Thing 3

Wikis

As mentioned in other posts I too am having great difficulties in finding examples of  good Wikis. I searched in Google using Medical wikis and found this list of medical wikis:- http://www.healthplusplus.com/wiki/List_of_medical_wikis
on the HealthPlusPlus wiki site (http://www.healthplusplus.com/wiki/Main_Page ).

 One disadvantage I can see with Wikis is that anyone can add information you don’t have to be medically qualified. However, I did find Medpedia (http://www.medpedia.com/ ) which allows patients to diagnose themselves. Although it is written and edited by volunteers all contributors must have a medical qualification.

 Another disadvantage is that a wiki could not have enough information / contributors. This was the case for the Royal Society who recently hosted a group edit-a-thon, in partnership with Wikimedia UK, to improve Wikipedia articles about women in science. See http://royalsociety.org/news/2012/women-wikipedia-science/ ) for more information.

 Participants who use SharePoint within their organisation may be interested in the following article which compares the two:-http://www.participo.com/ideas/social-business/wikis-vs-sharepoint/

Google Docs

Creating a document was OK.

It wasn’t obvious where to put the email address of the person you want to share the document with.

It was also not obvious what to do when you received the link to the document.

 One disadvantage of using this is that everyone who needs access to the document has to have a Google account. Or have I got that completely wrong?

Thing 2

Having completed the exercies for Thing 2 here are my thoughts on how I could use these in practice:-

RSS

Our organisation uses MOSS and this has the ability to save RSS onto your personal home page. I use this to keep up to date with news. A disadvantage I have found is that if you set up too many RSS feeds there are too many updates to keep a track of so it is better to be selective.

I have found RSS to be useful in keeping up to date with news from Professional Organisations so I would encourage staff to set up a RSS feed from their own professional organisation.

One area I would like to use these for is to produce a brief daily current awareness bulletin of health news.

Twitter

Like many participants our organisation blocks Twitter. However, as I have never sent a Tweet I decided to set up account and try it out.

I can see this being useful for sharing ideas, asking and answering questions. I think it could also be useful for students on courses to discuss things.

I can therefore see my role as making staff aware of how to use Twitter for networking.

Alerts

As many of our staff are remote users then Journal alerts are a good way for them to see the latest articles in a specific journal or topic.

I am looking to use journal alerts to help produce a themed current awareness bulletin. Again I see my role as encouraging staff to set up their own alerts

Thoughts on blogging

Setting up the Blog wasn't too bad. The hardest part was thinking about what to write. At the moment I don't think I am a natural but maybe it will become easier with practice.

Thing 1

Why the course? Having never used any of the tools this course would cover I thought it is time to start learning.