The Search Principle blog

My colleague Jo-Anne Naslund and I have enjoyed a partnership over the past six to eight months and one of the knowledge objects we have created together has now officially been peer-reviewed, edited and published in a special web 2.0 issue of School Libraries Worldwide. It is entitled:

Towards school library 2.0: an introduction to social software tools for teacher-librarians

Jo-Anne Naslund & Dean Giustini

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“The goal of this issue – New Literacies – New Libraries – New Learners – is to explore some of the current research and emerging notions of School Libraries 2.0. By this we mean implications for libraries of Web 2.0, or “the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology, social software and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users”(Wikipedia). Library 2.0 entails “both physical and mindset changes that are occurring within libraries to make our spaces and services more user-centric and inviting”. We are publishing this issue in blog and wiki formats to reflect new ways to publish and share information and to allow viewers/readers to add their responses and comments to the content presented. Thus the journal itself is a living example of socially constructing knowledge with Web 2.0 tools.”

Many of you will remember the days (not too long ago) when Google listed the number of pages it crawled below the main search box. Sometime in 2005, it dropped that practice but I remember when it hit ~8 billion pages.

News this week on the Google blog was that Google now crawls one (1) trillion pages. That’s one thousand billion.

In comparison, PubMed‘s refined database of peer-reviewed biomedical citations is about 18,000,000 (million).

On Google scholar‘s third anniversary, I surmised that its index was nearing 500 million pages. With the announcement of one trillion pages on regular Google, I’m revising that guesstimate. Google scholar is probably closer to one billion pages now – the largest academic index of its type in the world…in history.

Michelle Kraft has her finger on many issues facing health librarians and our physician users. A case in point is her post today entitled “Our Desire To Be Social and Privacy” in which she discusses some of the issues arising from an article about medical weblogs published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Highly recommended

Further reading:

1. Web 2.0 policy documents & strategies in higher education

2. Evidence-based web 2.0

Allan came up with excellent ideas around web 3.0 for his Suite101.com entries.

This is a case of his refining his ideas to cogent thumbnails. Nice work Cho.

Recently, Google announced Lively (its own version of Second Life) and now Knol (a distant cousin of Wikipedia). The term knol is named after a “unit of knowledge”.

Even though it’s hard to tell whether Knol will work, this is another interesting Google move and project. Knol will provide authoritative articles about “scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions.”

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Some questions for Google (or anyone wanting to answer):

1. Does Google want to compete for everything in the information age? Be a jack of all trades? Or, is this a strategic move towards web 3.0?

2. What happened to wisdom of the crowd? Is Knol Google’s version of leveraging knowledge in the long tail? Will this move signal a return to experts composing encyclopedia entries?

3. With so much health content, isn’t it possible to build a Google medicine-like knowledge tool – something better than Knol? Why not take on and compete with proprietary companies UpToDate by replicating that type of resource? Interesting that Medpedia is out in force now too, and launching in late ’08.

4. Is Knol, with a growing list of high-quality articles written by experts, part of Google’s plan to move into the semantic web? Could be.

5. At what point will Google’s conflict of interest be apparent? Will Knol content be positioned higher in search results than Wikipedia – garnering more ad traffic for the search giant?

Aren’t we getting closer to monopolization of information with Knol? What are your comments? ~ Dean

For ‘fraidy cats‘ like myself who prefer/choose not to go to international conferences (due to avoidance tactics and fear of airplanes/flying), we now have, wait for it, the Twebinar. (Think a seminar on the web using Twitter as a supplemental tool).

The BMJ published recently published an interesting debate entitled “Are international medical conferences an outdated luxury the planet can’t afford?”. The focus was not the inconvenience of flying to conferences as much as the cumulative effect of the carbon imprint of flying. The paper also discussed different electronic means and social media (like a Twebinar) to facilitate discussion for deep learning instead of meeting face-to-face (F2F) at conferences.

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1. So, what is a Twebinar?

A twebinar is a web conference or seminar and Twitter mash-up where conversations take place in real-time before, during and after the webinar, on Twitter.

2. How does it work?

. Sign-up for a webinar that interests you.
. Watch from your computer and receive information visually and verbally from presenter(s).
. During the webinar, a parallel conversation takes place as participants comment, ask questions, and discuss topics on Twitter.
. Follow webinar participants on Twitter and join the conversation.

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What are the possible applications of using social media to replace F2F conferences in medicine and health librarianship? Sensory overload? More attention-fragmentation??

The exciting posssibilities of web 2.0 and social software are often harshly criticized for the unrealistic expectations they engender around solving problems in learning. That said, every once in a while I find an article that strikes a coherent balance between highlighting social media ‘s vast possibilities with a proper critique of their appropriate use in health education.

To wit, Dr. Iain Doherty – Director of the Learning Technology Unit in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Auckland – has written an excellent overview of the current state of web 2.0 use in health and medicine entitled “Web 2.0: A Movement Within The Health Community“. I encourage you to read it.

In concise fashion, Doherty (see his publications) covers a range of issues such the move from web 1.0 to 2.0, social media’s many affordances and how consumer health is implicated in this discourse.

He also makes some excellent points on pedagogy 2.0 (my current obsession):

“The combination of a Pedagogy 2.0 together with the collaborative affordances of Web 2.0 technologies may mark a turning point for technologies in teaching and learning but at this stage we are seeing small scale web 2.0 implementations in education with little empirical evidence for the effectiveness of these tools ….there is as yet no reason to believe that web 2.0 technologies will fare any better than other technologies introduced into teaching and learning.”

As I have said before (and which Banks & Giustini will publish soon), the use of social media must be grounded using a variety of techniques which will not be doctrinaire but closer to the idea of evidence-based web 2.0 than we have previously seen.

Stay tuned for more information as we complete our thoughts for the BMJ. ~Dean

To be published soon…..here’s the introduction to whet your appetite. ~Dean

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Teaching and learning series – part I of IV

“Adult learning theories in the digital age: an introduction for health librarians.”

Introduction

“This paper is an introduction to adult learning theories for health librarians. As the first of a four-part series for the JCHLA/JABSC, the focus initially will be to provide some rationale for the study of adult learning theories (androgogy) – or pedagogy as it is also known – for health librarians. Thereafter, three of the most-influential adult learning theories will be introduced: behaviourism, constructivism and situated learning, respectively. [1]

For those interested in a deeper form of intellectual inquiry, suggestions for further reading will be provided. The recent research into teaching and learning is quite thought-provoking given the emergence of new digital theories and web 2.0 with its many learning spaces. [2] In any case, the goal will be to point health librarians to the seminal literature where appropriate and to build a solid knowledge-base for ongoing study.”

This just in (thanks to Laurel K. Graham, American Dietetic Association):

“Giovanni Giacomo Casanova was a soldier, an author, a spy, a gambler and a librarian. But all of those things pale in comparison to his reputation as a lover. His memoirs contain detailed accounts of his intimate relations with over 100 women!

This 5-1/4″ tall, hard vinyl action figure comes with a masquerade mask which he can put to great use in his tireless pursuit of adventure.”

References

1. Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Casanova

Since June 2007, when Apple released its first generation iPhone, I’ve been thinking about the implications of having online access to medical information and ‘the best evidence’ from a pocket phone. (In fact, I recommended that a new digital librarian be hired at VGH to use mobile technologies.) This is what the new 3G iPhone seems to represent: a revolution in terms of what mobiles can do for access to information.

The question is: of the million+ plus iPhones sold this past weekend worldwide, how many were sold to health professionals? Probably a large percentage. How many health librarians will buy the iPhone? According to this ComputerWorld article, many of the new 3G buyers are doctors, medical students and other professionals who can’t wait to get their hands on the device.

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“Thomas Drew Kozlek, 28, a second-year medical student at Boston University, said [he bought an iPhone so that] he could use a faster network to reach the Internet, send e-mails and text messages, and find Web information for medical classes. “I am basically already using the iPhone as a replacement for my computer,” he said, noting that he expects to try out some of the interesting medical applications in Apple’s new App Store.

His father, Dr. Thomas Drew, has used his iPhone in his surgical practice to search the Web, primarily with Google. “I use it a lot for disease information,” he said. “You’d be surprised how much up-to-date medical information you can get that way.”

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On my Twitter feed, I am watching very closely the conversation among my doctor and technology contacts about the iPhone. I am joining the Friendfeed group for physicians with Joshua, Ves, Berci and other medical personnel. Am I buying the iPhone? I will, very shortly….stay tuned for updates here and over at the wiki entry on the Apple iPhone for Physicians.