Technology-Escapades

At the conclusion of the Southern Nursing Research Society (SNRS) 2009 Conference in Baltimore, MD, which was a fantastic success (!), Dr. Anne Turner-Henson went in front of the camera that Dr. Cindy Russell was behind as we conducted short, candid, person-on-the-bench interviews. One of our first targets was Dr. Jean McSweeney, a senior scientist and icon in nursing who always makes it a point to attend SNRS conferences. Dr. McSweeney graciously agreed to be interviewed and teach us a very important sign.

Here’s a copy of that video:

Dr. McSweeney noted that nursing has been doing translational research long before it became the vogue. Nurses have known we needed to be translating science for the health of the public. Dr. McSweeney takes this commitment to heart, as she is interviewed by Reader’s Digest, Ladies Home Journal, Prevention Magazine and others. Women have emailed her after reading her articles in those magazines and say “you’ve saved my life!”

When asked about why senior investigators should keep coming to SNRS conferences, Dr. McSweeney reflected on attending SNRS as a student. I remember seeing scientists whose work I had read. Those scientists talked with her at her poster session. They attended her podium presentations. They dialogued with her about her research and its importance. In her words, it’s important for senior investigators to give back to the profession and this organization.

Dr. McSweeney graduated from the University of Texas and is a true Longhorn, commenting Texas is near and dear to my heart. She is looking forward to SNRS2010 that is planned for February 2-6, 2010 at the Hilton Austin, in Austin, TX. She even helped Dr. Turner-Henson learn an important sign that would serve her well at next year’s conference (see pic).

Jean McSweeney shows Anne Turner-Henson how to make the Longhorn sign

Come join us at the Southern Nursing Research Society’s 2010 24th Annual Conference: Health Care Challenges of the Next Decade, scheduled for February 2-6, 2010 at the Hilton Austin in Austin, TX.

There’s much talk these days to how we need to do things differently when we present -whether to professional or lay groups, whether in classrooms or the community. Whether it’s Beyond Bullet Points or a similar set of guidelines. we’re hearing that to be an excellent presenter we must engage the audience, focus on the benefits of whatever we’re talking about (avoiding a focus on features only), and do a litany of other things to make sure that an audience takes away the intended message.

Earlier this week I participated in a webinar, delivered by Carmine Gallo, that offered tips for delivering a presentation like Steve Jobs. You’ve likely heard of Jobs. Apple. Mac. Innovation. Excitement. iPhone. iPod. iTunes. Macbook Air. Etc…

Jobs doesn’t deliver boring presentations filled with bullet pointed facts and figures. Jobs delivers excitement … a solution to a need that, perhaps, someone has not yet identified!

In Gallo’s webinar, he started off by making this point:

You need to use your presentations to

Inspire – to elicit fervent enthusiasm for a product

VERSUS using them as

A means to deliver information and facts

He went on to cover 10 points for helping your presentations be more like those of Steve Jobs. These are:

1. Plan on paper

2. Set the theme

3. Show enthusiasm

4. Provide a roadmap

5. Make numbers meaningful

6. Deliver a Spielberg moment

7. Keep slides simple

8. Sell the benefit

9. Rehearse

10. Don’t sweat the small stuff

I liked the 10-20-30 rule. You should have no more than 10 slides for a 20 minute presentation and your font size should be 30.

You can access the entire online presentation where this information was delivered @ http://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/790850824

You will be required to give your email and you will, no doubt, receive an email from Go To Meeting asking if you’d like to demo their product … but there is no “catch” to reviewing this presentation

If you listen to the presentation, you will have a different experience than merely reading this list of tips! Highly recommended! Worth the time in listening to it. Thanks to Go To Meeting for offering this webinar for free.

I’ve always liked the YouTube video by Don McMillan on Life After Death by Powerpoint. Have a look at it for some other great pointers.

Here at the College of Nursing’s alumni day. Featured speaker of the day is Dr. Tim Porter-O’Grady. An engaging presenter, he keeps the attention of the audience through interesting stories, fascinating statistics, and engaging humor.

He compares the healthcare system of today to what we once had. The average length of stay of most patients is 4.5 hours. Nurses try to provide discharge planning just before patients go home, when patients can only retain 5% of what they hear. He referenced a hospital in Hackensack that has videotaped discharge instructions and posted them on their unit’s website so that patients and families can them once they return home.

Change isn’t a choice, he says. And, with a visual of a nice outhouse on the screen, the question is asked Do you really yearn for the good old days? Of course, some would say yes. Our educational systems are mostly grounded in the past. Two words matter, according to Stephen Hawking: Change is … we can do nothing about that.

It was interesting viewing O’Grady’s presentation. He evidenced many of the qualities that were described in a recent webinar I attended on How to Deliver Presentations like Steve Jobs. O’Grady didn’t have a slide for every point of his presentation. He often had a black, blank screen. When he had something on screen it was often an image and a few words. He spoke from memory – no notes, no bullet points on his slides to guide him. Yes, he is a skilled presenter and does numerous presentations … but his delivery of material (from early morning till mid-afternoon) was great. His energy level was high, his voice altered from high to low, he didn’t stand behind a podium but walked in the front of the room back and forward (in a not distracting way).

O’Grady engaged the audience all the way thru his presentation. He walked into the audience to speak to a table of faculty. He borrowed materials from audience members to illustrate points – such as how nurses take report at shift change.

How much am I doing? How much am I accomplishing? How much have I done? These are industrial age questions … they are not the questions of today. But, what are today’s questions? It’s not about what you do. “DO” is not a value.

Nurses are wedded to old ideas and old ways of doing things. We cling to paper and pen, which means that we cannot fully embrace the paperless and electronic world in which we live. We need to let go of some things in order to embrace new and current things.

He spoke of an information-driven mechanism for nursing education. Knowledge is not a capacity. We cannot know it all. Knowledge is now a utility. The issue is not do we have knowledge (you could only achieve 10% of what you need to know to be relevant and competent today). How do we make you access competent? Do I know how to access knowledge? Knowledge access is a skill, it takes discipline, it’s a learned skill. Access is only the first stage. We must take the knowledge we access and judge whether it can be applied and how we can use it. We must have translational skills and applicational skills. Third, we must learn how to let it go when it’s time. Most of what you got when you got it is irrelevant when you apply it.

Policies and procedures are a barrier to today’s healthcare system. You can’t do evidence-based healthcare in a non-electronic world. The applied framework often serves as a barrier to the application of evidence-based healthcare. BEHAVIOR is changed by what is directly available to us at the time.

We must start reading outside of our field. He referenced the following books (just a few of those on his shelf):

• Blink
• Massive Change: The Future of Global Design
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the many are smarter than …
• Systems Thinking, Second Edition: Managing Chaos and Complexity: A Platform for Designing Business Architecture
• Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
• The World is Flat

The “doing” of nursing is not the distinctive factor … it’s the “being” of nursing. His question: What do we be? We need to integrate to improve the patient’s journey. We must see our future differently from the path that got us here.

As nurses, we’ve got to be willing to explore places we’ve never been before. The journey is not without risk. Similarly, you can’t eliminate errors. You can manage error. You can learn from error. We have created risk-adverse people in our hospitals. As a leader, when you find an error you should call people together to celebrate it and learn from it.

He spoke about the DNP degree, saying that it was a timely degree, but that the healthcare system isn’t sure about what to do with DNP graduates.

Living in the digital world:

• information is greater than we are. Information is the vehicle we’re traveling on.
• Information is a utility, not a capacity
• Access is more important than having
• Knowledge is not permanently relevant
• Work never remains the same
• Effectiveness occurs at the intersections
• Look for the nodes and networks

He spoke about  the sociocultural aspects of information technology. He noted that No discipline can ever again define for itself alone what it will be or do out of context of its relationship with those on whom it has an impact and those who impact it. What this means is that life goes on at the intersection of the information age – your sustainability is determined at the intersections.

Preservationist activities don’t work in transformational times. Disciplines that attempt to preserve their roles and their place in healthcare are not effective in transformational times. We must be flexible and create flexibility in the system. Change must occur when necessary … not in 6-9 months when the policy and procedure can change.

What I need to know is already out there. I just need to access it. We need to use PDAs. Portability, mobility and practice … simplify your practice and do your work versus servicing or working around the system. Need timeliness and access.

We each must be a catalyst for change.

Porter-O’Grady used the afternoon session to get people engaged with each other and the topic. His first question to the group that he asked each set of people to consider was “What is the one thing that you think you’ll hear when you return home after attending this session?” Some of the interesting responses from the group, and his response to them, included:

• Costs too much – how much does it cost to do what you’re doing now? What is the price we’re paying to keep doing what we’re doing now? The emotional price? The economic cost? We live in a value age. In the industrial age, we lived in a volume age – how much can you do. In the value age in which we currently live, we must demonstrate how we’re making a difference. What difference does what you do make? That’s the key question we’re being asked now. Nurses are good at telling people what they do … but the question of today is what difference does what you do make. Person, Profession, Patient – how have you made a difference in these three “Ps”? The diploma from your school isn’t an exit ticket, it’s an entry ticket. Now you begin to learn. Your educational preparation doesn’t tell you what you’ve accomplished … it tells you that you’re ready to accomplish. Demonstrate your value, competence. What impact did you have on your patient or population? Our work in nursing is to change something – it’s performance demonstration.
• How do we get the attention of a staff nurse who sees him/herself as a doer versus a leader/coordinator of change? Magnet and systems applications have demonstrated how we can do that. We cannot change behavior by just addressing behavior alone – we can’t just demand behavior change. You can’t change behavior if you don’t change the structure in which the behavior unfolds. You can only get the behavior that the structure permits. You will always get the behavior that the structure is set up to support. If you have a structure of hierarchy, you will only get dependence. Is the organization structured in a way that the expectations for behavior are clear? Accountability and consequences need to be there. In a system, if an option exists for a behavior, the option will be taken. We have more options than we have rules or behaviors. There aren’t any consequences for behavior. You must build an infrastructure that has accountability and with accountability you must have consequences. Need to make sure that participation is an expectation of the workplace.
• We tried it before and it didn’t work. This statement is code for “I am not going to be engaged.” You need to assign this person a role, that of watching out for how things are going and letting you know when things are coming close to looking like it did when things didn’t work.
• What’s in it for me? This is a legitimate question. It’s a primordial question and an appropriate one. We could ask this question more often. What do I get from what I’m doing … in terms of role, energy, commitment, contribution. In addition to asking that question, you must be willing to seek out the answer.

In today’s day and age, you can’t be a champion of nursing if you’re not a champion of technology.

Porter-O’Grady certainly delivered an interesting set of ideas that were fashioned around some of today’s literature and ideas. He’s well worth taking time to read and listen to.

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Bureau of Health Professions (BHPr) All Programs meeting was held the end of February 2008 at the Hilton Washington Hotel in Washington, DC. More than 1200 BHPr grantees and Federal agency representatives attended this conference.

Some of the more interesting tidbits from the conference included the following:

• Instead of a health professions’ pipeline, think of it as a health professions’ swamp – a slow moving process that is pristine with everything working with all other things in the swamp. Tom Ricketts from UNC Chapel Hill
• It’s a fallacy for us to think that students know about blogs, wikis, etc… or that they are gamers. We have to help them understand these things. Me – after listening to presenters touting the latest great stuff we can use in our courses – it takes a HUGE amount of time to level out students’ understanding of these things!
• If you’re waiting for things to slow down so you can catch your balance, you’re in the wrong profession! Beverly Malone from the National League for Nursing
• The difference between change and transformation: Change is when I give you a dollar bill and you give me 4 quarters. Transformation is when I give you a dollar bill and you give me 5 dollars! Beverly Malone from the National League for Nursing
• We need to help students learn HOW to think versus WHAT to think. There is too much going on. No way to memorize it all. Beverly Malone from the National League for Nursing
• Information literacy is not the same as evidence-based medicine (even if a physician says it is)! Or even evidence-based healthcare! Me – at the breakfast chat focused on healthcare information technology – Recognizing that you need information, seeking the information, actually accessing the information, evaluating the information, and applying the information is not merely evidence-based medicine! Information literacy is a precursor to, among other things, providing evidence-based healthcare.
• To leverage a high performance workforce we must thread competencies and training across our educational programs. Mary Wakefield from the University of North Dakota – this is particularly important for information technology and information literacy competencies
• We need new healthcare providers that can work in more places: the right people with the right skills in the right places. Consider the AT&T commercial where the phone works in more locations: New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, and North Dakota – which means that it’s a new location, like Newfranlantakota. Similarly, our healthcare professionals need to be able to maximize their efforts. Consider combining the skills of an exercise physiologist and a dietician to become an exerphysietician! Marcia Brand of HRSA

An interesting mix of people and presentations. We presented a poster about our use of a mix of Web 2.0 tools to facilitate our HRSA-funded Nurse Education, Practice, and Retention project. Click here to access a PDF version of that poster. Read more about our LISTEN (Learning Information Seeking and Technology for Evidence-based Nursing practice) here!

Ever think about Leonardo da Vinci who is described on Wikipedia as a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, musician, and writer? Infinitely curious, highly inventive, and diversely talented … wouldn’t we aspire to be like him? Or to have the learners with whom we interact be like him?

Michael J. Gelb has written an interesting book about How to think like Leonardo da Vinci. Subtitled Seven Steps to Genius Every day, the book lists 7 critical principles that need to be followed for success (discussing each of these in relation to da Vinci’s work and life):

1. Curiosita: An insatiably curious approach to life.
2. Dimonstratzione: A commitment to test knowledge through experience.
3. Sensazione: The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to clarify experience.
4. Sfumato: A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.
5. Arte/Scienza: The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination (“whole-brain thinking”).
6. Corporalita: The cultivation of ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.
7. Connessione: A recognition and appreciation for the connectedness of all things and phenomena; “systems thinking.”

Kris, at Wandering Ink, has done a brilliant post entitled How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci. Although some of what is described is more relevant to primary and secondary education environments, it takes just a little creativity (and not a lot of genius) to envision the applicability of the post to higher education environments.

For instance … think about Connessione in educating healthcare professions’ students.

What is it? A recognition and appreciation for the connectedness of all things and phenomena. “Systems thinking.”

How do we “murder” it? By teaching facts and concepts in specific classes. By having classes and the content within them be independent of each other. By not helping students see the interconnectedness of what they are learning. By not providing the big picture.

Can you give an example? As faculty, it seems we have repeated struggles with presenting content in an integrated fashion. We often have separate courses in such content as diversity, social issues, informatics, pharmacology, anatomy/physiology, and interviewing. Then we have courses in pediatric care, care of the adult, and gerontology. Sure, students are expected to take content they learn in the general courses and apply it in their other courses. But, as faculty, we know that the extent to which this is a requirement or whether it is valued or “demanded” is often dependent on who’s teaching the course. For better or worse, there is a great deal of latitude in what individual faculty within courses can opt to include.

Why don’t we focus on systems thinking in our health professions’ courses? Because it is time-consuming and challenging to make the connections (for ourselves and learners) that are required in this type of thinking. Students (and faculty) often prefer a smaller and more specific set of course outcomes. When attending to the interconnectedness of content, it is a challenge to ensure that learners are aware of all the various aspects to be included. What about grading learners’ output?

Earlier I did a posting on the need for increased interprofessional education. The connectedness of health professions’ education is a topic of continuing discussion. Question: How many pharmacology courses does a health science campus need? Answer: At least one for each health professions’ program on campus. Why, oh why, can’t we get together in something that is a “no brainer” to educate health professions’ students together? There’s always someone’s schedule that doesn’t permit one group of students to be with another group of students. Never enough classroom space to bring all pharmacy, nursing, and medicine students together for a single class.

Why don’t we think outside of our disciplinary boxes? Let’s bring small groups of interprofessional students together. Not all nursing students need to have pharmacy class on Monday between 2 and 4. What about 1/3 of the nursing students having pharmacy class with 1/3 of the medicine and 1/3 of the pharmacy students? The other 2 groups of 1/3 of each class can have their joint classes at a different time. We need to think more flexibly in what we do.

Regretably, it often seems easier to argue for the status quo than to think outside of the box and try innovative programs. Or, sometimes people will initiate changes, but not really support those changes with the right people or the release time that would be needed to fully integrate the innovation.

But, back to How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci.

We really don’t want to do that. I can’t imagine that anyone purposefully is trying to quelch enthusiasm, creativity, innovation, and genius. But we all know that sometimes it happens. What genius healthcare provider are we missing because of how we teach and how we grade learners’ products? Have a read of Kris’ Wandering Ink post and ponder how this applies to the teaching that you do!

If you want to explore the use of brief audioclips in class even prior to reading this posting, head to technology-escapades.net and access the resources I’ve provided on that page. If you’d like to consider the use of brief audioclips in class, read on here!

Students in many online/hybrid courses often bemoan the fact that coursework is heavily text-based. Written assignments combined with written discussion board postings with written instructor feedback makes for a lot of reading. This is a lot of material to enter via one channel. Even if a student is a highly visual/textual learner, at some point it just becomes a lot to do class work and read, read, read (or write, write, write).

There are some movements toward looking at alternative mechanisms for engaging students and eliminating some of the heavy writing/reading requirements that faculty and students face. One mechanism that some faculty are trying is brief audioclips.

Brief … let me stress BRIEF.

Brief is in the eye of the beholder, to a great extent. Ask a clinical practice expert in nursing to be brief about their area of expertise and you’re likely to see brief is about an hour! Conveying the complexity of an area just requires time.

Ask a learner what’s brief and you’re likely to hear – anything that doesn’t make me scroll on a webpage or anything I don’t have to listen to for more than 3-5 minutes.

3-5 minutes … about the length of a really good song …

3-5 minutes … something that we can focus our attention on without feeling too guilty or feeling as if we’re neglecting too many other things.

Pressed to consider opportunities, faculty can likely identify many possibilities for brief 3-5 minute snippets of audio “stuff.”

Faculty can use brief audioclips to:

1. Introduce themselves to students prior to the class starting (very helpful if the course is entirely online)
2. Summarize the week’s important points/content (versus posting on the discussion board)
3. Provide feedback to students on their projects (versus doing a long written document – in many cases feedback can be to the entire group of students – common positive aspects of their work and common areas needing improvement – versus completely individual feedback)
4. Deliver late-breaking news (especially news that is best accompanied by the instructor’s personality)
5. Deliver interviews (with other experts in the field or with persons living with, or who have experienced, a specific type of illness or disease)

I did a not brief audioclip 2 years ago for a 2 credit hour Informatics in Healthcare course that was being delivered completely online to a group of 80 entering BSN students. In the clip (18 minutes long) I introduced myself, talked about my background in informatics, and then went through the syllabus and the course requirements. You can listen to the pitiful thing here. Were I to re-do this for today (and I probably will), I would make one audioclip to introduce myself, one to review the syllabus, and one to discuss each major assignment. The clip itself is fine, as is the content, but it needs to be divided into separate categories so that students who are interested in reviewing one component don’t need to listen to the entire thing or search a long clip to find what they’re looking for.

A colleague of mine implemented brief audioclips to provide feedback on the week’s activities and discussion board. Students appreciated those, particularly at the beginning of the term. It gave them a different mechanism for feedback and they could hear the important points. Students have requested that other faculty implement this strategy, which is why I developed the resource site at technology-escapades.net.

I used an audioclip for a qualitative research course to provide students feedback on their applied exercise for a particular week. Students work in small groups to complete a specific exercise each week and then submit fieldnotes or interview transcripts or a brief analysis. Instead of providing each group with what is often repetitive feedback that applies to every group, I opted to do a brief narrated PowerPoint (like an audioclip) for the group. I provided any additional needed feedback to individual groups but was able to take care of most of the feedback in the centralized clip. Students told me how much they appreciated the variety of my doing that … but also indicated that even doing that on a weekly basis would get old after a while! For them and me!

I’ve not used audioclips for delivering late-breaking news. But I did use a podcast for delivering interviews with two local experts in electronic health records and health information technology. These two folks, Dr. Diane Pace and Dr. Andy Spooner, serve on many boards and provide advice and guidance to many groups. Given that the informatics class was totally online, inviting them to speak in front of the class wasn’t an option. Even if the class met face-to-face, the chances of us having a class session at a time that either of them could be with us (given they are very busy healthcare providers) would have been slim. So I opted to do a podcast with each of them. These were much too long to count as audioclips but I could have divided them into segments with a table of contents so that students could click and access content of interest or I could have asked them to respond to a specific question in 3-5 minutes.

There have been some movements to document the use and effectiveness of using brief audioclips in classes. I’ve compiled the material of which I’m aware, as well as various information about using audioclips in classes and how to do audioclips. All of this information is accessible to you at http://www.technology-escapades.net/?q=node/22 and I invite your examination of this resource site. I’d also enjoy hearing about other resources you know about that should go on this page, as well as reports of your use of brief audioclips in classes. What are your ideas for other uses of brief audioclips that are faculty-generated?

We are living in a time of exponential growth in information and data that not only affects our working life, but permeates our personal life as well. Just looking at the growth in storage capacity of computers drives this point home.

From the smallest BIT of information to the largest BRONTOBYTE of data, there is a huge growth in data. In trying to put this into perspective, consider:

• A BIT is the smallest unit of data that a computer uses.
• Many of us have heard of MEGABYTES or GIGABYTES. A CD-ROM will hold 600 megabytes. In contrast, one gigabyte can hold the contents of 10 yards of books on a shelf.
• TERABYTES are the up and coming data term. One terabyte can hold 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s a LOT of data!
• An EXABYTE is equivalent to one quintillion bytes. Some say that five EXABYTES would be equal to all of the words ever spoken by mankind.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkley have estimated that humans are generating in excess of two exabytes of new information annually. There’s nothing to compare most of the higher terms to. But just that we have all these terms for the amount of data and that we keep expanding in terms of what we consider to be our standard gives one pause to think!

We can’t hold all of this in our brains, either in our short-term or long-term memory. TMI … Too Much Information.

As a nurse, though, I can attest to the fact that we once thought we could keep important aspects of patient care in our heads in the 1970s. Then we started jotting notes to keep in our pockets and putting charge stickers all over our uniforms. We then moved to our expandable pockets that we filled with reference texts that weighed us down. Now, however, we’re at a point where we not only need information but we need reliable, usable, evidence-based information that we can locate at the point of care, precisely at the time we need it, without taking a lot of time.

We’ve had an information explosion!

We’re suffering from infoluenza! Sounds plausible, but just what is infoluenza?

Luke Naismith from Melbourne, Australia first coined this term after reading Clive Hamilton’s and Richard Denniss’ book entitled Affluenza: When too much is never enough. You can click on the image of the book and be taken to Amazon.com for a description of the book and people’s (pretty positive) reactions to it.

Affluenza is a disease … a disease of our attachment to materialism. We have more money, but we’re deeper in debt. We have larger houses, but smaller families. It’s the keeping up with the Joneses syndrome in ever increasing proportions.

As a side note, Hamilton’s and Denniss’ book is about Australian affluenza. A corrollary Affluenza book about American society is also available on Amazon. Might make for some interesting comparisons.

So, back to Luke Naismith and his term infoluenza. In his Knowledge Futures blog, Naismith defined infoluenza as:

1. The frustrated, overwhelmed and unfulfilled feeling that results from continued efforts to broaden information or knowledge management systems.
2. An epidemic of confusion, vendor hype, paralysis by analysis, and suspect decision-making caused by dogged pursuit of a Technology Nirvana.
3. An unsustainable addiction to incorporating more and more information.

Essentially, people desire more content and more information, and ever more content and ever more information. But our attachment to information resources fails us as we search for deeper meaning. Infoluenza becomes

a disease of not being able to understand the limitations of deriving contentment from content alone.

This is one reason that in his Patterns and Sensemaking presentation Siemens talked about information visualization and non-text ways of presenting and reviewing data and information for meaning.

Siemens referred to a quote by David Gelernter:

If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don’t bother.

At some point, it’s just not useful to keep adding narrative and verbiage to things. At some point, we are overtaken by infoluenza. At some point, we need the overloadatorium!

Steve Gilbert of the TLT Group started an overloadatorium blog … just what all of us suffering from infoluenza need.

Finally, if you’re looking for some cures for infoluenza specifically, check out Jack Vinson’s blog, Knowledge Jolt with Jack, that provides a list of 7 analgesics.

Good luck with managing your infoluenza. Try not to inflict your addiction with information and content on poor unsuspecting students who would prefer to understand the meaning and context of things … not merely meaningless lists of “stuff.” If you’ve got some good ideas to make sure infoluenza stays under control, let me know!

Again, let me return to that fabulous online presentation on Patterns and Sensemaking delivered by George Siemens. I blogged about it in yesterday’s post, scroll down or click here. In yesterday’s post I introduced you to a website called Worldmapper that uses cartograms to convey changes in world areas by values on specific data being mapped. Have a look at the post … since a picture’s worth a thousand words I think you’ll find it quicker to look than read!

Siemens talked about patterns, saying that patterns are:

• about sensemaking (the picture’s worth a thousand words saying)
• about understanding
• a temporary “state of”
• ever evolving and emergent
• aggregated based on context and/or experience to form some type of image that portrays understanding

A neat way to convey patterns, of content and quantity, is through the use of tag clouds. I have a del.icio.us account – http://del.icio.us/ck9russell – that I use to bookmark websites of interest/use to me, and potentially others.

You can read my earlier blog post about del.icio.us here.

I’ve just now gone and taken an image of my current tag cloud from del.icio.us. That’s the image you see at the right. You can see:

• I’ve got some diverse interests – agoraphobia to obesity to technology
• Sometimes I’m not too consistent – grant and Grants should probably be put together
• I’ve used some tags quite a bit – like conference (17 tags), education (28 tags), games (40 tags), iPod (16 tags), virtual (12 tags)

You can visit my del.icio.us webpage and click on any of the tags you see and be taken to the complete listing of the URLs tagged with that term.

I author a Qualitative TiddlyWiki that is part of the Qualitative Research Web Ring. I wanted this to be a value-added site. One way to add value is to continuously compile information about upcoming qualitative conferences and calls for abstracts for qualitative conferences. But I didn’t want to spend all my time going in and updating the Qualitative TiddlyWiki.

What I opted to do, and I think it was an excellent use of time and resources, is to tag websites with qualcall (if it’s a call for abstracts for a qualitative conference) or qualconf (if it’s a web page for a qualitative conference). Now when I receive notification of either of these I simply go to the web page and click to tag it in del.icio.us and it is automatically added to the listing. Hardly any effort on my part – since I’d be going to the site anyway to have a look at the information to see if I was interested.

But I digress.

If I listed all these tags and gave you the number of links for each, even if I sorted the list in ascending or descending order, you would not understand it and make sense of it in the same way as by viewing the tag cloud.

Which brings us back to George Siemens and his Patterns and Sensemaking presentation and today’s resource.

The resource of the day is … Quintura. From their website:

Quintura employs a unique graphical user interface with an interactive tag cloud to visually navigate and easily refine searches. Quintura’s neural networking technology discovers related search terms to the initial query and presents those terms as the interactive tag cloud. Users can then refine or narrow down their searches by clicking on any word or phrase in the cloud.

Given my belief in the picture’s worth a thousand words saying as of late, let me insert a tag cloud that I just generated using the term “patient safety.”

I went to the Quintura site and, at the top of the page beside the word “Find” I typed in “patient safety” (with quotation marks). You can see the terms that it brought up as related in some way to patient safety.

When you use your mouse and hover over any of the other phrases, a tag cloud for that term/phrase opens up, so you can see even more potentially related terms.

Additionally, on the right side of the Quintura page is a list of links that appear for the tag that is prominent at the moment.

Now, another fascinating thing about the Quintura search, you can elect to search the web, which is what I did to generate this particular tag cloud, or you can choose to search:

• images
• video
• blinkx, the largest video search engine on the Web
• or even Amazon (yes, the retailer that has books … and lots of other stuff)

Here’s how Siemens talked about Quintura. It exposes the periphery and the loose connections among terms. It’s useful because it can give you some indications of other phrases and terms you might want to review that are related in some way to your primary interest area, but on the periphery. In some type of context, though, everything in the tag cloud is more or less connected.

As Siemen noted:

We communicate and understand differently when we move away from a linear text format to one that is more visual.

I hope you have a newfound appreciation for images and tag clouds after reading this post. Let me know if you have some interesting ways to visualize information so that you can make sense of things differently! I’d enjoy hearing your stories.