up and down content so adding a filter to the masses of new content we come across.

It might allow deeper engagement with content that tweets. 

And there has been some good discussion so far. What do you think? 

Ethical responsibilities of leaders of tweetchats?

That way by justinbaeder
Over a year a go, Natalie Lafferty and I hosted the first #meded chat on Twitter. Ours was between 9-10pm UK time, and 5 hours later a similar chat was held for participants in the US.

We had some really great and very wide-ranging discussions. In the UK we had a lot of participation from students and doctors in training. This made for particularly rich and informative debates, for example on portfolios and competency. Over the summer we wound the chats down and didn't get them started again, although the US chat has kept running. But thanks to some calls on Twitter we have got some momentum building again and it looks as if our first session will be announced soon.

In advance of this I wanted to clarify what someone who participates in these chats could expect. I am not so interested in etiquette. We didn't really have any problems before, and participants seemed to be relatively sophisticated users of Twitter, so saying 'be nice' would seem to be a bit superfluous, and a little prissy.

But there are some other issues that I think we should address. The first is the issue of archiving. Anyone can archive anything on Twitter, but I think we should be clear with users that we ourselves will be archiving tweets and the implications of that. Up to now we had been using Symplur's archiving tool but we need to check whether individual tweets can be removed if they breached the confidentiality of patients or others. Again this did not arise before, but it is a serious enough governance issue that I think we should draw attention to it.

Next is the issue of research. As we are forming a community with the participants we would not consider researching the community without making participants aware. However, others outside our community might make us an object of research without making us aware. We can not do anything to stop that but we can make participants aware at least.

So given all that, here is a first draft. It is a fully editable document so please leave a comment here or directly on the document. What else do you think we need to add?

For students, can any social platform compete with Facebook?

Facebook like button by Sean McEntee

At #amee2012 last week Facebook was talked about a lot. It came up in the excellent  social media workshop that was lead by students and in several posters and short communications. Search this 500+ page book of abstracts to see how often!

But as might be expected there was not agreement on whether Facebook should have any place in medical education. Whilst there were reports of it being used to support student learning in informal and formal ways Imperial College, London, other students and faculty argued that Facebook is a social space and not a learning space. In the past any mention of Facebook at a medical education conference usually concerned being unprofessional, so the fact that people were starting to consider the possibility that it might be educational platform was very interesting in itself.

It was also suggested (including by me) that we might have responsibility to provide  safe spaces for students and faculty to model and develop digital professionalism. Quite a few of the issues I heard discussed were raised in the comments of two blog  posts I had written last April.

This post is also a  follw-up to a discussion on our LinkedIn group 6 months ago. It was started by Bernadette John asking if any medical schools were looking into developing  and supporting social platforms for students. King's had just started a project with Elgg but was also thinking about Mahara. Why would a medical school want to do this? Some suggested that the VLE should support social learning interactions. But they don't. Blackboard does not feel social, certainly not social like Facebook.

Today a colleague told me that the University of Wales, Newport (who don't have a medical school) had started using NING , a 'social community tool', in 2008 to support first year students. How might we use something like NING in a medical school? What value would it have? My thoughts are that it would be useful to have a space where students and staff could get to know each other in a semi-formal way. Most of the NHS staff who our students meet do not have profiles on the university site, but it might be useful for students to know some more about what their special interests are clinically, and in research. And vice versa, it would be excellent if teachers could know more about the students they meet on placements.

But later I found out that Newport had stopped using the NING. It was only used by students in the first few weeks of the course to make contacts with each other before they migrated to their own Facebook groups. And if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!! This year Newport is setting up a Facebook page for students to like and post to throughout their university careers.I imagine that even if activity does tail off over the next few months this might still be quite a good channel for the university to communicate with students through.

So can any social platform compete with Facebook? Is there any merit in trying to encourage students to use another 'social learning' platform? A separate platform would mean that students are at less risk of being accused of digital unprofessionalism because they minimise their contact with faculty there *although I would rather see a re-calibration of what is considered unprofessional in the first place- if my ears did not deceive me I think I even heard a medical student volunteer that they were urged not to like a One Direction page on Facebook for fear that it may be seen as unprofessional*.

A separate platform would also mean that faculty with Facebook antibodies could avoid it. Other faculty might be just as concerned as students about mixing personal and professional presences online. There was some talk of dual profiles at AMEE but that is against Facebook terms and conditions. Facebook would rather see professionals create 'pages' to project their work-relate personae.

So some questions. Would students or staff see value in a social platform? For more ideas on how that might work see this post on location and learning.  If yes, could that platform ever be Facebook?

(Edit: Here's an interesting post by Donald Clark in January, "7 reasons why Facebook is front runner in social media learning"

What happens when you invite students to collaborate on a google doc....

Confused Sign
Originally uploaded by kudaker

..... and you use their university email address?

I've had a gmail account for years. I've used google documents with others for years. I've presumed that when I sent invites to universith colleagues to access a timetable in a google doc spreadsheet and fill in their availability etc, that this was quite an easy task to respond to. Although I had noticed that few people tended to actually add anything to the spreadsheet and emailed me back instead.

A few weeks ago, I invited the 7 students who I am working with on an audit project over the next year to collaborate on google documents. I used their university emails. Some of them could access the initial brainstorming document but they seemed to be denied access to to edit. Others couldn't even see the document. And a few 'asked permission' to edit, which I agreed to, although it seemed to be to the same email address which already had permission to edit! I was confused. They were confused.

So I decided to try it out for myself. I gave access to myself through my Cardiff Uni address to see how the process worked. This is what happened by way of my explanation to students:
"1. I received an email with a link which showed me the document and asked me to sign in with a google acount.
2. I didn't have a google account for Cardiff Uni address so I had to click to set one up.
3. I entered in Cardiff Uni email address and selected a password.
4. After a few minutes I received an email asking me to confirm that I had set up an account. When I clicked on this/logged in and clicked on docs, it looked as if the account was completely empty. There were no documents there.
5. I went back to the email with the link to the document. I clicked it and this time instead of being brought through to see the document I was told that I have been invited to share a document and I could click to accept or decline.
6. I accepted and was then able to go in and edit the document and invite others, and send all of you a mesage!
So if you are having trouble could you please follow these steps."

What have I learned? 1. If you invite someone to collaborate on a document and they don't already have a google account in that email address they might find the process more difficult that you think. It might be a good idea to instruct them to start by creating the google account.

2. I am so familiar with google accounts and documents that I assumed the process would be more striaghtforward to others than it was.

So, now for the question. What has been your experience of collaborating with students, or another group, who are unfamiliar with gdocs? What tips do you have?

Thanks!