Whither the Wikis? With your help, not the case for Physiopedia.
I came across this article recently on the Inside Higher Ed website and thought it a pertinent and interesting read in relation to what we are doing in Physiopedia. The article suggests that “it is becoming clearer where wikis are jibing with the culture of academe, and where they are not” and suggests that many of the academic wikis have failed to take off. A good time to talk about the academic successes and opportunities in Physiopedia.
We like to think of Physiopedia as an “academic wiki” in that we advocate evidence based content, have students completing academic work on the site and also allow our community to publish research and other academic work. As far as students completing classroom work in Physiopedia these projects have been a great success. So far six student projects have been completed in Physiopedia with great results and great feedback from tutors and students alike. Some have successfully been for academic credit and most have resulted in great content being produced for our profession. This looks like it is set to continue with more and more educators and their students becoming involved from all over the world.
With regards to publishing academic work (i.e. research) in Physiopedia it is still early days. For this to be a success we need, as suggested by the article, an overhaul in the way we think about publication. In my opinion publishing academic work in a professional topic specific wiki has a place along side traditional means of publishing in journals. Researchers can benefit from greater exposure and discussion surrounding their work, we can bridge the gap between completing research and publication and also provide an opportunity for publication to those that don’t want to go through the rigorous process of publishing work in a journal, a good example of this being student dissertations.
The opportunity to publish research in Physiopedia increases the impact of scholars, students, and bloggers by enabling them to share summaries and discuss academic papers online. The subsequent opportunity for open peer review then provides a place where academic papers can be summarized, discussed, clarified, or made fuller by the general community. Surely this collaborative activity surrounding academic work is a great way to highlight and discuss new research and subsequently provide evidence and support (or not!) for what we do.
Key to all of this is continuous support from our Physiopedia community. So if you have some research that you would like to publish in a new way, or an abstract from previously published work that would benefit from discussion among the community please do get in touch….
First international collaborative student project to go ahead in 2010
We are very excited to announce that the first international collaborative student project will go ahead in February 2010. During this project fourth year physiotherapy students from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa will collaborate with fellow foundation year students from the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland. The project is being organised and supported by Rachael Lowe, the Physiopedia founder, in collaboration with Michael Rowe from the University of the Western Cape and Aileen Barret from the Royal College of Surgeons.
The project is an elective module where students will be invited to participate. The students will be allocated into groups of four students (two from each nation) and tasked with working together to build pages/content in Physiopedia. The topics that the students will work on will investiate key physiotherapy skills and also explore cultural differences between the nations.
At the end of this project students should be able to:
- Demonstrate evidence based practice skills such as literature searching and critical appraisal
- Demonstrate scientific writing and referencing skills
- Demonstrate an ability to work in teams, agree goals and time frames, roles and responsibilities
- Demonstrate web-editing skills
Students will also have:
- An increased understanding of the clinically related topics that they have investigated
- An insight into the cultural differences in the physiotherapy profession in different nations
- Experience of online collaboration
For more information on this project see the ISP1 page in Physiopedia or follow the #ISP1 in Twitter.
Physiopedia – an Open Educational Resource
I just wanted to take the opportunity to cross post the latest post the I made at my own blog as I think (I hope) that the readers of this Physiopedia blog may find it quite interesting, if not inspiring!
The movement for open educational resources has been noticeably gathering pace recently and has sparked quite a lot of debate within the e-learning community. The recent Open Education Conference in Vancouver certainly had a lot of buzz (and tweeting) around it!! The term “Open Educational Resources” (OER) was first adopted at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. They defined OER as follows:
“OER are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”
Basically OER are all about sharing. In a brave new world of learning, OER content is made free to use or share, and in some cases, to change and share again, made possible through licensing, so that both teachers and learners can share what they know. There are many examples of institutions that have made a big effort to provide OER which everyone can benefit and learn from. This movement certainly makes self directed online learning a real possibility for our continuing education and professional development. However, those that will benefit the most are people whom otherwise have limited access to information. There is an urgent need to improve the availability and use of healthcare information in developing countries.
People in the developing world are dying for lack of knowledge. Today, 1.3 billion people lack access to basic health care services and many more are at risk of receiving poor quality care. A major contributing factor is lack of access to relevant, reliable healthcare information. The New York Law School/HIFA2015 White Paper: Access to Health Information Under International Human Rights Law, concludes that health information is an essential component of many identified and established human rights. The resulting HIFA2015 campaign has the goal that by 2015, every person worldwide will have access to an informed healthcare provider. The challenge is to ensure that everyone in the world can have access to clean, clear knowledge – a basic human right, and a public health need as important as access to clean, clear water, and much more easily achievable.
My contributions to these efforts come from my Physiopedia project. Essentially Physiopedia is an OER that provides free information to health care workers. As well as being a place where education can take place, I really do hope that physiotherapists across the world will see the benefits that contributing information to this site can bring. It really doesn’t take that much effort to create a page in Physiopedia and if all physios in the UK alone created just one page using the unique knowledge that we all have, that would immediately be 48,000 pages!!! Not only is it a great CPD activity in itself but contributors can also feel good in knowing that they are contributing to improving health care in the developing world.
We invite you to become involved in one of our student projects…
Within our first year we have already run three very successful student projects within Physiopedia amongst the international physiotherapy and physical therapy community. EIM Residents completed an assignment to each make two pages in Physiopedia as part of the capstone course in their residency training; Eric Robertson’s DPT students at the Medical college of Georgia completed a new set of pages as part of their spinal course; and Aileen Barrett’s students at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland created new pages for Apley’s Test and Auscultation as part of an elective module in their foundation year.
We are now looking for new partnering institutions and their physiotherapy/physical therapy students to join us in other exciting projects within Physiopedia. We have lots of ideas and are here to provide full support in planning and undertaking the projects. We are also very keen to complete some educational research in relation to these innovative projects and would like to see the results published and disseminated internationally. These are some of the ideas for projects that we have :
Creating a structure for the various clinical areas within Physiopedia.
Those involved would choose a clinical area and create a workable structure for the contents of this section to be built within Physiopedia. Clinical areas to choose from include: Neurology, Paediatrics, Sports Medicine, Rheumatology, Elderly Care, Endocrine/Metabolic, Pain Science, Womens Helath, Oncology, Health Promotion. This project would be suitable for a group of undergraduate students who could either work collaboratively on one topic together or work as individuals/pairs on a specific clinical area covering a number of clinical areas between the group.
A collaborative project between international students.
We would like to run a project within Physiopedia that is a collaborative venture between institutions in different countries. This project would be suitable for matched undergraduate or postgraduate students where the actual task would be created to suit their level of education. The task could be as simple as creating pages, creating structures for clinical areas (as mentioned above), case stidies or research reviews or could be complex and involve peer review situations. We are actively seeking institutions that would be keen to be involved in this project and have some great ideas for this project so will assist in all the planning, collaboration and support.
Educational research within Physiopedia.
We are currently looking for institutions to become involved in educational research within Physiopedia. We aim to academically assess student experiences of completing projects within Physiopedia and then publish and disseminate the results internationally. We have plenty of ideas for projects but need institutions to provide us with their students and support to complete these projects!
If you would like to get involved with any of the above projects or have another idea of your own don’t hesitate to get in touch with me directly to Rachael Lowe by email.
EIM Capstone Course Assignment
EIM run an Orthopaedic Physical Therapy Residency program which is a planned program of post-professional clinical and didactic education for physical therapists designed to advance the physical therapist resident’s preparation as a provider of patient care services in orthopaedic physical therapy. the 2009 EIM Residents recently completed an assignment which involved making pages in Physiopedia as part of the capstone course in their residency training. They created some great pages and really helped us to increase the content within Physiopedia, so thanks to all those involved including Eric Robertson who co-ordinated the project.
