Blog 7: Professional Learning Network

It was hard to find an educational group geared toward me because teaching medicine is a bit of a niche, most groups I found were more geared to K-12 or college. I tried joining a couple several weeks ago.
Active learning Facebook group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/12256460391/

Learning Education and Training Professionals Group
http://www.educationalnetworking.com/Learning%2C+Education+and+Training+Professionals+Group

The first turned out to be dead which I didn't realize when I joined. The second was ok, but again, really not geared toward me or what I do. More toward general professionals. I read some aspects of it but really didn't get much out of it.   I have been a member of an online course through Stanford for sometime (https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Medicine/ANES205/Fall2014/about) that involves weekly updates with lectures and various discussion forums to talk about the issues at hand. I think it actually falls under the category of a learning network quite well due to the interactive nature of it and I think I got the most out of it through various discussion on how best to teach and engage patients. The discussions involved both students and the instructors which was nice.

The RSS feed I had trouble using, its information overload for me. I checked it every now and then and usually just used it as a reminder to check out websites I already used on a regular basis. I frequently read the Health Care Blog. Its also kind of a neat way to organize various articles from several journals of emergency medicine like Academic Emergency Medicine and NEJM journal watch. But overall I found it a little overwhelming and difficult for me to use in my general work flow.

I think these are great general tools for education. For RSS feeds: High school students could use it to keep track of recent events for a class, college students could use it to help with research for a paper, elementary school teachers can keep up with other ideas around the country. Its a great idea if you use it right, which I just couldn't find the right way to use it for me. Professional Learning Networks have clear benefits for larger populations like science high school teachers or elementary school teachers. I think my issue is being an emergency physician in education there just isn't a huge community out there like that, its more localized and everyone just already knows everyone and contacts them directly.

Journal 6: Self-Reflection

I've really enjoyed this class so far. As someone with zero experience in web design or programming I wasn't sure how difficult this class was going to be for me. Fortunately, I've found that I actually find the HTML to be incredibly intuitive. While I may often have to look up the exact tag for a particular function, I can always look it up, and actually using them makes a lot of sense - particularly linking to other pages. All of the HTML tagging was interesting and fun (particularly all the semantic issues where you could have the web browser know if you were writing a date, time, phone number, etc to help more appropriately display them in the browser). The forms in particular were fascinating to me, although I wish I had some experience in java to understand how more modern forms work.

For links, folders, etc I'm already incredibly neurotic about how I keep files organized on my computer - so maintaining clean folders for an organized easy to link to website hasn't been difficult for me. However, I do have a tendency to decide I want to move something because it will make more sense and I have to be careful not to do that now as it will break all my links. 

The CSS has definitely been the most challenging and rewarding. I am not a visually oriented person, actually trying to design things and decide what looks "good" is hard for me. So even though I get how the CSS is detached from the HTML document and still affects in in various ways depending on the id, class, etc. My problem is I can't imagine how what I'm typing is ultimately going to look. Given that that is the whole point of CSS I'm concerned about my actual abilities to use it to create a beautifully designed webpage.  My most rewarding assignment so far was the chapter 12 exercises, for this exact reason. To actually see step by step how what I was tagging and defining was affecting the website to create a much nicer looking menu made me feel hopeful that I will be able to do it on my own.

Journal 5: Twitter

I already use Twitter, I was resistant at first because I kind of think its pushing the "look at me" culture of our society a little too far, but I joined last year for work. Because while I'm not excited about using it on a personal level, I do think the professional connections and educational opportunities can be far reaching.

Currently, I use my own twitter @TooheySL for connecting to people professionally, sharing educational idea, concepts and content, and networking at conferences.
I also have an educational twitter that uses the idea on one of the readings of "Bite Sized Info" teaching: @UCIrvineEM. Twice daily we post Emergency Medicine facts and have about 500 followers, our tweets are often retweeted to thousands of people. 

I already follow quite a few people on Twitter, my boss and coworkers, my hospital, several larger governing bodies in Emergency Medicine. 

Occasionally use hash tags for search, in medicine with have #FOAMed which is "Free Open Access Medical Education." So I'll sometimes look for that one. Although mostly, I use it when I'm at a conference or what to follow the goings on in a conference and I'll follow that conferences hashtag during the conference. TwitterFall has an ok format but I prefer TweetDeck which also allows me to search and follow certain hashtags - just opens it in a separate app for me and I find the format a little easier - plus it allows me to tweet and retweet which I didn't see in TwitterFall.

Overall, I think Twitter has a lot of opportunities professionally, although mostly I use it because I want to have a social media presence. I'm not sure if its as applicable for people who don't plan on focusing on social media in their future. Educationally the opportunities are endless, we've started with resident education but I hope to create similar patient education feeds. We've also talked about using Twitter to make conference lectures more interactive and allow questions and discussion during lectures. 

1) How is use of twitter in graduate studies different than K-12?
I think in higher education Twitter is going to be more about getting information across, while in K-12 its about using a media that the kids like to help engage them.

2) What is one of the biggest challenges in using Twitter in my field?
Too many resources and information. Many people follow a lot of different people and their twitter feed is bombarded and has so much information that they can't really use it all. A lot like the Digg reader, I think it takes some experience and knowledge in what works for people to appropriately choose who to follow to make the most out of their Twitter feed.

Plan for My Curriculum Project

Site title - AfterTheER.com (already purchased from GoDaddy)

Developer - Shannon Toohey (working with my boss Warren Wiechmann for content)

Rational or focus - Our purpose is to provide patient education to improved health literacy in the community. Our objectives will be to create and curate information on emergency medicine aftercare and cover general health concepts for patients.

Main features outline - 

• Main
• Aftercare Information and Discharge Videos
• PEP (Patient Education by Provider) Videos
• Over-The-Counter Care
• In the News
• Ask a Question

Content - There will eventually be quite a few webpages. I'd like to start with the above concepts (Main features) and then I will build out content from there, as described below.

• Main
• After Visit Information and Discharge Videos
• Discharge information and videos for patients
• PEP (Patient Education by Provider) Videos
• Health videos on topics pertinent to the community eg. Halloween safety, taking your medications, etc
• Over-The-Counter Care
• Articles and videos regarding how to use over the counter medications (eg. over the counter pain medications, children fever - Tylenol/Motrin, RICE for muscle pain etc)
• In the News
• Articles and videos regarding health issues in the news such as Ebola, Enterovirus, etc.
• Ask a Question
• we won't be able to answer individual questions about a personal specific health problem, but if patients have general questions like what to take for a headache, or how to protect themselves from the flu we will use those for ideas for future videos/articles. 

Target audience - Emergency Department patients and community members...the wonderful thing about being an emergency department doctor is that eventually everyone is a potential patient.

Design considerations - 
I'm not a designer...this is going to be much harder than the content. I want to keep it clean and easy to navigate but ensure it has a modern look. I'm going to have to keep thinking about exactly what I want that to look like. UC Irvine colors are blue and gold so the color scheme may have some basis in that.

Limiting factors - 
I think my limitations in designer knowledge and experience is going to be a huge limiting factor - I'm going to have to look at a lot of other websites to figure out what kind of look I want.
I'm clearly new to this web development stuff so my technical capabilities will also be a limitation although so far the linking and folder organization hasn't been hard for me. However, I would like to have videos built into the pages and I don't know how to do that yet.  Creating a clean, easy to use format is going to be difficult, especially considering I want it to work on Mobile devices so I'm going to have to be sure I incorporate responsive design so it can work on computers, tablets and phones.

Site Map will be mostly hierarchical but as we will suggest other recommended articles and videos May at times be more complex. However most pages will not be more than 2-3 layers deep from the home page.  (forgive my chicken scratch)

Wire frame will be a very simple header and footer with two column format for the main body of the webpage. I like the clean design of sites like Wikipedia and Amazon, plus I want to use most of the space to suggest content for users. It seems to be the most popular current design tactic. People like procrastinating online and they like being told what to look at. Amazon, Wikipedia and Facebook are all examples of this technique and it's very effective. Users spend hours going down the rabbit hole of article after article. (forgive my chicken scratch)

Journal 3: The Case for Social Media

Kessler, Sarah. "The Case For Social Media in Schools." Mashable. N.p., 29 Sept. 2010. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.

The article is exactly right: social media and the existence of an online presence is a core part of our culture at this time and its not going away any time soon. Trying to block high school students from using this resource at school is not going to prevent them from using it at all. Learning how to appropriately and responsibly manage an online persona is important. Its even something we teach in medical school to ensure future physicians can appropriately manage this new social space without causing professionalism or privacy issues.

A lot of the same issues that plague teenagers also plague young professionals. For example, the OB/gyn thatgot into trouble for venting about one of her patients being late. Learning where to draw the lines for use in social media and separating your personal and professional life when it comes to your internet presence is becoming an essential skill.

Lastly, I think the article has an excellent point about the educational utilization of these social media tools. When you have people (teenagers and 20-30 something’s alike) who have a tendency to brainless return to Facebook or twitter to procrastinate 20 times per day, if you can provide meaningful quick learning points within those tools you could improve learning. This is something that is slowly becoming popularized in medicine.

1)   How can we build teaching responsible use of the internet and social media into curriculums for teenagers and professionals?

I think having teachers use Facebook for assignments and communications with students is a good idea. Have a daily fact on Facebook or Twitter to tie education into the daily social media activities. There are hundreds of ways to utilize these technologies to encourage kids to learn. Additionally, I think actually providing feedback and information on what is and isn't appropriate and how everything stays online forever is very important. At the UC Irvine Medical School we provide an elective that covers professionalism in social media.

2)   Should teachers be held responsible when teenagers do not appropriately use technology and social media?

Absolutely not. Parents are responsible for their children and parents are the ones who should be watching what their teens are doing and adding to the conversation of how to be responsible online.

Digg Reader

The Digg Reader is an ok media for keeping up to date on blogs, websites and topics. In some ways I like it because it brings information directly to me. But mostly I find it to be a bit of information overload. I really prefer to just look for information when I need it.

I think part of the problem is I already have information overload between the books I need to read, journals, school assignments etc, that adding one more thing just pushed me over the edge.

1. Why don't more people use RSS feeds? 

I know lots of people who know about them or peripherally use them but I don't know too many people who really use it as their primary means of gathering and filtering information. But if used properly it really should be perfect for that - I mean Facebook is like an RSS feed of your friends and people love that. I think people don't truly know how best to use RSS feeds (myself included) and maybe end up with too much clutter. 

2. How do I make the best use of my RSS feed? 

A lot of time I feel RSS feeds end up with so much stuff they're a little unmanageable. I joined a lot of blogs for my new Digg education RSS feed and I already have several I follow for emergency medicine. I think maybe its just too much and turns into information overload. I think what works so well for Facebook is that it hones in on what you like or what people you know are sharing or what the whole world is sharing and gives you that (plus the paid stuff). I think if someone developed an RSS feed that had technology like Facebook to track what you use and show more stuff related to the things you click on to read that could make it more useful. In the mean time I am going to parr down my RSS feed list and see if I can make it a little more manageable. I spent some time on google looking but so far didn't find an RSS feed like that. 

Chapters 1-3

The history of the web is pretty interesting, I think the most amazing part is that most of it has happened in just the past 20 years - so many changes within my lifespan. Its amazing to think that we have actually "run out" of billions of IP addresses. Just goes to show how many electronic/internet capable devices we now have in the world.  

I never knew I could look at source code for webpages.  I’ll be honest, looking at the code of a complicated website was a little intimidating about whether I’m actually going to be able to write my own webpages, but I’m still excited to try. 

The site performance I completely agree with, I too am guilty of getting frustrated with webpages if I have to wait more than a few seconds. Side effect of a generation with 2 second attention span I suppose. The studies google and amazon did on it were interesting – just proving the point. I also really like the Network tool within the developer tools in  Chrome. Its interesting to see exactly what is loading, what information is being requested from the server and how long its taking. I can see how that tool would be helpful in my own development to speed up how a page loads by changing or removing time consuming sections.

1. When will the new IP system start?  IPv6 has been deploying since the mid 2000s as a 128 bit number using hexadecimals.
2. How do you decrease the number of requests to a server? I get how to make files smaller but if your webpage has a certain number of elements I’m not clear on how you would decrease the requests without changing the elements and therefore the design. After looking at a couple websites it looks like a lot of the strategies involve simplifying the webpage, combining files, and combining images. Of course, users who have been there before will have quick upload times because of items saved in their browser cache but you probably need to design toward the first-time users as well. 

About Me

I grew up in Southern California, specifically Thousand Oaks. Received my Bachelors in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley and then went to Medical School at UC Irvine. I stayed at UC Irvine for my Emergency Medicine residency and am now working as a Clinical Instructor in the Emergency Department while completing a fellowship in Multimedia and Instructional Design. Part of that fellowship is research and education projects within the department, and part of it is completion of this Masters. 

I'm probably in the intermediate skills area when it comes to computers. I grew up with technology so I pick up on things fairly easily and because of that its easier to self-teach certain things. However, I have no formal training so really have no experience in web design or formal creation of multimedia. I do, however, use technology a lot in my teaching already and created an iPad curriculum for our residency in the past few years. Initially we used iTunesU but now we use Schoology which is a GREAT platform - much more negotiable and collects a lot more data than iTunesU did. I've also worked with medical students to use Camtasia to make "Flipped Clerkship" videos for residents and medical students to learn emergency medicine before they get to their rotations. Currently working on using a documents camera to create discharge instructions for patients, in a "Whiteboard Video" style.

As mentioned earlier, completing this Masters is going to be part of my Multimedia and Instructional Design Fellowship at UC Irvine. My hope is it will give me the background skills to make more professional multimedia and resources for the residents and patients. I'd like to achieve a strong background in web design and multimedia creation in various formats so I can use those in the future. Ultimately, I look forward to completely redesigning the way our residents learn. Additionally, I have a strong interest in patient education and we are looking at creating a patient education portal for patients of the emergency department with videos and blog posts regarding after-ER care and self-care.

Course Description:
Course examines how the Internet, and its tools and resources be integrated in educational settings for delivering course content, providing access to resources, expanding the classroom, and supporting learning styles. Students learn how to plan, design, develop and evaluate Internet-based learning activities/course websites.
- 3 seminar / discussions; 1 three-hour laboratory. Office Hours: 3:00-4:00 4th Floor conference room (near elevator.) I will also make a habit of being in the class chat room during this time. 

Visit the Course Website