TechnOT by VirtualOT

My OT Path

2011-10-24T10:41:00.003-06:00

This week we celebrate World Occupational Therapy Day on the 27th October. This is the second time this day has been celebrated and is part of the wider celebration around the globe for OT Month.

I have been reflecting recently on why I became an occupational therapist and why I remain so.

It all started for me at the age of 15. I was asked by my friend and her mum to help out a camp for children with physical and cognitive impairments with Noah's Ark Toy Library in Melbourne. My friend's mum was employed there as an occupational therapist. At the camp, my eyes were suddenly opened and I saw for the first time what it might be like to work with children with a disability and their families. I wondered if this might be my "calling".

Another strong influence in my career selection was my mother. My mother was a Registered Nurse and while I grew up she worked in the area of aged care. My mother nursed people lovingly in long term aged care facilities and was instrumental in setting up the Scott Street Adult Day Care Facility in Dandenong, Vic. I spent much time at that facility working with the older adults doing their daily exercises, arts and crafts, playing scrabble, participating in conversations and looking beneath the mask of age to the beauty of their souls and wisdom. The thing that I remember most about that time was there was so much laughter and fun, and many of the people who attended said they would have died without it. They actually meant it.

My occupational therapy education was at Lincoln Institute in Melbourne and enjoyed the social nature of our education process more than the studying part. Like most students, fieldwork was a particular highlight in my learning, even though some of the hardest learning came through understanding and accepting my own mistakes. I started in 1985 and finished in 1989, I had a year off in the middle as I went to Japan to teach English and ended up working at Tokyo Disneyland! While living and working in Japan in the 1980s I experienced my own form of disability and bias. Disability: I had to learn Japanese in order to communicate and Bias: As a white Western female many assumed I was there as a "Call Girl" and treated me as such.

My first job as an OT was in acute mental health. I worked with an amazing team of people from a range of disciplines who helped me learn, by showing me how they worked and letting me try things out. I remember my OT manager had a sign in her office that said "Don't come to me with problems, come to me with a list of potential solutions". I took that sign very seriously and only once did I sit down in her office and say "I have no idea what to do in the acute program today". In this role I ran groups that included relaxation, dance and movement, cooking, arts and crafts, horticulture and woodwork. The purpose of the acute program was to create a structure for the patients' lives on the ward. After working on the acute ward I needed to move to an area that focused on more community living skills, so I applied for a job in a new community residential facility which would act as a transition point from hospital to community living. Ironically we opened this brand new facility at the same time that the whole world was moving rapidly into "de-institutionalisation", so we were given a large number of men and women with 20 years or more history of severe mental illness coupled with the effects of institutionalisation. Our visions of possibility for the population we had been serving became overshadowed by the overwhelming needs of the population we inherited as they emptied the institutions to the community. Over time we managed several of our houses with long term residents and the other houses returned to being a step-down facility for people being discharged from acute wards in the hospital to the community. My focus as an OT was on living skills such as budgeting, bill-paying, shopping, using public transport, social skills and home management. I started to specialize in helping people to prepare for return to work and worked closely with people at the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service (which became known as CRS Australia) for assistance.

After a while I became more interested in vocational rehabilitation and successfully applied for a job to work at CRSAustralia. I ended up working there for nine years and became proficient in many areas of OT work such as undertaking Functional Capacity Evaluations, Work Site Assessments, creating Work Conditioning Programs, overseeing workplace modifications and so on. I also had a small stint working on a "Policy Development" project while at CRS and got to have a taste of "black suits and briefcases" and early morning flights from Melbourne to Sydney or Canberra. What I remember most about working in Vocational Rehabilitation at CRS Australia was having the ability to work closely with my clients and getting to know them well as we carved out a program designed to help them manage their limitations and return to work. It was while I worked at CRS Australia that I worked on my first Virtual Team, which would later serve me well.

In June 2002 I moved to work at a private surgical and fast-stream rehabilitation hospital. Here I re-learned many of what most OTs consider "bread and butter" OT skills. Cognitive assessments, shower and dressing assessments, ADL tasks such as meal preparation, shopping, banking and community mobility assessments and interventions. What I enjoyed most about this job was having the opportunity to work from an occupational health and well-being angle with people who were in the midst of a medical event. People told me the stories of their lives in the steam of the shower or by tracing their finger along the scars on their bodies. I felt so privileged to have this role, I think that the importance of this role is often overlooked.

While I was working at the hospital I was also working on my Masters degree at the University of Queensland. I was very excited to be actively learning again and was so impressed by the staff at UQ that I decided that I wanted to become an academic! Deakin University had just commenced a new occupational therapy program at their Waterfront Campus in Geelong under the direction of Ann Wilcock, and I really wanted to work with her. As I was not especially knowledgeable about this thing called "Occupational Science" I decided to use one of my assignments in my Masters degree to examine this topic. I used this as my launching place to get to know Ann Wilcock better and make sure she knew that I was serious about wanting to work with her. In February 2003 I started work at Deakin and started by teaching second years in a Lifespan Development course. I had approximately 4 weeks to develop curriculum from scratch, with no assistance and no idea of where to start. OTs are good at problem solving and with some help from my friends, my husband, and even my own students I survived the baptism of fire of my first year as an OT educator. Each year I worked at Deakin I taught new subjects while keeping some of my previous subjects or passing them on to new staff as they joined. I discovered that I have a talent for curriculum development and went on to develop eight new courses at Deakin. While at Deakin I undertook post graduate education in Higher Education and found this to be one of the single most helpful education experiences I have had. The program was designed to have an overarching structure that included topics that the Education Faculty felt were fundamental to being able to teach in Higher Education but it was also designed to be flexible to the learning needs of each individual student.

In July 2006 my life took a turn "North" when I was at the WFOT congress in Sydney. It was at the congress that I met the staff from the University of Alberta, who were there showcasing their program and recruiting new faculty. I decided then and there that I was going to apply and when I spoke with my husband on the phone that evening he know by the tone of my voice that I was serious. He was just as excited about potentially living and working in another country, so together we worked on developing my CV and applying for the job. Our children were excited and anxious about moving. the hardest part was leaving family and friends. Occupational Therapy was moving us to Canada!

In October 2007 we moved from Australia to Canada and I started work at the University of Alberta. That was also when I started blogging, one for family and one for work. On arrival I found that I was going to be involved in developing new curriculum as the program was about to roll out its first year of the new MScOT program and Susan Burwash and I were tasked with developing the "Curriculum Philosophy" for the upcoming CAOT accreditation. I was in my element! Tight deadlines, opportunity for creativity and a great team of clinical track teaching staff to work with.

Something I noticed however, was my lack of connection to the community I lived in. All my OT life I had lived where I had worked and I had practiced OT in settings within the one community. That meant had I had developed a significant community around me in Geelong, which I now lacked in Edmonton. To overcome this I started to connect more with OTs in the global community and started volunteering as a computer skills teacher at a local agency for people with acquired brain injuries (it's called Brain care Centre now) and in 2010 my whole family started volunteering as puppy raisers with an assistance dog training society called Dogs with Wings.

Connecting with local agencies was critical in the "doing, being becoming and belonging" process of joining a new community. I started doing research projects with Brain Care Centre about people with ABI being able to use online technology safely to enhance social connections, which led to student involvement and further projects. One of the students involved even got her first OT job from working with BCC as a student volunteer in one of our projects! For me, this also led to conference presentations, networking and is now integral to my publishing endeavours (and even links to my current PhD research).

In 2009 a series of events brought a group of like-minded individuals together and became known as OT4OT (online technology for occupational therapy). OT4OT is a small international group of occupational therapy volunteers who are passionate about using online technology to advance entry level education, ongoing professional development, research, and practice. As volunteers we coordinate and run activities for the overall benefit of our profession. The biggest event we run is a OT 24 hour virtual exchange (OT24VX) to celebrate World OT Day. Our vision is:

"To share knowledge about online technologies to enable occupational therapy practitioners and assistants, educators and students to participate in vibrant and effective online communities that support the growth and development of occupational therapy practice, education & research, locally & globally."

Along the path of my OT career I have been open to opportunities that have presented themselves to me... I didn't plan to become an OT, nor did I plan to become an OT educator let alone a VirtualOT living in Canada... it all evolved as I followed paths that made sense at the time. So now my life is at another fork in the road, I don't have an ongoing contract at the University of Alberta and the future is presently shrouded in a fog, but I am confident that a new path will reveal itself soon because I know that...

Through the doings of my profession I have become an OT, and through becoming an OT I belong.

Robot Suit HAL

2011-09-05T22:39:00.001-06:00

Robot suits have been developed in Japan. They help weak muscles as well as normal muscles of the extremities. So they strengthen the muscles but not the bones. These robots might endanger the osteoporotic bones, particularly the vertebrae.

Thank you Judy Gnarpe for alerting me to this wonderful rehabilitation device developed in Japan!

Facebook or LinkedIn

2011-07-11T10:58:00.005-06:00

I have noticed that LinkedIn has been becoming more popular in occupational therapy circles recently, as people seemed to be inviting me to connect with them, and I could see that they were new to LinkedIn but getting involved quickly. My contacts rose sharply in the past few months from about 20 to over 80 contacts, with little or no effort on my part.

So, what is the difference between Facebook and LinkedIn?

For me Facebook is a place to be social with friends, family and colleagues. In Facebook I connect and share information relevant to occupational therapy but I also share information about my home and leisure life. I have my own profile and am a member of many groups that represent the many facets of my life. I am able to "like" people, places and products, and share photos of life as it happens...

LinkedIn is different from Facebook in many ways. Firstly, LinkedIn was set up as a business networking tool, not a social networking tool, so it is designed for users to input information about their professional self. Secondly, LinkedIn has strict rules about connecting to others. The program asks you how you know a person before it lets you connect with them, ie: it is not designed for you to "friend a stranger", it is designed for you to connect with people you already know, or to be introduced to people with whom you have mutual connections. Thirdly, LinkedIn is not interested in "what you are doing right now", its purpose is to be an online space to develop a profile, where you can upload resources you have developed, include testimonials and join professional discussion groups on topics of your choice.

LinkedIn has 100 million users and Facebook has 500 million users, so right now you have a larger body of people in Facebook who to participate in conversations with. LinkedIn is starting to develop more as an asynchronous discussion space, but not yet at the level that Facebook has achieved.

So, what do OTs use LinkedIn for? In a poll using Facebook I asked OT contacts what they use LinkedIn for. The picture here is a "screen shot" of the answers, with a summary on the left.

The results of my Facebook poll which had responses from 52 people (number responding to each category of question in brackets)

To build my business/professional network (20)
I don't really/Don't use LinkedIn (15)
To share professional profile tools (blog, portfolio) (3)
To recommend others (2)
Keep up to date in my network's role/job (1 vote)
To get recommended by others (1)
Still working out its usefulness/still finding out about it (1)

What do these results mean? It appears that among my Facebook contact group LinkedIn is still a novel online tool which some are using effectively, but most are just becoming aware of. The Technology Acceptance Model (Davis et al., 1989) suggests that technology must be both useful and easy to use in order for people to be willing to adopt it. Perhaps LinkedIn is perceived as not as easy to use as Facebook and therefore not as useful for making quick connections in our rapidly developing online OT world.

The questions I pose are:

In what ways is LinkedIn potentially more useful than Facebook to occupational therapists?
What are the benefits if we build profiles in each of these online spaces?
Can LinkedIn be used as a tool to demonstrate ongoing professional development?

Getting the most out of Twitter as a health care professional!

2011-05-15T23:43:00.010-06:00

Two years ago I said that I thought Twitter was taking it too far in the online world and I seriously couldn't see a role for it in my life... I have changed my tune!

One year ago I tried to use Twitter more often, but found it daunting because I wasn't using an appropriate tool to get the most out of it.

Now I finally understand the role Twitter can play for healthcare professionals as I finally found a program to collect Tweets, organize them in topics and also found ways to share my Tweets in other forums such as Facebook, my Blog and LinkedIn. So now that it is part of my routine I thought I was ready to share some tips on getting started on Twitter and getting Twitter to work for you!

Tip 1. Think about your online persona, have a reason to start Tweeting.

Decide what you will Tweet about. I mostly Tweet about OT, Higher Education, Online Technology, Assistive Technology and topics broadly related to these, (sometimes I stray away and Tweet about how my football team is going, maybe I could use a separate identity for that?)

My Twitter Profile

Tip 2. Create a professional profile in your Twitter account. Choose an online identity (or name) that represents you. I chose VirtualOT and use it for all my professional online activities. Having a consistent online presence helps people to start forming a relationship with you, soon they start to send you information because they know your interests.

Customize your Twitter profile to give a professional impression! a) Write a brief, professional and relevant bio (it is ok to include some personal information, just keep it to what you would tell a patient/client in real life), b) Upload a picture or avatar that represents you professionally, and c) Customize your page’s background and colours. You can do all of these things through the settings tool bar, then select 'design' for the background, 'profile' for your profile etc.

Tip 3. Learn the lingo (language). Thanks to @enableOT for the foundation of this list on OT4OT wiki

@: Use this to inform a person that you are directing a Tweet towards them (e.g. @VirtualOT).
Find people: This means “find people to follow”.
Follow/Following: By following someone you will see all his or her tweets on your page. You can choose to follow anyone who allows it; sometimes you will get a message saying they need to approve you.
Hashtags #: The hashtag is used to tag a topic. For example in OT we use #OT.
Profile: Customized information about you that others will see on Twitter.
Tweets: The term given to the bite-sized messages of 140 characters you send out. Tweets can be public, private, or even direct messages. You can only receive direct messages from people you follow and vice versa. Re-tweets (RT's): This is when a tweet is forwarded by another user.
Tweeps: People who use Twitter (sometimes also means people you met on Twitter).
Twittersphere: The virtual world of Twitter.

Example Tweet using bitly (reduced URL)

Tip 4. Be concise and informative. You only have 140 characters to use for each Tweet, so be concise! Think of Twitter as a virtual notice board with the capacity to leave notes or questions for individuals or groups about a topic. Most health care Twitter use this forum post information, look for answers or brainstorm a problem. Examples include looking for a resource, a supplier or to share news on funding changes for OT services. If you need to add a website URL these can be very long. To get around this use bitly or tinyurl to shrink the url address so it can fit in your 140 characters more easily.

Example Tweet hashtag #OT

Tip 5. Use #tags - hashtags. Hashtags have made a huge difference to finding information on Twitter. These are the best way to have non-followers see your tweets and for followers to notice Tweets of shared importance. For a current list of Twitter hashtags that are of interest to OTs, see Twitter Hashtags List. A helpful website is WTH: What the Hashtag, an editable encyclopaedia for hashtags found on Twitter. Experiment with hashtags as they specify your interests. You can invent your own hashtags (e.g. we created #OT4OT which is online technology for occupational therapy).

Tweetdeck helps organize top

Tip 6. Use technology to organize your Tweets! The basic Twitter site will show you a constant feed of information from people you follow. However there will be people in the "Twitterspehere" posting about topics you are interested in. You need a way to collect and organize Tweets by topic. There are a number of Apps for phones and computers to help you organize tweets by topic. TweetDeck, HootSuite, and TweetCaster help you organize your Twitter account for your phone, desktop computer, iPad, laptop etc. It can be daunting to work out which App to use, I have settled with Tweetdeck and am happy with its performance. On my Tweetdeck I leave a search column open at all times for the terms #OT, #Virtual-World-OT-Day, #OccupationalTherapy, and #OT4OT. I also use these hashtags frequently when chatting with my OT Twitter friends.

Linking Twitter to Facebook

Tip 7. Set-up an RSS feed—Twitter is an especially powerful networking tool when combined with a blog or Facebook account. You can set up Twitter to direct Tweets to your Facebook wall (if you want) and you can also set up a feed from Twitter to your blog. Using these tools you will be able to post information just once and have it available in three different online forums! Note: Another great way to get more impact from your blog is to set up Networked Blogs in Facebook to re-post blog posts on your Facebook wall.

@enableOT created an OT list in Twitter

Tip 8. Find people to follow. To find people you can use findpeople link in Twitter. Once you follow one person, you can look to see who follows them and then click the “follow” button to add them to the list of people you follow. There are also directories such as wefollow.com where you can search for people by keyword. To find other OTs on Twitter start with @enableOTs occupational therapy list and from there you will find many other lists of OTs under areas of practice or topics of interest.

Tip 9. Be selective about who to follow back—Once you’ve been on Twitter for a while, people will begin to follow you. Don't feel compelled to follow everyone back, they may even turn out to be a spam-bot or simply a person whose interests don't align with yours. When deciding whether or not to follow-back, look at the user’s profile and see if their profile and interests match yours, read some of their recent Tweets and see if you'd like to "converse" with them.

#FollowFriday is a great tool to find OTs in Twitter

Tip 10. Make use of #FF. Follow Friday #FF is the hashtag to help people find new Twitter friends. On Fridays "Tweeps" recommend people they think others should be following. Take advantage of these days, follow the people your friends recommend and then re-tweet the recommendation to let the recommended know that you are now following him or her. Apps like FollowFridayRanking help keep track of who is being recommended!

Hearing help in the developing world: An unconventional approach

2011-04-28T10:16:00.001-06:00

Bill Hodgetts, an audiologist at the University of Alberta, has a big idea! Bill would like to develop an app that tests hearing and then use the ipod as a hearing device, as a personal amplification system!

He writes:

Hearing loss and deafness affect at least 278 million people worldwide, two thirds of whom live in developing countries with limited care. My idea is to use an iPod touch to test hearing (point of care diagnostics) and then use the same device and headphones as a personal amplification device to give people greater access to the world of sound.

So, if you agree that this is a good idea, please help Bill to get funding by visiting the website and clicking "like"!

The touching voice of autism: A communication App for iPhone, iPad, iTouch

2011-03-05T23:01:00.000-07:00

2 March, 2011 4:59PM AEDT
By Rob Harris (Statewide Drive Victoria)

Lisa Domican's creative mind has given her daughter a most valuable gift - a voice.

The mother of two autistic children,

Grace and her mother Lisa Domican (picture from ABC Drive website)

who hails from Ballarat but now lives with her family in Ireland, has developed a picture-based application for smart phones and electronic tablets which help children with autism to communicate.

Ms Domican's son Liam was diagnosed in the Royal Brisbane Hospital in 2000, while Grace was diagnosed by a paediatrician in Ballarat in 2001, just before the family moved abroad.

The technology is tailored to meet the needs of individual children and helps them communicate through pictures on a touch screen.

Ms Domican, who last year was awarded a United Nations award at World Summit Award Mobile for e-Learning and education, named the application Grace app - in honour of her 11-year-old daughter.

"Grace was my research team and the other kids in her school also tested it," Ms Domican said.

"I didn't really have a clue what to do, but I was reading a blog about a developer who making about 5000 euros a week making games. I wrote to him and he said it sounded like a great thing and then we met."

Ms Domican said the application was made available through application stores last year and that she was planning to introduce the technology throughout autistic education around the world.

Grace app will be made available to download for free from April 1 to April 3 as a part of Autism Month.

DailyFeats Launches; New Online and Mobile Platform to Reward People for Doing Good

2011-03-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

A press release was emailed to me today about a new program called Daily Feats. This new program enables the user to keep track of and get rewarded by completing daily feats. The feats can be simple, like eating fruit and vegetables, to more complex, signing a petition for action on a human rights issue.

This program has potential to be used by occupational therapists working with clients in keeping track of goals. You can set your goal and then mark off daily achievement of that goal. The tracking of the goal can be seen in this program or it can also be fed to Facebook.

It is interesting to see a growing number of programs being developed that provide extrinsic rewards to the users. It makes me wonder about about the concept of personal causation and volition discussed in the occupational therapy model, MOHO. It makes me wonder about internal and external locus of control.

I am wondering, "Do these online programs help people who need praise and recognition by others?"

So here is the press release and link to the program "Daily Feats"

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - March 3, 2011) - DailyFeats, the online community that rewards and celebrates doing good, today launched its platform for sharing positive actions at www.dailyfeats.com. Built on the principle that "doing good should be rewarding," DailyFeats offers a place for people to do positive actions (known as feats) that foster good health, improve financial security, reduce stress, strengthen communities, enrich connections with family and friends, and more. Members connect with one another locally and around the globe, finding the inspiration and resolve to be healthier and happier while also working toward real rewards.

A feat at DailyFeats is any action that creates good, such as eating whole grains or fruits and veggies; working out or taking the stairs; reading or doing creative projects; volunteering or mentoring; and many more. DailyFeats offers a growing collection of hundreds of feats to choose from, representing a broad range of positive priorities and lifestyles that encompasses the vast diversity of its members.

"DailyFeats is awesome, and it's helping me become a healthier person," said Juan-Ramon Jacobe of Los Angeles, an active member of DailyFeats. "I check in whenever I go out for a hike or bike ride, and lately, I've found myself hiking and cycling more and more, because I know I'm working toward a real reward."

DailyFeats members earn points whenever they do a feat; they earn additional points when their most inspiring or funny accomplishments receive "props" from other members. Points can then be redeemed for savings and rewards sponsored by national brands and local businesses throughout North America. DailyFeats, completely free for members to use, currently has more than 125,000 local rewards available nationwide that anyone can earn for doing good.

DailyFeats is powered by its pioneering rewards and loyalty model, affiliating its supporting organizations with feats that befit their missions. They include respected national brands such as Monster.com and 1-800-FLOWERS.COM®, and nonprofits such as World Wildlife Fund, charity: water, the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, WELL WORLD and the Chopra Foundation, among others. Through DailyFeats, all of these organizations demonstrate a meaningful commitment to positive action.

"DailyFeats came to Monster with a refreshing, spirited and meaningful approach to our social engagement with job seekers that was hard to resist because it synchs up so well with both our mission and the desire to measure our impact," said Janet Swaysland, SVP Global Communications & Social Media at Monster.com.

Festival of Teaching UofA 2011

2011-02-23T17:13:00.001-07:00

Since the festival of teaching began in 2008 here at the University of Alberta I have not missed out on presenting, as a way to share with my colleagues the joy of teaching motivated MScOT students. This year I wasn't going to submit an abstract as I just had so much on, but then I thought... "I can't miss out, that will break the link". So I quickly submitted a proposal at the last minute and was delighted to have it accepted.

This year the format is different from the past three. The posters are BANNERS and will be taken around the University and placed in different Faculties throughout the Festival week. On March 10th there will be an opportunity for people to share their stories, in a traditional conference style sharing session at the Telus Centre here at the University, with all the banners up in one location. I imagine it will be quite a beautiful sight.

One of the new things on at this year's festival is the the opportunity to go and visit a class, to sit in and see how others teach! What a great idea that is! I have volunteered also to have people come to my class, and I offered our online class for INTD 410, in Elluminate. It will be interesting to see if we get any interest. I will make sure that I attend at least ONE other class during the Festival week, seeing how others teach can be so motivating to do better.

A.hamilton festival of teaching 2011

View more documents from Anita Hamilton.

PEW report has me concerned! Internet Challenges for the disabled

2011-01-27T10:45:00.003-07:00

Internet Challenges for the Disabled

Pew Research follows trends in the US and today they reported on an are of concern, 54% of Americans with disabilities use the Internet, compared with 84 % of the able-bodied population.

Americans living with a disability are less likely than other adults to use the internet. According to a national survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in September 2010, 54% of adults living with a disability use the internet, compared with 81% of adults who report none of the disabilities listed in the survey. Two percent of American adults say they have a disability or illness that makes it harder or impossible for them to use the internet. The survey found that about one-in-four (27%) American adults live with a disability that interferes with activities of daily living. Statistically speaking, disability is associated with being older, less educated, and living in a lower-income household. By contrast, internet use is statistically associated with being younger, college-educated, and living in a higher-income household. People living with disability, once they are online, are also less likely than other internet users to have high-speed access or wireless access. The Pew Internet Project report provides context for the continuing conversation about who does -- and does not -- use the internet in the U.S., including a proposal to extend the enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act to include websites operated by certain entities.
Click here to read the full report.

Dell Integrating Streak, Mobile Devices into Healthcare Solutions

2010-11-07T17:57:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Tim, an OT here in Alberta Canada for alerting me to this new technology.

iPad: A therapeutic marvel

2010-11-07T11:25:00.001-07:00

From the NY Times
By EMILY B. HAGER
Published: October 29, 2010

OWEN CAIN depends on a respirator and struggles to make even the slightest movements — he has had a debilitating motor-neuron disease since infancy.

Owen, 7, does not have the strength to maneuver a computer mouse, but when a nurse propped her boyfriend’s iPad within reach in June, he did something his mother had never seen before.

He aimed his left pointer finger at an icon on the screen, touched it — just barely — and opened the application Gravitarium, which plays music as users create landscapes of stars on the screen. Over the years, Owen’s parents had tried several computerized communications contraptions to give him an escape from his disability, but the iPad was the first that worked on the first try.

Click here to read the whole story (NB: non-person first language used in this article such as quadriplegic and autistic)

'Wil-habilitation' at Western Plains Therapy Services - Dodge City, KS - Dodge City Daily Globe

2010-11-02T09:06:00.001-06:00

'Wil-habilitation' at Western Plains Therapy Services - Dodge City, KS - Dodge City Daily Globe

iPortal To Change The Lives Of Wheelchair Users

2010-11-02T08:58:00.002-06:00

iPortal To Change The Lives Of Wheelchair Users

Tinhte.com - Talks Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense ...

2010-10-30T15:05:00.000-06:00

IBM: Safe social networking options in healthcare settings

2010-10-19T22:28:00.001-06:00

It has been my contention for a long time now that health care practitioners need to get online to network and share knowledge to develop health care practice. Of course one of the biggest barriers is having a safe and reliable system to use!
This link is to an IBM website that details their social software solutions for healthcare professionals. I am not endorsing it as I haven't tried it, I am highlighting the fact that the IT industry has heard our pleas and now we need management of health care networks to say "we support professional development using online technologies... At work.... On work time!"

The Freedom Leg

2010-10-19T21:30:00.004-06:00

I love this leg brace! It takes away the need for crutches. What a really neat AT device :-)

Jeff Han demos his breakthrough touchscreen

2010-10-18T18:40:00.000-06:00

In 2006 this touch screen was revolutionary. Now we use iPhone screens and iPad screens using this technology (not quite all yet...) and we accept it, love it and expect it! It's a great reminder of how fast technology changes and how quickly we adapt to it.

Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world

2010-10-03T22:16:00.000-06:00

In this presentation Jane McGonical talks about her mission to create games that teach kids of today to be real problem solvers for the problems of today and tomorrow. She has convinced me (an avid NON-GAMER) that there is a really valid reason to use gaming technology for change! Kudos to this woman!

Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves

2010-10-03T22:05:00.000-06:00

In this talk Sugata Mitra demonstrates that children have the capacity to teach themselves how to use computers, in even the most rural and disadvantaged towns in India. One of the key points he makes in this presentation is that children are naturally motivated to learn. So imagine if these kids had better teachers, better resources and a place to put this learning into practice...!

Getting ready for classes to start again "What is Occupational Therapy?"

2010-08-25T18:18:00.001-06:00

Occupational therapy is the art and science of enabling engagement in everyday living, through occupation; of enabling people to perform the occupations that foster health and well-being; and of enabling a just and inclusive society so that all people may participate to their potential in the daily occupations of life. Slide 2

✤(Townsend & Polatajko, 2007, p.2)

Top 25 Android Apps for Healthcare Professionals

2010-08-01T00:13:00.000-06:00

Top 25 Android Apps for Healthcare Professionals

Prezi: About Occupational Therapy

2010-07-31T09:36:00.001-06:00

I have been developing this prezi presentation for my introduction lecture for first year MScOT students. I wonder what else I need to include?

Introduction to: Theory and practice of enabling occupation on Prezi

Sensory Processing Disorder: Education available online

2010-07-20T17:52:00.003-06:00

Dr. Lincoln Bauer emailed to let me know that she is making professional development easier for OTs by putting a course about sensory processing disorder online. Visit this link to view the website.

Here's what Lincoln wrote in her email to me:

For families with Sensory Challenged children who live too far from the right occupational therapy centers, and occupational therapists who would enjoy participating in workshops such as these, this is ground-breaking, as they can now have the benefits of working with Dr. Jean Ayres and the staff of the SPD Foundation without actually having to come to the center.

I applaud your vision and professionalism Lincoln. Your website is very clean and easy to navigate. This is the way of the future! You have translated your knowledge for others and used online technology to share this knowledge. This is the future for ongoing professional development.

Bridging the gap between our online and offline social network

2010-07-20T16:16:00.001-06:00

Thanks Susan Burwash for sharing this with me. It is always a good idea to keep an eye on the dark side...

Bridging the gap between our online and offline social network

View more presentations from Paul Adams.

RESEARCHERS USE BRAIN INTERFACE TO POST TO TWITTER

2010-07-20T12:58:00.002-06:00

This is a copy of an email I received in April... sorry it has taken me this long to share it!

MADISON - In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on the social networking Web site Twitter - just by thinking about it.

Click on this link to see a demonstration.

Just 23 characters long, his message, "using EEG to send tweet," demonstrates a natural, manageable way in which "locked-in" patients can couple brain-computer interface technologies with modern communication tools.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student, Wilson is among a growing group of researchers worldwide who aim to perfect a communication system for users whose bodies do not work, but whose brains function normally. Among those are people who have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), brain-stem stroke or high spinal cord injury.

Some brain-computer interface systems employ an electrode-studded cap wired to a computer. The electrodes detect electrical signals in the brain - essentially, thoughts - and translate them into physical actions, such as a cursor motion on a computer screen. "We started thinking that moving a cursor on a screen is a good scientific exercise," says Justin Williams, a UW-Madison assistant professor of biomedical engineering and Wilson's adviser. "But when we talk to people who have locked-in syndrome or a spinal-cord injury, their No. 1 concern is communication."

In collaboration with research scientist Gerwin Schalk and colleagues at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, N.Y., Williams and Wilson began developing a simple, elegant communication interface based on brain activity related to changes in an object on screen.

The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. "The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually," says Williams. "And what your brain does is, if you're looking at the 'R' on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the 'R' flashes, your brain says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Something's different about what I was just paying attention to.' And you see a momentary change in brain activity."

Wilson, who used the interface to post the Twitter update, likens it to texting on a cell phone. "You have to press a button four times to get the character you want," he says of texting. "So this is kind of a slow process at first."

However, as with texting, users improve as they practice using the interface. "I've seen people do up to eight characters per minute," says Wilson.

A free service, Twitter has been called a "micro-blogging" tool. User updates, called tweets, have a 140-character limit - a manageable message length that fits locked-in users' capabilities, says Williams.

Tweets are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other Twitter users who have signed up to receive them. "So someone could simply tell family and friends how they're feeling today," says Williams. "People at the other end can be following their thread and never know that the person is disabled. That would really be an enabling type of communication means for those people, and I think it would make them feel, in the online world, that they're not that much different from everybody else. That's why we did these things."

Schalk agrees. "This is one of the first - and perhaps most useful - integrations of brain-computer interface techniques with Internet technologies to date," he says.

While widespread implementation of brain-computer interface technologies is still years down the road, Wadsworth Center researchers, as well as those at the University of Tubingen in Germany, are starting in-home trials of the equipment. Wilson, who will finish his Ph.D. soon and begin postdoctoral research at Wadsworth, plans to include Twitter in the trials.

Williams hopes the Twitter application is the nudge researchers need to refine development of the in-home technology. "A lot of the things that we've been doing are more scientific exercises," he says. "This is one of the first examples where we've found something that would be immediately useful to a much larger community of people with neurological deficits."

Funding for the research comes from the National Institutes of Health, the UW-Madison Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, the UW-Madison W.H. Coulter Translational Research Partnership in Biomedical Engineering and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
###
- Renee Meiller, 608-262-2481, meiller@engr.wisc.edu

EDITOR'S NOTE: View and download a video of Wilson using the brain-computer interface to post to Twitter at http://nitrolab.engr.wisc.edu/media/P3Twitter.mov

CONTACT: Adam Wilson, jadamwilson2@gmail.com; Justin Williams, 608-265-3952, jwilliams@engr.wisc.edu

Harnessing the power of Twitter with the hashtag!#!#

2010-07-13T21:20:00.007-06:00

On the 26th March 2009 I said "I don't see the point of Twitter" on my blog, but now I appear to be a born-again Twitter user!

It's amazing! It was a gradual build-up, or was it a steady erosion? Either way, over time I started tweeting more frequently and following more and more people. This meant that I also attracted more "followers" (which is always good for the online ego), and these people sent me interesting information and links etc!

The turning point in becoming a Twitter user was harnessing the power of the hashtag! Namely while I was at a conference #celc2010 and watching tweets from another conference #cot2010.

So... what's a hashtag # and what do they do?

Hashtags make all the difference in using Twitter because having a hashtag means that you can follow certain topics, events, people etc. Interestingly #wfot2010 was a very low key event on Twitter because we simply didn't have the numbers in OT circles to create a groundswell of activity (and I know some key people really tried, ClaireOT, EnableOT, Su_BuOT, BridgettPiernik, alisonlaverfaw and Merrolee and even VirtualOT), but it wasn't not enough to create an impact in the Twittersphere.

Over the past weekend I followed more and more topics of interest using hashtags and found that it was both a blessing and a curse. A good example is as Nils pointed out on Facebook, #OT brings in topics of conversation around the Old Testament and Occupational Therapy... among other things. I figure you just "block" those people who always want to talk about the Old Testament instead of occupational therapy, but will that block people who are talking about occupational therapy and the old testament? Yes! I'm not sure that there's a solution to this.

Claire Jones suggested that we need a hashtag system! I agree, we do! So Claire initiated this on the OT 4 OT wiki on a page called "Hashtags List" and we need your help. What hashtags are we already using and what hashtags should we make?

Getting the news you want on Twitter
On another topic around Twitter, it is crucial to have a way to organize where and how you capture Tweets. Sure, you can go to their website and read through the Tweets that have been posted by the people you follow, and you can add your own tweets while you are there. But Twitter is really about getting information in and out fast! So, we need to use an application for Twitter that manages the feeds and organizes them into categories and does this on a mobile device.

I have found four applications so far and tried three: Twitterific, Tweetdeck and HootSuite are the ones I've tried, and today I heard about "Involver" but have not found an iPhone app for this. Tweetdeck and HootSuite are superior to Twitterific, so I would recommend choosing between these. I am not familiar enough yet with HootSuite to say it is better than Tweetdeck, and it appears from a conversation on Mashable today that the jury is "divided" on this.

The main reason to use one of these apps is that they organize information coming in for you. They organize it using the hashtags and searches you have set up, and put them into columns or folders for you. That way you can open up the Twitter app and go to the search that you want. e.g. #wfot2010. It makes it faster and easier to stay up to date with what you want. The other wonderful thing about these apps is they also allow you to feed in updates from Facebook. Tweetdeck lets you add feeds from LinkedIn as well when using it on the internet, but not on the mobile app. HootSuite brings in feeds from Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.

I'm really interested to know who is using Twitter, what you are using for and how you are managing all that information!

Top 50 Occupational Therapy Blogs

2010-07-12T15:53:00.001-06:00

It's nice to get a compliment. So I thought I'd share this with everyone. Kelly Davis from Career Moxie recently discovered my blog and included it in her list of "Top 50 Occupational Therapy Blogs." Click on this link to read about all the blogs Kelly found, how she categorizes them and what she found useful.

What other blogs would you include and why?

Shape Writer iPhone App

2010-06-16T13:33:00.005-06:00

Ricky Buchanan founder and main writer for ATMac writes about "ShapeWriter" for typing on an iPhone or iPod without lifting your fingers. This app uses smart prediction to anticipate what you want to type.

Visit ShapeWriter - iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad Typing Without Lifting Your Finger for the full story!

Smart underpants share how you're feeling

2010-06-15T21:54:00.005-06:00

Thanks Joan G for this! In this article by Matt Hickey you can learn about high tech undies!

Matt writes: "underwear that have sensors built into the waistband to sense blood pressure, heart rate, and other biological markers... underwear that relays biometric data nonstop, allowing medical teams to better and more quickly treat the wounded. But the military is just the start. If found practical, the new sensors (and comfy, comfy underpants) might end up in hospitals as a new way to track patients' progress with less invasive sensors than those used now."

Joan was wondering if perhaps they could also build a version with hip protectors!

Online Technology has a role for professional development: A students' reflection

2010-05-30T02:02:00.003-06:00

Ashley has given me permission to share her reflection on the recently completed module: "Online Technology for Occupational Therapy"

All the students were asked to consider HOW they adopted these new technologies and how they might contribute to their professional development. The first task was completed through the lens of Kolb's experiential learning theory (1984)and the second part was completed through the lens of the Canadian Profile Document (CAOT, 2007).

Thank you Ashley, I really appreciate the time spent on creating this wonderful reflection. I hope others look, listen and learn from you.

Sharing the love... of technology!

2010-05-28T13:34:00.008-06:00

I recently completed a 13 hour "intensive" module "Online Technology for Occupational Therapy" with MScOT students here at the UofA. The module is an elective subject and up to 20 students can participate, this year was the biggest group yet with 13 first years.

The module has evolved over the past three years, from being called Web 2.0 for health care to Web 2.0 for Occupational therapy and this year, in keeping with the WFOT congress workshop I changed the module name to "Online technology for Occupational Therapy".

The format of the sessions was as follows:

Session 1:

Introduction and workshop

Online technology for Occupational Therapy: Presentation for students

Online technology for Occupational Therapy: Presentation for students
View more presentations from Anita Hamilton.

View more presentations by Anita Hamilton.

What’s expected in this course?
Assessment tasks
Project selection and commencement

Session 2

Personalized homepages/Portals
Collaborative writing
Social Networking
Online Surveys
Podcasts
Continue projects

Session 3

Managing RSS feeds: Google Reader, iGoogle
Setting up "alerts"
Setting up automated database searching from the library
Social bookmarking: Delicious
Project presentations
Post-course evaluations

Below is the list of student projects completed

AT for OT: A repository for the assistive technology projects completed by the 2010 MScOT cohort (this is not an open project until permission received from all groups whose AT projects are housed on the site)
OT survival guide: An students' view of surviving and thriving while studying OT at Corbett Hall (this project was developed using a Mac computer and is looking for a new online home... watch this space)
Pediatrics for OT students: An online resource looking at the key diagnostic groups and assessment tools an OT student needs for a pediatric fieldwork placement
Cultural Mosaics: How OTs fit - An online resource for OTs working with people who have immigrated to Edmonton, particular focus on understanding what resources are available.
Occupational therapy: Is it for you? - An online resource looking at the question of "what is occupational therapy as a career?" This group avoided jargon as their target population is school leavers and undergraduates who may not know about OT as a career option.

Showcasing online technology to occupational therapists

2010-05-21T22:23:00.007-06:00

Teaching classes is slowly finishing and conference season has begun!
As educators we have a couple of mandatory requirements and one is to present our recent research activity at conferences. Coming up with amazing content seems to come in waves and right now we are riding a wonderful wave that formed gradually over the past 10 years or so!

In the last month I have attended and presented at the AOTA conference with Professor Karen Jacobs from Boston University, at the World Federation of Occupational Therapy congress with and on behalf of the international group we call OT4OT (online technology for occupational therapy) and then this week Professor Vivien Hollis presented on behalf of a group of us from the University of Alberta Occupational Therapy Department at the Association for Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) conference in Malaysia.

Conference 1: American Occupational Therapy Association conference in Orlando Florida 29 April - 2 May, 2010

While at the AOTA conference I spent a lot of timelooking at the technical displays in the exhibition hall, a definite strength of this conference. Below are some brief videos of a couple of items that grabbed my interest while I was there.

Video 1: Learning to use an eye-gaze control to operate the computer! Plugs into any computer using the USB port, I was able to master in less than 5 minutes.

Video 2: The RollerMouse being demonstrated. This device replaces a traditional mouse with a roller under the palms of the hands and buttons to click for left mouse, right mouse, copy, paste etc., all in one central location.

The slides from the Tech Day presentation can be found at this link

Conference 2: World Federation of Occupational Therapy Congress, Santiago, Chile. May 4-7, 2010

Here I am including the link to the wiki called Online Technology for Occupational Therapy that we developed for the workshop as an ongoing resource for participants and also for any other OTs wishing to find out more about using these technologies in OT practice or education for knowledge retrieval, transfer or research. We also developed a Facebook group with the same name as a place for people to get together and share resources and knowledge about online technologies. The Facebook group has blossomed from 17 members in mid-April to over 400 members in mid-May, a sure sign that OTs are using this social media and want to talk about it!

Conference 3: Association for Advancement of Computing in Education conference in Penang, Malaysia, May 17-20, 2010.

The paper that we collaborated to produce is titled: "It's not possible to be a sage on the cyberstage" and the abstract can be found through this link. The paper illustrates the range of online technologies we are currently using in our OT program at the University of Alberta. We also made a series of videos to tell our story as we could not all attend. This was a wonderful way to illustrate what we were doing, how we were doing it and Vivien Hollis was there to discuss why we are using all these technologies in a program that is primarily face to face.

Canadian Virtual Hospice

2010-03-26T06:15:00.009-06:00

Today I clicked on Facebook Ad for "Canadian Virtual Hospice". I was intrigued to see what types of information and services this site might offer and was genuinely impressed by how thorough this site is!

There are three main areas: Topics, Support and For Professionals,

Topics include:
What Is Palliative Care?

What Is Palliative Care?

Emotional Health

Talking with Children and Youth about Serious Illness
Hope and Denial
Living with Limited Time: Exploring Feelings
Grief in Times of Celebration: The Empty Spot
Grief Work

Spiritual Health

Spirituality and Life-Threatening Illness
Finding a Spiritual Companion
Finding Meaning and Purpose during a Health Crisis
Rituals for Patients and Families
Rituals to Comfort Families
Sharing Your Story

Symptoms

Sorting out Health Concerns
Confusion
Constipation
Dehydration
Depression
Fatigue
Lack of Appetite and Loss of Weight
Nausea and Vomiting
Pain
Shortness of Breath

Providing Care

Caring for Yourself
Help with Medications
Help with Eating
Care of the Mouth
Caring for Hair and Face
Help with Bathing
Help with Toileting
Positioning a Person in Bed / Preventing Bed Sores

Visiting

Tips for Visiting
What Do I Say?

Decisions

Health Care Decisions
Considerations for a Home Death
Advance Care Planning
Wills
Planning a Funeral
Financial Assistance
Patient Benefits
Caregiver and Survivor Benefits

Final Days

When Death Is Near
The Moments after a Death

The Support Section allows users to register and join specific discussions with professionals working in palliative care. The professionals involved in the service are listed on the page "Meet the Team" There is a section called "Your Stories" which is an area for people to tell their brief story about grief, death, dying or to thank the professionals involved in their care, One other section is called: "Asked and Answered" which is the FAQ section.

The For Professionals Section allows users to link to ongoing professional development and research links.

I am impressed by the content and layout of this site. It is easy to navigate, they use lay language and I particularly applaud their use of online technology to provide best practice information for professionals, service users and families in a timely way!

Using Skype to connect real life to the theory!

2010-02-28T13:03:00.008-07:00

Interactive online technology has opened the world to our classroom through Skype™. I can now invite guest speakers and experts into the classroom.

In one of my OT courses this year I interviewed two eminent occupational therapy authors using this approach and then watched the interviews in class with the students.

I used eCamm recorder™ to pre-record interviews on Skype™ and in addition to playing them in class I was able to upload the file to the learning management (LMS) system for repeated viewing.

My goal was to show the students the people who wrote the text, so that they might think more deeply about their words when they read the textbook, rather than view pre-reading as a "burden". I used the interview to ask questions about expand on topics that were not included in the text.

The pre-recorded interviews provided a scaffolding of learning for the students and the disucssion in class enabled students to explore concepts more fully with the instructor. Using the interviews brought theory to life and encouraged students and educators to learn together with the invited expert.

This week I am preparing to interview an OT colleague live during class. Students will be able to directly interact with an OT, and ask her about practice in her part of the world. This will be different from last time, as I controlled the interview and played it to students, this time students will be actively involved and the session will unfold on the day. With permission of the interviewee I can record the session and load this on to the LMS for future viewing.

Using technology to enhance OT education is my passion. I wonder what other ideas people might have to bring theory and practice together through technology in the classroom?

Facebook fatigue

2010-02-18T10:05:00.006-07:00

This week my facebook status reads "Anita is a bit tired of thinking like a FB status update... I want to think properly again". I decided to call this Facebook Fatigue.

I love the fact that I can constantly stay up to date with the day to day "doings" of friends and family around the globe, and even feel like I was actually there with my sisters when their kids said the funniest things... but who am I kidding? I am living vicariously and virtually, in their lives... soon a question started to gnaw inside me... am I living my own life?

After almost 2 years of using Facebook it became part of my daily routine, and a way to feel connected with others. However, it gradually started to change the way I behaved. I would check Facebook before email, and even before I ate breakfast, I would use facebook as a place to connect with a wide range of people, but not at any meaningful level, and it became a place where I could easily lose an hour at a time through my day! Many evenings it became my main activity. On weekends I would be on FB talking to people in another country, me having a glass of wine on my computer, them also at a computer... it replaced real socializing!

I don't want to say I was addicted, but maybe I was!

The thing that started to really irritate me was the feeling that having a "conversation" on facebook had become one big public forum and it wasn't simply with people I wanted to converse with... but people who were friends of friends (ie: strangers). It started to feel like a public conversation, like traveling on a train and speaking with your friend and the people traveling on the train who were around you continually adding to the conversation without invitation.

I am an outgoing person, an extrovert! So having conversations with complete strangers does not bother me at all (hey... I blog!) but what started to happen was people from very different walks of life started to become part of my daily conversations inside facebook, through my friends or family's pages... now this shouldn't bother me as opening myself up to having conversations with people with different viewpoints is wonderful! However, these weren't conversations, these were somtimes personal attacks disguised as conversation. People critiquing my choices and comparing them with theirs.

I started to wonder what was happening and realized that maybe it is the anonymity of the online world that creates a sense of safety and loosens people's "manners". Maybe they wouldn't comment on your choices if you were meeting in person, but in the online forum there really are no consequences, so they just voice their true opinion.

The other aspect is there is no voice intonation or body language when you communicate online (yes, all the netiquette rules say CAPITAL LETTERS = SHOUTING!) but between speaking normally and SHOUTING and emoticons ;-) there is little way of knowing how a person is actually speaking. Text simply lacks nuance.

So, none of this is new really, it just simply came to a head for me recently, and my breaking point was... I was thinking in updates! I would do something, for example: bake a loaf of bread, and then I would think about how to word that as an update! There is a positive angle to this, I am noticing the small things in my life and "amplifying them" and celebrating them... and the other way of looking at this is I am wasting my life navel gazing, telling people about the mundane and forgetting to get on with the bigger goals in my life!

As this is a blog about Technology and OT a little voice is telling me that I need to make this relevant to OT practice... EASY! If I was helping someone to connect with friends and family online (such as we did in the ABI & Blogging program) then I would be particularly careful to address the issue of what to post and what not to post, and how to avoid offending people online!

So, I am having a breather from FB and focusing more on my Blog, my work and my PhD... oh and my kids! How's your online world treating you?

Lebanon's Landmine Soccer Team: Story from TIME magazine

2010-02-16T09:53:00.006-07:00

walky lets you control robots via finger gestures, turns iphone into a wii

2010-02-11T18:54:00.001-07:00

walky lets you control robots via finger gestures, turns iphone into a wii

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Reconnecting: Becoming a Blogger after ABI

2010-02-03T17:00:00.001-07:00

This is the presentation that we gave at the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists' conference in Ottawa, May 2009. The presentation is about the results of our project where we taught 5 clients with ABI to bog, use iGoogle and Facebook, and we interviewed them before, immediately after and then 10 weeks after the program. The plan is to use these results to run a better program in 2010.

Reconnecting Becoming A Blogger After Abi

View more presentations from Anita Hamilton.

Blogging, Facebooking and Twittering: I'm starting to twitch!

2010-01-21T10:10:00.003-07:00

Recently I have noticed that I feel lost when I cannot connect to my online world so I have decided to schedule a digital break every few weekends for a whole day! This is very challenging because the digital world is an integral part of my life and it crept in so quietly. I don't see any seam between my virtual and non-virtual worlds.

I noticed recently that when I see or hear something interesting I think to myself "I've got to put that on Facebook" and before that I thought, "I could blog about that" and before that I thought "I will email that" and before that I probably wrote letters. Somewhere along the line I also stopped phoning and started texting. Many people I know have also evolved to tweeting about their life, observations or new information on an hourly basis!

I, like many of my online friends, have a personal style that likes to share and connect with others, quickly and often. I feel very connected through the online world and believe that I have real relationships with the people online that I regularly converse with. I still view strangers online as strangers online, but I am happy to chat with them as I might in a Supermarket line. I am wary though if I meet someone online in a forum that is strange (e.g. I think that the weirdest people comment in YouTube)

So what about addiction to online activities? This is my biggest concern for people like me who like to connect online. We can find life in this world more controllable, and satisfying and neglect the real world realities like cooking, cleaning, washing, shopping and being with our real world family and friends. So, online/real world balance might become a new area for occupational therapists to work with people who have started to "twitch from too many tweets"!

Sharing resources: Are we just giving away our knowledge?

2009-12-09T11:01:00.003-07:00

Some people who are new to the online environment are concerned that others may use their content and not cite them, so they simply refuse to put any information online, keeping all their knowledge in the formal literature... inaccessible to the masses.

The fear of having your work stolen is real and it happens! Many people either don't know how to cite or maybe they don't want to cite (and in fact are stealing your work to pass it off as their own). Either way, that is plagiarism and should not happen!

So a dilemma exists for many people who want to use their wiki or their blog to share their small project, or their ideas or maybe even the results of a large study... they may not get any "glory"

This is how I view the dilemma (today) about what to put online and what to try to publish through the "formal channels"...

Primarily my role is to find and make sense of information and translate this for use by others
It is not about "glory"... even though I love a bit of a spotlight :-)
Sharing my work through journal publications is one way to get new information to the community andpublishing in journals and books is still the most accepted form of currency for my employer to understand that I am contributing
Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs and podcasts etc are excellent tools for quick dissemination of information, and it is a good idea to promote your published material there for people who don't have ready access to databases and journals etc

Thinking "out loud" about this dilemma further maybe there is a time and a place to withhold information that I want to publish, but should really go through the formal channels of publication.

Question to the ether... "in the professional arena what do you withhold from your blog or wiki and why"

Mobile augmented reality: Reality, improved | The Economist

2009-09-29T10:37:00.001-06:00

Mobile augmented reality: Reality, improved | The Economist

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'Tweeting' medics expose patients

2009-09-24T12:04:00.002-06:00

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.

Tiny URL

2009-09-18T00:34:00.003-06:00

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.

Robots teach kids how to walk

2009-09-16T23:50:00.004-06:00

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

Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think

2009-08-20T14:16:00.003-06:00

This is copied from the Blog "Socialnomics" and was shown to me by Susan Burwash at the UofA. Thanks Susan!

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

The above statistics and “Social Media Revolution” video tell the story, social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Please feel free to share with any non-believers!

http://socialnomics.net/2009/08/11/statistics-show-social-media-is-bigger-than-you-think/

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Becoming a blog commenter.. I'm growing up!

2009-07-22T14:21:00.004-06:00

My blog became a place for me to download (my brain) of information of interest that passed over my desk, came through my email or arrived in my Google alerts, it is a "filter blog" not a "reflection blog". Today I visited OTBlogs.org again (created by Joan G. UofA MScOT graduate next month) and this time I started to read a range of other people's blogs and posts and felt compelled to comment.

I think this is an interesting developmental stage in becoming a blogger, it is becoming a blog commenter. As an extroverted person I can easily spend my day filling my blog with information I find interesting, now it is time for some reflection and interaction... I'm growing up as a blogger!

I'd love to know what developmental stages other bloggers have noted in themselves? Did you start as a commenter and move to your own blog? Did you start a blog straight away? How do you feel when someone comes and comments? What if someone doesn't agree with you?

New Internet Intervention Gives Insomnia Patients a Better Night's Sleep

2009-07-21T09:50:00.000-06:00

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., July 6, 2009 – The estimated one-third of adults who suffer from insomnia could soon find effective treatment without ever leaving their homes. Researchers at the University of Virginia Health System have developed a unique Internet-based intervention, based on well-established face-to-face cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, that has shown remarkable results in improving patients’ sleep.

Medical-device maker Saebo flexes muscle in growing market

2009-07-16T15:09:00.002-06:00

Henry Hoffman just wanted to help stroke survivors.

Today, the occupational therapist is a leading force at Saebo Inc, a growing Charlotte company that develops and manufactures rehabilitation products for stroke survivors.

“For years, there were no options,” says Hoffman, Saebo’s president.

The company got its start in 2001 as Affordable Therapy Equipment, changing its name to Saebo three years later.

Hoffman co-founded the venture with his brother, John Farrell, also an occupational therapist.

They created and patented a line of orthotics — specialized mechanical devices to support weakened parts of the body. The goal is to help patients regain the use of their hands and upper extremities.

The company’s SaeboFlex device, a spring-loaded orthotic that reteaches a patient how to grasp and release objects, is its biggest seller.

Hoffman estimates Saebo has sold more than 10,000 of its devices in seven countries. The equipment is custom-fabricated and assembled at Saebo’s Charlotte offices on Water Ridge Parkway.

“We have our fingers on the pulse of what therapists want because we’re therapists,” Hoffman says. “We know what works. We know what doesn’t work.”

Study Reveals Tension between Employers and Employees around the Use of Social Media

2009-07-16T15:06:00.002-06:00

I received this information from Dave McNamee from Deliotte.

Deloitte’s third annual Ethics & Workplace survey, commissioned by chairman Sharon Allen, reveals tension between employers and employees around the use of social media. This year’s survey set out to explore an area of increasing significance to the workplace; use of social networking and its affect on ethical behavior and reputational risk to a company.

Some top findings are:

· Sixty percent of business executives believe they have a right to know how employees portray themselves and their organizations in online social networks.

· Employees disagree, as 53 % say their social networking pages are not an employer’s concern.

· Nearly one-third (30%) of employees surveyed never consider what their boss or customers might think before posting material online

· Even though 74 % believe increased activity on social networks make it easier to damage a company’s reputation

· Of the executives surveyed, a mere 17% said that their organizations have a program dedicated to monitoring and mitigating risks associated with the use of social networks; less than a quarter (24%) have formal guidelines for the use of social media among their people.

STUDY FINDS LINK BETWEEN FACEBOOK USE, LOWER GRADES IN COLLEGE

2009-04-16T15:29:00.002-06:00

SAN DIEGO – College students who use Facebook spend less time studying and have lower grade point averages than students who have not signed up for the social networking website, according to a pilot study at one university.

However, more than three-quarters of Facebook users claimed that their use of the social networking site didn’t interfere with their studies.

“We can’t say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying – but we did find a relationship there,” said Aryn Karpinski, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in education at Ohio State University.

Click on this link to read the whole article

iBrain

2009-04-16T15:00:00.004-06:00

I am about to buy the book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind by Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan. I think it is very important the occupational therapists stay up to date with the impact of the digital world on brain development and the subsequent impact on basic skills such as human interaction. Has anyone else read this book yet?

Motorcyle riding with paraplegia

2009-04-16T14:52:00.002-06:00

Thanks Anna for sending me this link, it is a great example of getting around impairment and limitation to get on with doing what you love doing!

Making Facebook accessible

2009-04-07T09:40:00.003-06:00

Thanks to Twitter I caught this link from Will Wade, thanks Will!

Carl Augusto is the President and CEO of the American Foundation for the Blind, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that expands possibilities for people with vision loss. One of AFB's priorities is broadening access to technology, and AFB is working together with Facebook to make the site more accessible and user-friendly for people who are blind or visually impaired.

See this link for the full story

Advances in Online Care and Telehealth

2009-04-07T09:30:00.005-06:00

This post by DAVID C. KIBBE on the Health Care Blog talks about a recent symposium on Online Care in Hawaii, where two Family Physicians and a primary care Internist participated in a panel in which they described their experiences with Online Care and Telehealth.

Visit this link to read the full article.

How are we going in occupational therapy in online consulting? Where is it happening and who is doing it? Or is this level of application of technology reserved purely for medicine?

Better Health Website widget

2009-04-06T23:41:00.003-06:00

I'm adding the Better Health Website widget to the side of the blog tonight... is it useful?

Earth Hour 2009

2009-03-29T00:40:00.004-06:00

Here's how we spent Earth Hour 2009: A snow picnic in our backyard! It was so peaceful.

What did you do for Earth Hour?

Web 2.0 and computer technology in mainstream OT practice

2009-03-29T00:03:00.002-06:00

I am delighted that this coming year 6 MScOT students have elected to undertake systematic reviews of the literature looking specifically at the use of technology in OT practice. We're ironing out their specific topics right now.

Two students will look at mainstream computer technologies in OT practice and three will look at the therapeutic benefits of engaging in the online world and will specifically look at one population each (e.g.: people with cancer, people with ABI and carers) the final student is still thinking.

The projects are a "capping project" for the MScOT students and give them the opportunity to demonstrate a fundamental skill for practice and research... the ability to ask meaningful questions, seek up to date and relevant literature, critically appraise the literature and then synthesize this in a meaningful way to translate it for practice.

Reading the wonderful blog "Gosh That's Neat" I came across another wonderful blog called WiiHab - Rehabilitative Therapy. I'll have to get these students to take a look!

Retrofitting the Education Space: Should we even consider "Teaching With Twitter"?

2009-03-26T21:52:00.000-06:00

http://technots.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-twitter-taking-it-too-far.html

Is twitter taking social networking too far?

2009-03-26T21:47:00.003-06:00

My reluctance to Twitter is illustrated in this YouTube video...

So fellow bloggers... where do you see Twitter fitting?

Enabled by Design

2009-03-26T21:27:00.002-06:00

Tonight while finding more people to follow on Twitter I discovered Enabled by Design. Here's what they say about themselves on their website! I'll have to share this with my students! :-0

It's all about people powered products: Enabled by Design is a community of people passionate about well designed everyday products. By sharing their loves, hates and ideas, Enabled by Designers challenge the one size fits all approach to assistive equipment through the use of clever modern design.

To Tweet or not to Tweet... what is the answer?

2009-03-26T10:05:00.004-06:00

After reading the article suggested by Joan I found this fascinating quote within the article:

Every blogger, no matter how ambitious or dedicated to his or her blog - wants a community around it. Easier said than done of course. To build a community you have to get people engaged around the premise of your content and then make it as easy for them to interact as possible. Both with you and each other.ShoutEm, Mar 2009

You should read the whole article.

Retrofitting the Education Space: Should we even consider "Teaching With Twitter"?

2009-03-25T19:49:00.001-06:00

Retrofitting the Education Space: Should we even consider "Teaching With Twitter"?

Claire Hewlett is wild about Twitter. This link is for you Claire!

Earth Hour 2009

2009-03-16T20:40:00.003-06:00

I may be a technology addict but I am also deeply concerned about global climate change. The recent horrific bushfires in Victoria Australia are an example of what we will all face in the future if we don't all help. Please watch this video and PLEASE participate!

Tech gurus use power of Web to help veterans

2009-03-09T09:52:00.001-06:00

Story Highlights

Silicon Valley professionals start Web site to connect donors with troops in need
Founder models site on Craigslist and Kiva.org, so people can decide who to help
Veterans and active-duty troops can list their stories, photos and specific requests
"I am so grateful that there are people who were willing to help me," soldier says

Companies turn to Web 2.0 to recruit for trials

2009-03-04T23:09:00.003-07:00

"Fierce Biotech" reports

Patient recruitment companies are reinventing the patient-to-trial matchmaking service of yesteryear with a new approach that meets prospects where they are increasingly spending their time--on social networking sites.

Not only are companies creating web applications for such popular sites as Myspace and Facebook, but the companies running these sites have also begun exploring the idea of creating business plans around clinical trial recruitment, Matthew Holt, founder and author of The Health Care Blog, tells Bio-IT World.

Visit this link to read the whole story! It's just too obvious isn't it?!

Health 2.0 Advisors

2009-02-27T23:10:00.002-07:00

This is a new website called Health 2.0 Advisors. The description on the front page of the website is as follows:

Health 2.0 is a rapidly developing and powerful approach that uses the Web to collect, refine and share information. It is transforming how patients, professionals and organizations interact with each other and the larger healthcare system.
The foundation of Health 2.0 is information exchange plus technology. It employs user-generated content, social networks and decision support tools to address the problems of inaccessible, fragmentary or unusable healthcare information.

Health 2.0 connects users to new kinds of information, fundamentally changing the consumer experience (e.g., buying insurance or deciding on/managing treatment), clinical decision-making (e.g., risk identification or use of best practices) and business processes (e.g., supply-chain management, business analytics).

Understanding Health 2.0 has become mission-essential. Health 2.0 Advisors helps clients critically evaluate Health 2.0's continuing evolution and the ways its tools and processes can maximize value in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Here is the link to their list of publications page.

Medpedia

2009-02-27T23:00:00.002-07:00

Medpedia is a new health information wiki which is contributed to by medical professionals only. The supporting Universities include Harvard, Stanford, Berkley and Michigan. This will be a step up from Wikipedia for serious medical information.

Do you love iGoogle?

2009-02-18T23:25:00.007-07:00

For a year or so now I have been using iGoogle as my home page. It keeps me grounded... the weather for Canada and Australia, France and China (there are some real contrasts there!), the top news stories for my favourite places, my Gmail account and a Facebook app, a special tab to house all the blogs I subscribe to and so on. In my cyber travels tonight I've been visiting the links posted by US College students about the Google Apps they love. I love this one a lot!

Using Google Calendar to coordinate your life at work, home, community

2009-02-18T23:13:00.003-07:00

I use Google Calendar to sync my work and family commitments. I stumbled across this link tonight and thought it would be good to include in my blog. This entry in Google Student Blog shows quickly how you can use Google Calendar (G-Cal) with your work or student team.

To see a list of Google Applications (apps) being used in US colleges and Universities visit this link.

Hawaii tries out online health care

2009-01-17T11:48:00.006-07:00

For people in Hawaii, going to see the doctor just got as easy as booting up their PC.

The state is the first to offer online physician visits statewide, under a program that kicks off Thursday. Residents can chat with a doctor over a standard Web browser (IE 7 or Firefox 2) or carry out their visit over the telephone. Those with a Webcam can also use that to share video with the doctor. The service will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week (with a few monthly maintenance outages during low-volume times). Members of Hawaii's largest insurer, HSMA (which operates the state's Blue Cross and Blue Shield) pay $10 for the 10-minute consultation, while non-members pay $45.

Click here for the whole story.

New Year's Resolutions

2009-01-04T21:20:00.002-07:00

This year I will try to be more focussed on what I do and how I do it. I have the usual teaching load and a few projects to complete but I now seriously need to focus on commencing my PhD.

So, the backlog of projects that need to be completed are:

Complete writing the chapter of the fieldwork book with Helen Larkin at Deakin University
Commence and complete writing the chapter of the fieldwork book with Merrolee Penman from Otago Polytechnic
Complete the wiki project at the University of Alberta with the PT group
Commence and complete the wiki project at the University of Alberta with the OT group and with the SLP group
Respond to ethics committee requests for the blogging project with EBIRS so that this project can get going by February 2009 (we're presenting the findings at CAOT in June!) It was hopefully going to commence in January but hey... ethics is not through yet!
Write the articles I was going to write for OT Now looking at the role of Web 2.0 in OT education and practice

So, my resolutions are to keep gradually moving ahead with each of these projects and NOT take any more on. I also want to be calm and organized in my teaching and marking load, and enjoy watching our students develop, grow, learn and then fly out into practice :-)

This year I will commence my PhD and I will use Web 2.0 from beginning to end! I even thought about asking Commoncraft if I could use their approach in developing my proposal. You know the guys... "hmm hmmm hmm... XYZ in plain English"

So, this blog will be a place this year for keeping focussed by downloading my brain regularly!

GraphJam

2008-12-22T10:43:00.003-07:00

Ok, another virtual timewaster, and an opportunity to express your frustrations without really being direct... Here's Graph Jam (thanks to Sue Waters for pointing this one out too).

Merry Christmas!

Crappy graphs

2008-12-19T21:08:00.003-07:00

If Sue Waters from Edublogger thinks that crappy graphs is a good tool, then I'm prepared to give it a go. Here's my creation:

TechnOT: UN launches e-learning collaborative effort

2008-12-19T15:03:00.002-07:00

Synchronicity occurred today when I also came across this information from the wikieducator website where Archbishop Desmond Tutu talks about digital freedom for knowledge transfer in education. This links perfectly with the UN launched e-learning collaborative.

UN launches e-learning collaborative effort

2008-12-19T09:14:00.002-07:00

UN launches e-learning collaborative effort
By Rebecca Wanjiku, Computerworld Kenya
16 Dec, 2008

Sixteen U.N. agencies have merged their efforts to establish UNeLearn, a technology-supported project to share information and expertise in 160 developing countries.

Technology-supported learning offers tremendous potential to address the capacity development needs of a wide range of beneficiaries in developing countries, said Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

"The work of the U.N. country teams will ultimately be strengthened through this collaboration, and member states will be better served," he added.

The project will allow the U.N. agencies to collaborate on the sustained deployment of e-learning, which has faced challenges in developing countries.

By agreeing to pool and share their collective training resources and shift towards technology-supported learning, UNeLearn is expected to help U.N. agencies eliminate duplicative activities, reduce costs and reach a wider client base.

"As a first step towards the implementation of the project, a comprehensive stock-taking exercise is planned to commence early in 2009 to identify and integrate quality-assured training resources from across the U.N. system," Steiner said.

The U.N. Staff College will host online content for training in areas such as agriculture, development, education, environment, food security, health and human rights.

The project will address issues of how universities, schools and training departments are teaching; the power of storytelling and other narrative approaches in the design of online learning; and the sustainability of open education resources.

Collaboration will also focus on communities' impact on learning facilitated by Web 2.0 applications and developments in games-based approaches and mobile technologies.

The initiative is inspired by the U.N.'s "Delivering as One" concept, which aims to maximize coherence among U.N. projects at the country-level to implement the Millennium Development Goals.

Some of the organizations taking part in UNeLearn are the Food and Agricultural Organization; The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; the U.N. Development Programme; UNEP; the U.N. High Commission for Refugees; the U.N. Secretariat; U.N. University; the World Food Program; and the World Trade Organization.

Louise Shaper in Perth WA passed this on, thanks Louise! :-)

The wonders of skype

2008-12-18T08:53:00.006-07:00

I use Skype almost every day in my personal and professional life. It's free and easy to use and so personal! My sister and I cook together with our laptops on in our kitchens, chatting while doing our "chores". She's in Melbourne and I'm in Edmonton! My nieces and nephews play imaginary games with me through the computer screen, feeding me imaginary cake or giving me presents!

More and more we are integrating Skype into teaching in schools and higher education.

Rather than create my own set of "how to" instructions here, which is time-consuming, I will link to Blogs where others have already done the hard work. Here are two links to follow if you want to learn more about setting up Skype and want to link with others who are already successfully doing this.

The Edublogger has a "how to set up skype" guide, followed by discussions, this is based on higher education settings.
An online e-journey with generation Y tells us about their experiences using Skype in their schools

Podcasting & Web 2.0: Implications for Health Care Education

2008-12-18T08:45:00.001-07:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Podcasting & Web 2.0: Implications for Health Care Education

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: podcasting web 2.0)

Is this a conference you would like to go to?

2008-12-16T21:36:00.004-07:00

Web 2.0 expo

The Power of Less

"We do some of our best work when we’re constrained: by budgets, by headcount, by technology, by the economy. These are the times when bureaucracy and waste die by necessity. What’s left are ideas, and the muscle to make them real."

2009 will be a tough year in many ways, but now more than ever, the core concepts of Web 2.0 provide an advantage. Lightweight tools, user interfaces, and development models will help streamline productivity and focus resources; new business models will emerge out of the environment of change. Transparency and openness will help avoid disasters and extend our influence, as we learn to trust users as co-developers. Marketers can’t afford to ignore the value of social media, communities, and a new set of analytics. On an individual, team, company, and global level, this is the year we will choose to work on what matters.

So, where is healthcare going with this? Are we part of the big picture that big business has?

Barriers to Web 2.0 in OT education

2008-12-16T16:56:00.002-07:00

I am passionate about linking occupational therapists in the online environment... however, right now my perceived barriers are these:
1. Health care practitioners are people-people, therefore a computer is seen as a barrier to their ultimate goal of working with people (even though Web 2.0 IS so interactive!!!).
2. The curriculum is so tight that it is almost impossible to embed new technologies without going over the allowed hours.
3. Students are competitive for grades and do not like to share their new knowledge (not all of them, but most of them) and this means that Web 2.0 is counter-intuitive to their ingrained learning modes.
4. Students are feeling pressured to "get through the curriculum" not taking time to think and problem solve, so taking time to work collaboratively is like pulling teeth.
5. Students have become more like "consumers" of an education product as opposed to creators of their own knowledge, therefore point 4 applies again.
6. Health care practice settings do not allow Internet access or time to build online networks, therefore it is all on your own time and from home.

HOWEVER... I believe that it is important to create opportunities for networked learning as it is the key to lifelong learning.

My experience tells me to:
1. Start small first (small technology tasks that don't have huge grades attached)
2. Run parallel education sessions about Web 2.0 technology for health care practitioners in the field, so that there is a willing audience waiting for our graduates
3. Reduce components of the curriculum if possible to create space for learning about online technologies (wikis, blogs, podcasts, and SL)
4. Network with others who are having success and ask them for help!

The Networked Student

2008-12-13T10:26:00.002-07:00

I followed a link from a blog called Wishful Thinking in Medical Education (a great blog!) to this YouTube clip featured on a blog called TechTicker. An excellent discussion follows below the YouTube clip and Mike Bogle discusses his post further in a video clip of his own! How Cool!

Occupational therapy groups on facebook

2008-12-09T10:42:00.032-07:00

There is a rapidly growing number of OT groups on Facebook, that are both serious and social. Over the next few days I'm going to find them and list them here.

This is a snapshot of what's happening in this corner of the Web 2.0 world for our profession.

I'll list if it is an open or closed group, I'll also highlight student groups too. The bottom list is those groups that I believe are unprofessional.

Professional Networking Groups

American Occupational Therapy Association: open group
Collaborating and sharing ideas with other occupational therapists: open group
Darwin OT: open to Australian networks
Bored Of Fluffy Occupational Therapy: open group
Facebook Occupational Therapy Association: open group
Health, Physical Educators, Exercise Science, PT, OT, and Nurses: open interdisciplinary student networking group
Hong Kong Occupational Therapy: closed group
I'm an occupational therapist/OT student and I have something to say!: open group
I'm tired of having to explain what occupational therapy is: open group
Is OT Worthwhile?: open group
I've worked at St Thomas'/Guys as an OT!!!: open group
Los Angeles OT Leadership Forum: open group
Occupational Therapists (OTs) for Refugees: open group
Occupational Therapists Having External Reproductive Systems: open group
Occupational Therapy at the University of Salford: open group
Occupational Therapy: What's in it for you?: open group
OTs are hot: open group
OT AUSTRALIA National: open group
OT AUSTRALIA QLD: open group
OT from ACTT: open group
OT Hand Party - An Occupational Perspective: open group
OT Jobs Help: open group
OT Malaysia: closed group
OT meeting space: closed group
Princess Margaret Hospital OT: open group
St.Theresa's hospital OT: closed group
The OT Principles: open group
Top 10 Reasons to Stay Up Late with an Occupational Therapist: open group
Union Hospital OT: open group
What YOU need to know about occupational therapy: open group
Yes, I am a Occupational Therapist and no we don't wipe bums!!: open group

Student groups:
AUT OT '08: open group
Christ Church OT class of 2008: open group
Cumbo students OT graduating 2011: open group
Curtin OT Students: open group
Curtin students '09: open group
Dalhousie MSc(OT) 2010: closed group
Dalhousie BSc Alumni: open group
Deakin OT Alumni: closed group
Deakin OT graduates 2007: closed
Deakin OT Grads of '09 open group
Derby OT Students - Class of 2008: open group
Derby Uni OT students-Class of 2009: open group
Downstate OT 2010: open group
ECU OT UE Rehab Club open group
Entering Physiotherapy or OT at McMaster University in Sep. 2008? open group
FIRST GRADUATE OT PALMİYE COLLEGE :): open group
First year O.T '08: open group
1st year Wits OT 2008: open group
Future Physical/Occupational Therapist: open group
GCU OT Society: open group
LLTC 'B' 2008 OT!: open group
LOOKING FOR A MAJOR? NOT SURE WHAT TO DO? O.T. is the way to go!!: open group
MCG OT 2010: closed group
McGill 2008-2012 PT-OT: closed group
McGill PT & OT 2007-2011: closed group
McMaster MSc. OT Grad Class of 2009: open group
Monash OT: open group
My OT professor wants me to do what?: open group
Occupational Performance HELP!!!: open group
Occupational Therapy-OT
OT at Stockton: open group
OT CSU class of 2008: closed group
OT Class of 97: open group
OT class of 2009: open group
OT Class of 2010: open group
OT Group: open to Australian networks
OT@ECU It Started With Us!: open to Australian networks
OT@TUKS: open group
OT at LaTrobe: open
OT Students: open group
OT students in Bethlehem university closed group
OT students 2nd Year 2008: open group
O.T sTuDeNts r SpEcIaL tOO!!!!! :): open group
OT Vs PT 3 - The Last Stand: open group
OT Masters Class of 2009 open group
Philly OT Event: open group
PT/OT Frosh 2008: closed group
Poly U OT: open group
Queens University OT class of '09: open group
Sargent College OT Alumni Group: closed group
SJSU OT
Touro OT: closed group
UCT-OT: open group
Uni of Derby OT Student and proud to be: open group
UQ graduates of 2008: open group
UEA Occupational Therapy: open group
University of Utah OT class of 2010 open group
UWO OT class of 2005: open group

Other groups related to or created by OTs
Six Degrees Of Healthcare/Medical Separation: open group
Web 2.0 for healthcare: closed group

Negative side of facebook groups that have OT in their title
OT Blokes Who Love Hitting The Piss and Not Working Much: open group
OT Booze Cruise '08: closed group
Yeah Bitch, I'm OT: open group

Another good e-health blog

2008-12-07T16:51:00.004-07:00

I've just added a link to eHealth, a blog devoted to eHealth and Health IT. There are some excellent posts and also some excellent links.

The volume of activity happening in the USA since Barack Obama was elected has been unbelievable. We're hopefully going to see rapid development of excellent online healthcare resources as a result of this. See this post on Cup of Buzz Blog for an example of what's happening!

Online Healthcare Gets Personal

2008-12-04T22:30:00.004-07:00

Health 2.0 and the Healing Power of Supportive Communities

As we know, social networks are gaining widespread acceptance, and people of all ages are accessing the internet not just to get information but also to find, give and receive emotional support.

In a recent report from CarePages, they discuss that scientific studies provide evidence that such support has significant health benefits.

An excerpt from their full report:
"For people facing a health crisis or a chronic, debilitating condition, Health 2.0 is not just about innovative technology – although technical advances such as the expansion of broadband have made Internet applications easier to access and use. Technology, however, is only an enabling tool to help these Health 2.0 individuals get what they really want – the opportunity to connect with others who will help them feel better physically, emotionally, mentally and/or spiritually."

This report links with three of my other posts. The first one where I talked about the incredible support my father received from an online support group, after he was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, the post I made about "doing being and becoming a blogger, to belong in a virtual world" and one linked to that... about the blogging project we are planning with Edmonton Brain Injury Relearning Society... to facilitate safe blogging with people who have an acquired brain injury.

TechnOT: Why OT's need to be online

2008-12-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

TechnOT: Why OT's need to be online
This earlier post on "Why OTs need to be online" links with today's post on "Web searches feed health fears" this article claims that we are becoming cyberchondriacs!

If health professionals have a larger presence in the online world would this make this problem better or worse I wonder?

The future of online learning 10 years on

2008-12-01T09:13:00.004-07:00

Stephen Downes, an educator and researcher in New Brunswick Canada reflects on his essay entitled The Future of Online Learning. In a recent post on his blog he has reviewed and updated this essay, finding that many of his predictions made ten years ago were quite accurate. Visit this link to read the essay in Stephen's blog or download a word version from the blog site.

Web searches feed health fears

2008-12-01T07:30:00.003-07:00

BBC News Monday, 1 December 2008

Health information online is breeding a generation of cyberchondriacs - people who needlessly fear the worst diagnosis after surfing the net, say researchers.

A team at Microsoft studied health-related Web searches on popular search engines and surveyed 515 employees about their health-related searching.

Web searches had the potential to escalate fears - like a headache was caused by a brain tumour, for example.

Experts said people concerned about their health should see a doctor.

Self-diagnosis by search engine

Microsoft conducted the study to improve its own search engine.

Roughly 2% of all the Web queries were health-related, and about 250,000 users, or a quarter of the sample, engaged in a least one medical search during the study.

The Web can be a useful tool to find out more information about conditions, but it should not replace talking to an expert

A spokeswoman from NHS Direct

The researchers found Web searches for common symptoms such as headache and chest pain were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the serious illnesses are much more rare.

Searching for "chest pain" or "muscle twitches" returned terrifying results with the same frequency as less serious ailments, even though the chances of having a heart attack or a fatal neurodegenerative condition is far lower than having simpleindigestion or muscle strain, for example.

About a third of the 515 Microsoft employees who answered a survey on their medical search habits "escalated" their follow-up searches to explore serious, rarer illnesses.

Although the work does not give firm proof that searching the web increases health fears - users may simply be curious about a condition - the researchers say it is likely in some circumstances.

"Our results show that Web search engines have the potential to escalate medical concerns," said Eric Horvitz, an artificial intelligence researcher for Microsoft.

Trusted sources

A spokeswoman from NHS Direct said health information on the Web was no substitute for expert advice.

"It is always a good idea to talk to a clinician who can point you in the right direction if you are concerned about your health.

"The Web can be a useful tool to find out more information about conditions, but it should not replace talking to an expert."

Henry Scowcroft, of Cancer Research UK, said trusted patient information websites could be useful resources.

"Paradoxically, the problem in the UK is that many people are still unaware of the symptoms of cancer, and delay in seeing a doctor is one of the key reasons why this country's cancer survival figures lag behind the best in Europe.

"It's important to study this area further, but we must also remember that many people still have no access to the wealth of information online, and that health inequalities - including inequality of information access - are widening, not narrowing."

Did you know: Shift happens... 2008 version

2008-12-01T00:43:00.001-07:00

The Future of Education

2008-12-01T00:41:00.000-07:00

Future of Education

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: knowledge informl)

What's next on the web

2008-11-29T22:10:00.002-07:00

Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond, May 2008 Update

From: ricmac,
6 months ago

Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond, May 2008 Update

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: wellington 2008)

An overview of emerging web technology trends, as covered on top tech blog ReadWriteWeb; such as Websites becoming web services, Semantic Apps, Open Data, Mobile Web, Recommendation Engines. This presentation was given by ReadWriteWeb Founder and Editor Richard MacManus at XMediaLab, Wellington, May 2008.

SlideShare Link

Want a laugh?

2008-11-12T13:34:00.002-07:00

This awesome animation by Alan Becker has us enthralled! It's not just clever computer animation but an incisive depiction of frustration by the "victim".

Click here to go to the link: sit back and watch.

Thanks for sharing this Trish :-)

Shazam! A Projector Is Shrunk

2008-11-06T22:35:00.003-07:00

Thanks Susan Burwash for this link...
The New York Times

By DAVID POGUE

Published: November 5, 2008

Optoma Pico really shines.

The Walkman put a stereo system in your pocket and changed the game forever. A modern digital watch has the computing power of a roomful of 1950s computer gear. And people are watching TV shows these days on iPods about the size of a business card.

Enormous feats of shrinkage like that don’t come along very often, though. So when they do, you sit up and take notice — as you will the first time you see the Optoma Pico Projector ($430 list price). It’s a long-awaited, much-rumored projector about the size of a cellphone: 2 by 4.1 by 0.7 inches, weighing 4.2 ounces.

A pocket projector? Are you kidding? This isn’t just a new product — it’s a whole new product category. To read the whole article click on this link

Wikiflash is happening

2008-11-03T16:32:00.005-07:00

For those of you who love all things web2.0 and want OT to really get a move on in this area, then wikiflash needs you! Go to the wikipedia occupational therapy article then sign in and become a contributor. The University of Salford is taking the lead here, and they need players! Once you've made a contribution go to OT Wikiflash to enroll and get credit for your contribution! It's so easy.

Get going Web 2.0 OTs!!! (Webtwoots)

Disability is Natural Website

2008-11-01T14:32:00.006-06:00

While preparing for a course with first year OT students I "Googled" the term "people first language". I stumbled across Kathy Snow's website called Disability is Natural and read her downloadable document about people first language.

I asked for Kathy's permission to use this in teaching and she was happy to help me spread this information to help inform future health care practitioners that person first language is NOT about political correctness, but about respect and dignity.

Another downloadable document puts forward Kathy's case against the term "Special Needs". This is also very clearly written.

This is yet another example of the power of the internet as a tool for education.

Adaptive Toys

2008-10-23T21:25:00.004-06:00

We are working on a case study about an 18-month old boy who has hemiplegia and we are up to the part where the students present their plan to the "mom". Here are some links one our second year MScOT students shared with the class today. Brittany recommends Special Kids Zone and says "this site has the most amazing AT, toys, adapted everything, you name it, you can probably find it there!" and the next site is Cerebral Palsy toys and play aids, which has some really good information about CP and toys.

Thanks for sharing your new knowledge :-)

Salford University Occupational Therapy Education Blog: How do YOU engage in activity?

2008-10-20T22:21:00.000-06:00

Salford University Occupational Therapy Education Blog: How do YOU engage in activity?

This post about students commenting on their leisure activities and how they achieve a sense of doing, being and becoming through these activities links very well with a post I also made about doing, being, becoming a blogger and belonging in a virtual community.

TechnOT: Using a computer is an Activity of Daily Living (ADL)

2008-10-16T23:17:00.002-06:00

It's refreshing to see that Verdonck and Ryan (2008) state that technology can be useful to improve both functional independence and occupational performance in every day OT practice by using mainstream technologies, including information and communication technologies such as the internet, computer software, portable devices and computer games, in their everyday interventions. This article ALSO used the CMOP to articulate how computer technology is impacting every aspect of our lives.
Another reason to get a copy of this article if you want a great glossary of terms for technology!

Verdonck, M. C., & Ryan, S. (2008). Mainstream technology as an occupational therapy tool: technophobe or technogeek? British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 71(6), 253-256.
TechnOT: Using a computer is an Activity of Daily Living (ADL)

iShoe

2008-10-16T22:01:00.003-06:00

One quarter of senior citizens chronically fall down, leading to over 300,000 broken hips a year. Developed by NASA and tested on astronauts, our patent-pending insole rehabilitates the wearer’s ability to balance, reduces falls, and automatically notifies caregivers and loved ones by phone should a fall take place. Welcome to iShoe.

Using a computer is an Activity of Daily Living (ADL)

2008-10-14T16:42:00.013-06:00

Lane and Ziviani (1999) state that technology access become an increasingly important Activity of Daily Living however I am not certain that occupational therapists think terribly deeply about the significance of computer access in daily life. It's probably not even a standard question in an ADL assessment!

Using the Canadian Model of Occupational Performance and Engagement (CMOP-E) we can identify how pervasive the computer has become in our lives and see that assessing how, where, when and why our clients use computers is Core OT business!

Person
Affective: How do computers impact affect? Well, we all know the frustration of a computer "crashing" or forgetting how or where you saved a precious document and so on, but we also know the joy of conquering a new program, making our first slide show, or maybe the sense of connectedness through emailing a friend or joining an online community.

Cognitive: Computer use varies in its complexity, depending on the task you are doing. Many people find computers easier to use with guidance and practice, demonstrating that accessing a computer regularly facilitates ease of use. (See "affect" above for impact of cognitive level and computer program level being mis-matched!)

Physical: The ergonomics industry (and many OTs and PTs... and optometrists) have worked out that the physical impact of the computer has seen a boom in business. Not being able to touch type, over-using a mouse and staring too long at a screen are three typical sources of over-use injuries brought about by computer use.

Occupation The CMOP delineates occupation into three main areas; Productivity, Self-care and Leisure. This Taxonomy is a guide in breaking down areas of occupation. This Taxonomy can also be a source of frustration when we think about what to put under each productivity, self-care and leisure (e.g.: is cooking productivity, self-care or leisure!? Answer: depends what you're cooking!)

For this discussion we'll keep it simple... Computers have changed the world! Computers enable people to participate in productivity, self-care and leisure occupations that didn't exist 20 years ago. Computers store information (e.g.: work documents, recipes at home, photos, etc), connect people (e.g.: friends, family, support groups, work, social networking etc), provide entertainment (e.g.: games, social networking, buy tickets to a concert!), connect with databases and directories and so on.

Environment The CMOP names aspects of the environment as physical, institutional, cultural and social. All have been impacted by computers.

Our physical environments (built and natural) have changed since the advent of the computer. Computers have changed how we design and use our homes, people seek a place for their computer (or computers) that enables them to be online when they want and in a space they can spend extended periods. Wireless computer access has also meant that we can look up recipes while cooking in the kitchen, then take the computer to another room for another purpose.

In institutional environments such as the workplace, computers are the core tool used in nearly every industry, in towns and cities governments are paying for public spaces to be "connected" so that people can access their computers from almost anywhere. Our mountains have mobile towers on them and being able to access the internet using a mobile phone is fast becoming an expectation, not a dream!

Computers connected to the world wide web also enable access to new virtual communities. Virtual communities such as those in Facebook or MySpace create another social dimension for people to engage, socialize and learn from each other. Second Life is a rapidly growing community in the virtual world where you can walk and talk in the computer using an avatar to talk with other people. You can connect with special interest groups, get information on a range of topics, or simply "hang out" in a night club.

I think as OTs we need to keep in mind how to create safeguards to ensure that vulnerable people are not taken advantage of in all online communities.

Spirituality How does computer use relate to spirituality? Computers directly impact the users experience of purpose and meaning in their lives. Meaning and purpose is so often derived by the important roles we play and how we experience relationships with other people. Computers play a significant role in both these areas. Computers can enable us to achieve our potential in work and personal life. This is seen through the fact that so many people use a computer to effectively complete work tasks, to maintain links with and be involved in the lives of friends and family (email, Skype, MSN etc), to store precious memories in online photo albums, or to expand social horizons through social networking spaces or to manage personal problems in online support communities.

Engagement in the new text Enabling Occupation II (Townsend and Polatajko, 2007) 'E' was added to the model to depict 'engagement' in occupation.

Computers facilitate engagement in meaningful occupations in a range of environments. Therefore computer use is an important Activity of Daily Living and core OT business!

Lane, A., & Ziviani, J. (1999). Children's computer access: analysis of the visual-motor demands of software designed for children. British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 62(1), 19-25.

Townsend, E. A., & Polatajko, H. J. (2007). Enabling occupation II : advancing an occupational therapy vision for health, well-being & justice through occupation /Elizabeth A. Townsend & Helene J. Polatajko, primary authors. Ottawa, Ontario: Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists.

TechnOT: Doing, being, becoming a blogger and belonging to a virtual community!

2008-10-13T21:37:00.000-06:00

TechnOT: Doing, being, becoming a blogger and belonging to a virtual community!
I updated this blog entry tonight as I was reviewing the types of searches that got people to my blog. A vast number of the searches that landed people in my blog included words like: "what is doing being becoming". So I've added a bit more history on the model's development ahead of my story on doing, being becoming a blogger and belonging in a virtual world! I hope that this information is helpful!

New game gizmo uses mind control

2008-10-13T21:00:00.002-06:00

Asher Moses, The Age Newspaper, Melbourne, Australia, May 7, 2008

An Australian company is gearing up to release a computer headset that allows people to control video games using only the power of their minds.

Emotiv Systems, founded by four Australian scientists in 2003, will release the $US299 ($315) EPOC headset on the US market this year.

Featuring 16 sensors that measure electrical impulses from the brain, the headset - which plugs into the PC's USB port - will enable games to register facial expressions, emotions and even cognitive thoughts, allowing players to perform in-game actions just by visualising them.

The headset works in a similar way to voice recognition, in that it must first be calibrated using Emotiv's software to recognise patterns in the user's electrical brain impulses, which are used to perform 30 preset actions.

What implications might this hardware and software have for people with communication disorders?