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Over the course of the last year, I’ve seen recent blogposts appear in the results screens of Mother Google. And now Google has started to integrate scientific papers (crawled by Google Scholar) into Mother Google.

Check out the “How Web 2.0 is Changing Medicine” search screenshot. Google lists the author (me), cited by (how many other papers cite me) and links to related articles and other ‘versions’ (including the free self-archived copies). Metadata integration is not perfect in Google by any means but the search results seem to be richer for academics – if a bit cluttered.

Google also shows additional information next to books, web pages and other media that include addresses and tests displaying metadata and extracting specialized information from web pages. While Yahoo tries to convince webmasters to make structured data explicitly available, Google has a more practical approach and uses what’s already available to enhance its search results.

This is a positive development for Google & Google scholar, and will point scholars to useful, authoritative information as needed. Just be sure to remember that this is merely a browsing feature – and should not be viewed as a replacement for a proper literature review. ~Dean

Other developments of note to academic searchers:

* Google Scholar has begun to flag papers that are gratis/free with green triangles
* ProQuest and Google have reached an agreement (see here) to digitize millions of pages of content from ProQuest‘s newspaper microfilm archives. Google wants to create searchable archives of newspapers otherwise unlikely to be digitized, making them available on the open web

In our first LIBR534 class, we asked the student librarians to interrogate a series of issues such as why they were taking our class, to list the most important issues facing librarianship and to describe their best learning experience. I thought it would be interesting to look at some of their top (most commonly-mentioned) traits for the ‘ideal teacher’. Enjoy! Dean

Top Ten (10) Traits of an Ideal Teacher

1. An ideal teacher is humanistic – someone who cares about his/her students.

2. An ideal teacher establishes clear and transparent guidelines for assessment, and clear expectations.

3. An ideal teacher makes you feel hopeful – and praises your attempts to learn.

4. An ideal teacher truly cares about your individual goals and makes a commitment to help you reach them.

5. An ideal teacher is empathic, caring and knowledgeable – and has the skills to impart what is important.

6. An ideal teacher stimulates critical thinking and infuses the joy of learning a new subject with the unique climate of a specific group of students.

7. An ideal teacher is passionate about his/her subject and shares that with students.

8. An ideal teacher can organize students and their abilities to take everyone to a new place intellectually.

9. An ideal teacher listens, inspires, motivates – and knows when to use humour.

10. An ideal teacher is also a learner and an observer of others.

Alex Wright (and his book) came to my attention when I read an article he wrote in the NY Times about Paul Otlet and the ”web time forgot’. Since then, I’ve blogged about him here and <a href=”http://migrator.rab.olt.ubc.ca/googlescholar/2008/06/Paul-Otlet’s-Web-of-Meaning—Circa-1934/”>here, and even met the guy when he visited UBC recently. I’ve asked Alex a couple of questions about his background as a librarian and his work as an information architect at the New York Times – here is our interview.

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1. Alex, tell my readers who you are and a little about your background, what you do now, etc. (btw, what is an information architect?)

Alex Wright: “My professional background is all over the map. I’ve worked at various times as a writer, designer, librarian, consultant and (once upon a time) fry chef.

Before that, I worked in various capacities as a consultant and manager at companies like IBM, Yahoo!, the Long Now Foundation and elsewhere. In my previous life, I spent six years working as an academic librarian at Harvard, where I worked on my MLS at Simmons.”

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2. How did you come to write “Glut: mastering information…”?

Alex Wright: “Having cut my teeth as a librarian, then morphed into a Web worker during the dotcom boom, I began to realize what a shallow grasp of history most people seem to have about the history of information systems. The Web has become such a powerful cultural force that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that people have been organizing information for a very long time. So the book (Glut) really grew out of this personal interest in exploring how people have organized information over the years, and asking whether these earlier periods can teach us anything about where the Web may be taking us.”

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3. In the book, you mention a number of influential thinkers – ‘masters of information’, if you like….what similarities and differences do you see among some of the great thinkers in information organization as you surveyed them? I’m thinking about both librarians in the list (Cutter, for example) and the others (Bush, Linnaeus, Ted Nelson, etc)?

Alex Wright: “I’m not sure whether there are any particular character traits that unify these people, other than their obvious shared interest in creating systems for organizing information. Some of these people – like Ted Nelson, or Giordano Bruno – were extreme iconoclasts, heretics even. Whereas some of them – like Charles Cutter or Vannevar Bush – worked within the institutional mainstream. But all of these people seem to have shared a passion for making sense of the intellectual cosmos, and for creating structures that would help people transcend the chaos around them.”

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4. “Glut” is organized chronologically, more or less. What is it about “looking back” that informs what we do now and in the future in terms of organizing or mastering information? Does the semantic web hold some promise, in your view, in dealing with info-glut?

Alex Wright: “The philosopher-programmer Werner Kunzel once said, “Computer science is currently so successful that it has no use for its own history.” It seems like the Web has become such a cultural juggernaut that it almost seems to obscure the history of what came before.

“But as I argue in my book, I think we need to resist the pull of this kind of techno-futurism and make the effort to look back, because this is not the first time that people have had to come to terms with a disruptive new information technology. And while the changes we are witnessing today may be unprecedented, history can teach us a lot about the relationship between technological and social change – lessons we may need to understand if we’re going to make sense of a world that’s probably going to change even faster in the years ahead.

Regarding the Semantic Web, I’m an agnostic. In principle the concept holds a lot of promise, but it remains to be seen whether people will be willing to invest the kind of manual effort required to create the ontologies that would really make it fly. I think there’s some hope for machine-generated ontologies, however, but that work is still at a pretty nascent stage.”

Some of you may remember that the first Medicine 2.0 Conference is this week in Toronto – with 180 participants from 19 countries. That’s impressive.

I’m not able to attend, but I’m watching my Twitter feeds, Doctor Friendfeeds and the Medicine 2.0 feeds closely.

I just realized today that five months ago I didn’t use ‘micromedia‘. It’s changed how I stay current. Now, due to my need to be a snoop and stay connected, I feel the tools are part of my daily routine – and indispensable. Check out the live photos.

Some of our LIBR534 students are just started to use Twitter too.

Time for more evaluation of Google’s endless 2008 rollouts and beta projects. Today it’s a new open source browser Google is calling Chrome – http://www.google.com/chrome

A few comments:

* first thing you see when you open Chrome is a page of your favourite websites – <a href=”http://migrator.rab.olt.ubc.ca/googlescholar/2008/06/Five-(5)-Reasons-Opera-9.5-Is-Seriously-Good/”>think Opera – pulled from your search history – go straight to them with no typing;

* typical Google lite, simple and easy, tabs that allow you to close a session (not the whole browser); see this video

* Chrome borrows its navigation ideas – and technologies – from other browsers. More choice is a good thing and might stem the tide of Microsoft hegemony.

Or, will it create another monopoly (i.e. Google) to take its place? ~Dean

Over at my Twitter feed, this post will be my 1000th (see here) since I started using the tool in April 2008. It therefore seems appropriate that I spend time reflecting on the use of micromedia in educational contexts and in my work as a health librarian.

Several medical bloggers who are also enthusiastic web 2.0 lone rangers – such as Berci, Joshua and Ves – use Twitter every day. Just this morning Berci sent a tweet from a conference. The medical Friendfeed seems to have traction among physicians, too.

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What’s cool is kibbitzing back and forth with these guys: affable, funny and keen to stay current, I have the innate sense that their leadership in using social media will result in better networking across medical disciplines. But this will take time.

Questions about whether Twitter has any application in education – and whether teachers need to be careful of how they employ micromedia in the classroom – inevitably arise. Moreover, is there an emerging Twitterogy?

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I’ve been e-mailing back and forth with Melanie McBride who has some excellent ideas on Twitter and participatory learning. She pointed me towards Dave Parry at Academic Hack and what he has done with Twitter and his students.

Is there an emerging pedagogy using micromedia? in fact, a Twitterogy? Check out the links and information below, and let me know your thoughts. ~Dean

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References

1. Teaching With Twitter – video

2. ‘Electronic note passing’ – http://www.chatterous.com/

3. Melanie McBride dot.net

4. Twitter: Ephemeral Learning Tool

5. Towards school library 2.0 “microblogging”

One of the most common questions I get from aspiring health librarians – which I’ve discussed before here – is “I really want to be a health librarian. Can I be one without a health sciences background and/or degree?”

My colleague Greg Rowell has a background in the sciences – but I do not. However, I have always maintained that my initial liability has actually instilled in me an intellectual drive and interest in learning my field – and this in turn has become a huge plus as I try to share my expertise gleaned over two decades with my colleagues and students through the wiki.

Last fall, a very revealing study was published in the Health Information and Libraries Journal based out of the UK, “The education and training needs of health librarians – the generalist versus specialist dilemma” by T Petrinic et al. The study found that a first degree in a scientific area was an advantage in the early stages of building a career in health librarianship but this advantage diminishes over time through training and experience.

I was glad to see this study because it affirmed my observations. This is a point I will make to my students, next week, during the first class of term when we are all trying orient ourselves to our discussions and scholarly work. ~Dean

For more background, similar project information and weblinks, see the Google health entry.

Introduction

In the last few years (post Google medicine), search giant Google has undertaken at least three different health-related projects: first it was the tagging project at Google Co-op (Health) in 2006, and then Google Health (electronic patient records for consumers) in 2008.

Also in 2008, Knol (though not completely health-related).

What is ‘Google health‘?

Google Health is a personal health record project permitting health consumers and patients to build their own health records in a private web space. Users can include information in their private records such as their health conditions, medications, allergies and lab results. One of its many benefits is that the health record merges all information from disparate sources and tracks conditions and drug allergies. At present, Google Health is available in the United States only.

Google Health is not covered under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. According to critics, this is a huge privacy issue when important privacy laws do not apply to newer technologies.

Google health & privacy

Privacy issues are front and centre with Google Health. However, many patients do not seem concerned that their personal health information is controlled by Google. That aside, some privacy experts suggest that Google health may be more private than the many current “paper-based” methods of record-keeping in the health-care system where records are subject to all kinds of indiscreet access.

Similar to its academic search service Google scholar, Google will not reveal how this new tool will be monetized. In development since mid-2006, Google health has had a two-month pilot in 2008 with 1,600 patients at The Cleveland Clinic. In May 2008, Google health was released to the general public in beta.

Doctor-centred, doctor-driven – new site launched to feature social media and web 2.0 in medicine
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I agree with Dr. Ves Dimov at Clinical Cases and Images that Bertalan Mesko, an enthusiastic proponent of web 2.0 technologies in medicine, has taken a big step to the front of the pack in terms of discussing, interrogating and thinking about the practice of medicine in a time of great change in our health care systems.

In an effort to create “a bridge between physicians and e-patients”, Bertalan or Berci as he is known on Twitter has launched Webicina – “an online service that aims to help physicians enter the web 2.0 era with personalized medicine 2.0 packages; step-by-step tutorials; webinars and online image building solutions.”

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All health librarians and physicians internationally should monitor the development of Webicina . It’ll be an interesting exploration. At this point, it is not clear to me whether – as a dot.com website – Webicina will use an ad-based funding model, provide services completely gratis or some other profit-based mix.

In the meantime, best of luck to you and your new project Bertalan. ~ Dean

First, you may wish to have another gander at the newly-updated Apple iPhone for physicians entry on the wiki. My goal is to do systematic culls of the top web 2.0 sites every month and update this entry for health librarians and physicians.

Next, have you seen some of the cool tools that are emerging for the iPhone? Check some of them out.

Unbound medicine is particularly worth examining. Portability is critical for the medical fellows, residents and physicians at Vancouver General Hospital so many of them will find this optimized site for MEDLINE (and EBM culling) rather useful.

Are you a digital clinical librarian participating in ward and morning rounds? Will you buy the iPhone 3G? or opt in for the Blackberry or other mobile device?