My experience using social bookmarking with medical students: #fail?

Experience with Delicious...
I have about 300 second year medical students independently researching topics related to families who they are visiting. 2 years I ago I started using Delicious to share resources with them- often forums where patients were discussing topics such as living with diabetes or being a parent.The advantage was that Delicious was public. It made it easy to share a group of links in Blackboard. I encouraged students to sign up and share their own links so that they could develop ideas about curating and sharing, but this was a secondary aim.  I was aware of 15 students who actually signed up to Delicious, and about half of those saved at least one bookmark. But they didn't really understand tagging and obviously didn't find use in it for themselves as they haven't done so again.  I was also a little frustrated that I couldn't comment on or discuss with students why they had identified a particular source.

Interestingly I have showed Delicious to two of my personal tutees and they have continued to use it. But I introduced this to them in a one-to-one meeting. How can I manage to show the benefits of social bookmarking to 300 students in a lecture (in 5-10 minutes)?

...then Diigo....
Last year I decided to try Diigo. This was because it had richer features and would allow discussion around a topic. I am perhaps over-protective of students, but because this task was around the families they were visiting, I was keen to make this a private community so that if they did inadvertently break patient confidentiality then less harm was done. I've written more here about the the process of setting up the group and some of the hiccups along the way. Towards the end (after 3 months) some students (three!) did start saving bookmarks (one saved 7 to his diigo account, and shared 3 of these with the group, the other two only saved one bookmark each).
58 students signed up to Diigo - and these are the only ones who could access the 187 items that had been saved to the group- mostly by me. If I shared a link like this http://groups.diigo.com/group/familycasestudy/content/tag/breastfeeding on Blackboard I was guaranteed to get a response from students saying that they couldn't access Diigo as they weren't a member. The process to join a closed group made it all more onerous.

Lessons learnt

• The rich features of Diigo including the ability to use an avatar were not used by students.
• A closed group makes things very much more complicated- and there was no evidence that students used the site in an inappropriate way- so open is better.
• Few students saved links themselves, but it is very useful for me to be able to easily share materials with them.

This year?

I need to be clear about why I am introducing social bookmarking to students. This is not (yet) part of a programme in digital literacy. I started using Delicious in the course simply because it was an easy way for me to share information with students. My expectations then started increasing which was why I chose to use Diigo in a much more complex way the next year. I don't think that I can say that the use of Diigo was a success. I don't actually use it myself very much despite these rich features so it is hard to recommend to others.

Should I go back to using Delicious. Yes- students will need to set up a Yahoo account in order to save links- and the features are not as rich.

Or, I continue to use Diigo but open it up- it might take off this year.

Or, I try out using Scholar, a social-bookmarking tool which is built into our VLE. So far I don't understand it which means I am unlikely to use it. (Why did they pick a name so close to Google Scholar which is completely different??)

It is perhaps harsh to call this a failure. I didn't set out with the deliberate aim of teaching students about social bookmarking. If I was then I would probably force them to set up accounts and to save and comment on others links.But, I would like students to understand what social bookmarking is about- and to see that it might be useful to them. 

In this situation what would you do? I will report back!

EDIT: Martin Weller writes about similar issues in encouraging researchers to adopt social media here http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c0c0e53ef0133f47b6207970b

CiteULike vs. Delicious

On Twitter tonight I was asked how CiteULike was different to Delicious. I recorded this quick screencast to show why a tool like CiteULike is so much more useful for managing academic references.

From Google Reader to CiteULike, Delicious and Twitter

In my last post: Managing RSS feeds from journals/databases etc, I said I would record a screencast about how I am managing my Google Reader feeds today. It might be different tomorrow or next week! It would be great if you could tell me what you are doing too.

PLEs and Medical Students....

I started this blog with the aim of recording my web 2.0 learning journey and also in the hope that I would find a community of people interested and participating in medical education. Today this bore some fruit as I participated at a distance in an online seminar about these topics.

The presentation by @ajcann, University of Leicester, reported on courses to help students develop skills in the use of web 2.0 and information literacy. The slides and document give a good summary of the findings. Students appeciated tools, like customised google searches and a Pageflakes page, that helped them find resources more quickly. But they did not use the social aspects of tools provided. There was not evidence of the formation of a community of practice.

There was no audio-visual streaming of the seminar, so I could only pick up on the talk in the room through the tweets of those present. You can find them here: #UOLTAN. I am sure that this means that I have missed out on a lot of valuable interaction and responses to the material presented. I commented that I was not surprised that medical students did not use social bookmarking because despite looking for the past few months I have only managed to find one doctor who uses social bookmarking to record sites that are cliically relevant. And if I was looking for information on how to manage stable COPD, see last night's post, my instinct would not be to start searching delicious to see what others in my network had saved.

So what does that tell me? Well, if clinicians are not yet using web 2.0 to help them with their day to day clinical work, is there any point in us worrying about whether or not sudents are interested in developing these skills? I don't mean that only 10% of GPs or hospital doctors are using social bookmarking and blogs to keep up to date. Or even that only 5% are. I doubt that even 1% are. Early adopters of web2.0 tools for clinical practice do not seem to exist yet.

One of the report conclusions reached was that "Students are reluctant to change their habits unless there is a clear tangible benefit to them. If we believe literacy skills are worth developing, we must make them a requirement not an added extra."

I think that before doing that we need to figure out if these tools actually deliver something that is useful to medical students and to doctors. What gap are they actually filling? Medical education can certainly be improved. But we need to describe the problems before we come up with the solutions.