What are the risks in sharing PhD findings before completion?

Last week I was at the ASME conference. The conference abstracts are available online but the conference does not facillitate or encourage the sharing of actual presentations ar this stage. It occurred to me whilst there that rather than having posters displayed in quite a small space and often lacking the opportunity to engage with the presenters, wouldn't it be much better to have these online in advance so that comments could be left for the authors.

I am suspecting that I am increasingly growing in distance from my medical education researcher colleagues. And this is the reason why. One of the presentations I attended was so good that before it ended I emailed the presenter (during the presentation!) and asked if I could have a copy and encouraged that it could be placed by them on Slideshare. This was work leading to a PhD but as yet unpublished in any other form. Today I gratefully received an email with a PDF of the presentation. But the accompanying message stated that the author had been advised not to upload the work as it contained unpublished material. They were happy for me to have it personally and share it informally.

I know that my audience here may well disagree that it is dangerous to share work in this way. But how do we manage to change perceptions? How would you counsel a PhD student you were supervising on this? Is it up to organisations such as ASME to lead the way in this? Or should institutions have policies? Is there any proof that sharing work does lead to better outcomes for students and the wider community?

I feel this is at the very edge of 'open science' and makes me realise how far there is to go.

Image: CC by Jacockshaw, Flickr.

EDIT: Here is the Friendfeed discussion that emerged around this post:

ASME Conference 2010

The Association for the Study of Medical Education (ASME) had their conference in Cambridge, UK earlier this week. You can find out more about the conference here. I did tweet thoughout the conference and although I was a rather solitary voice I did have some good interaction with my followers as usual. A transcript of tweets can be found here.

I wish I could link to some of the very interesting presentations I attended but they are not online as far as I am aware. However, one of the keynote addresses was given by John Norcini, from FAIMER (Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research) using Prezi. I searched the website and found his presentation so can share it here with you.

Although ASME is an international organisation it does have strong UK roots so his presentation on the problems for medical education internationally was an interesting change. I should also point out that the UK does not yet have a national licensing exam. Licensing is carried out by medical schools who are accredited by the GMC (although I did hear some talk at the conference that a national exit exam may be back on the agenda).

One of his most interesting points was that often medical education followed fashion, which was then evaluated. He gave Problem-Based Learning (PBL) as an example of this. But there was evidence during the conference that other aspects such as the use of simulation are also being thought of more critically now. We don't have the evidence to justify widespread use.

I also talked to some other doctoral researchers about the need for a network to share our questions and learning. Watch this space for more about that!

What next for medical education? on Prezi

Social learning with Twitter

Social Learning: an explanation using Twitter

View more presentations from Jane Hart.

I was looking at this presentation by Jane Hart when I thought I should share my own screencast about using Twitter for learning. I have been experiementing with using Screenr to record feedback to students who ask me questions through a discussion forum in Blackboard. I discovered that not all students know what a screencast is so that is something for me to consider in future years! And I have also experimented with downloading and sharing the short videos I've made on a Facebook page. Like all my screenrs this is quick and dirty but hopefully gets across quite a nice story.

Making it easier to share content

My birthday was 10 days ago and I got a new camera. One of the first photos I took was of a bus at the end of my street.

A week later I joined the Guardian Cardiff Flickr pool. This pool supports the Guardian Cardiff local blog which has been doing great work in recent months. So today when Hannah, who runs the site, was looking for an image to put along side a story on the re-organisation of public transport in the city she used mine. Here is a link to the story.
So what if I took some photos that were relevant to education- lecture theatres, computers, an ipad(!), small groups etc. Which group would I put those in to make it easy for other educators to find and use in their materials? A quick search of Flickr shows that that a general education group- or a specific one for higher education- doesn't seem to exist yet.
So I propose that we start one. We would need to figure out some guidelines. It would seem sensible that images added to the pool should be under a Creative Commons license allowing re-use. What else do you think might be important to specify?
I am sure that there is lots of really useful content out there already. This pool would just make it a little easier to find out about. Martin Weller blogged about the Guardian local project recently and proposed developing something similar for education. I think this could be a first step. I think at this stage in social media we know that there is little point in trying to set up new sites and services. Get people to keep doing what they are doing already- just a little smarter!

I'll not be leaving Facebook yet either...

Below is my Facebook profile. It's a little bit secret. If you google my name you will not find it. And if you search for me in Facebook you will not find it. My privacy settings exclude me from search. So you can only find my profile if you know one of my friends already (or you click on the link in the networked blogs widget at the side!). I've always keep my privacy settings high on Facebook. I get all green lights from the privacy scanner (http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/facebook). And yes, I have no choice but to have a public profile, but I don't mind the level of information it gives about me.

My Facebook Profile

Sarah Stewart has blogged saying that she won't be leaving Facebook on "Quit Facebook Day". She connects with many midwives there that she would not otherwise. My use of Facebooks is more personal. But in the last few days I also decided to start a Facebook page to support my teaching. I was worried that it would come across 'creepy treehouse', so I sent an email to students making clear that it would only aggregate content that they could already find through Blackboard. I don't expect this page to be interactive as I already use the walled garden discussion forums of Blackboard heavily. And this piece of work involves contact with patients so discussion on Facebook would be completely inappropriate. 

As Matt Assay has shrewdly observed, the geek elite may be moving on, but the mainstream (including me) are just settling in.

How I made a Prezicast.

If you are going to share your presentation online then you need audio. A presentation which is not text-heavy, and doesn't cause death by bullet-point, can be hard for others to follow if they can not hear what you are saying to make sense of the images. A few weeks ago I discovered how easy Slideshare makes adding audio to a powerpoint presentation to make a screencast. (And I had quite a lot of help from my twitter support team!)

Last week I gave my first presentation using Prezi and recorded the audio with my trusty Zoom Q3. I then set about trying to figure out how to put the two together. It causes quite a lot of consternation to users but Prezi does not host audio on their site. Allowing a sound file to be synced to the Prezi timeline would seem a very sensible thing for them to introduce so there must be a very good reason why it has not been introduced.  I found some mention of possibly adding a sound file at the start of the presentation which would run throughout. This caused me to spend far too long- several hours- trying to figure out how to convert a .wav file (from ZoomQ3) to .swf (Prezi is flash-driven). I didn't manage it and was about to give up on the task entirely.

Instead I went back to one of the first solutions suggested to me : record a screencast with Camtasia. It's quite an expensive programme so I signed up for a trial. I then played my audio file outside of Camtasia and recorded the screen as I navigated through the Prezi in time. The end result is not perfect but it is good enough! If you are doing this make sure that you do not record sound within Camtasia when making the screencast. 

I produced a video file... I think I chose mp4, which I then uploaded to Vimeo. Why did I choose Vimeo? Well, it was the first time to use this as well and I guess I like the clean interface when embedded.

So, that is how I made a Prezicast You can see the end result here. If you have managed to do this some other way please let me know. I did think about embedding the audio separately but I think that would have been more perplexing for my audience! Do you think any other screencast software would allow me to do this? Maybe even free? 

Integrating Web 2.0 with Blackboard

Untitled from Anne Marie Cunningham on Vimeo.

This is a presentation that I gave yesterday at a Cardiff University conference on Technology-Enhanced Education. You can see the Twitter stream here. It is about my experiences trying to use free social media tools with Blackboard. These are simple tools that any one could use and many of the people who read this blog will be very familiar with them. But I hope you might find it interesting.
The presentation uses Prezi. You can navigate your own way through it here on the Prezi website. I reused a template and you can reuse my presentation as well.
Near the start I mention that Web 2.0 is an old hat term. That refers to a tweet I saw in the last few days saying that social media is rising in popularity on google, as web 2.0 sinks. But I don't have a link to the source! (EDIT: The very helpful @sarahnicholas sent me this link which explains all)
Here are some of the services that I refer to:
Delicious (social bookmarking)
Diigo (social bookmarking)
Screenr (Quick and easy screencasts)
SNAPP (for analysis of networks in discusion forums)
Mindmeister (collaborative mindmapping)

Oh, and if you have any views on how we should model developing PLEs for students please leave a comment.