VirtualOT

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Australia
I am an Australian occupational therapist, educator and researcher. I have worked as an OT in mental health, vocational rehabilitation and a private surgical hospital. I am passionate using online technology to enhance the knowledge and growth of the occupational therapy profession. In my PhD research I am looking at the role of online technologies in information management and knowledge transfer in occupational therapy. Views expressed and stories shared on this blog are my opinion and do not represent views of my employer or professional registration body.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

'Tweeting' medics expose patients

This link was sent to me by Susan Burwash... interesting article from the BBC about medical students using Twitter and Blogs to inappropriately share information about patients or institutions.

Medics posting messages on networking websites like Facebook and Twitter are breaching patient confidentiality, a leading journal reveals.

Research in the Journal of the American Medical Association found examples of web gossip by trainee doctors sharing private patient stories and details.

Over half of 78 US medical schools studied had reported cases of students posting unprofessional content online.

One in 10 of these contained frank violations of patient confidentiality.

Most were blogs, including one on Facebook, containing enough clinical detail that patients could potentially be identified.

Click on this link for the full article.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Tiny URL

Did you ever see the words TinyURL in a web address and think "what is that?" I often wondered, and saw it coming up more and more on Twitter. So tonight I got around to looking it up and found a great description on Wikipedia "TinyURL is a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs" It basically truncates long URLs with the words TinyURL.

What a great idea! So next time I want to list a URL but it is really long... I will try putting it through the TinyURL website for a truncated URL that looks tidy and is less likely to have transcription errors!

Update: I found another site called Tiny.cc which does the same thing.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Robots teach kids how to walk

Click on this link to go to source of photograph (not from the news report but a separate website)

Roxanne Stein from US television station WBPTV reported on an advanced "walking training" machine that can assist teach people with neurological damage, such as cerebral palsy, to improve their walking. You can see in the video footage that the child featured in the story seems to enjoy using the machine and her gait improved. Of course as OTs we're not just interested in simply "walking" per se, we're interested in the location, the reason, who with and so on. I did get the impression from this report that the child in the story was going to be able to walk more easily around her school and community. Take a look at the report on this link

My slideshare uploads