You can check your edgerank here. Sometimes you get a higher pourcentage of people seeing your Page Posts. It really depends on the type of content you publish and the Page you are promoting. For example I am managing a page on Facebook who gets more than 40% attention because I only have qualified fans.

A new report by PwC found consumers are increasingly turning to social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to find answers to their healthcare concerns, and that this frequently results in seeking out second opinions for previously diagnosed problems.

• 5 healthcare tweet chats you should have on your agenda

• Social Media in Healthcare infographics

• Game changers – four principles for gaming in health

Games could be the most important digital health tool of the 21st century and have a highly influential impact on the engagement pharmaceutical companies foster with health care professionals, patients and the public. Yet it is tempting for people to separate them from the ‘serious’ business of work, education and health.

• 1 in 3 surveyed says social media changes attitudes to medicines

A third of US social media users say it could change the way they think about their medicines, according to a new poll. The findings are part of a new survey which confirms the power of social networking to spread information about health, and influence consumers through authoritative sources and through peers and other online influencers.

• Here comes Microsoft Academic Search 2.0

• Crowdsourcing, citizen sensing and sensor web technologies for public and environmental health surveillance and crisis management

• Why gaming is a positive element in life [infographic]

• Moore’s Law Doesn’t Apply to Health Care Technology

Moore’s Law, which is more a rule of thumb than a law, originally applied to computer hardware and the notion that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The law has been used to describe the speed of advance in a wide range of technologies.

Medical education and medical practice at all levels, already online in so many ways, can no longer remain aloof from social media.

When patients ask questions about the online world, or more precisely about social media, medical professionals should at least be aware of the issues and be able to give an honest, nondefensive, appropriate answer without hesitation.

After a presentation about this course at the Medicine 2.0 Congress at Stanford University in November 2011, a U.K. physician asked permission to travel to Debrecen, Hungary, every week during the semester just to attend the course. So, Dr. Mesko developed and launched a new global format called The Social MEDia Course.

MobyGratis http://mobygratis.com – is a website where nonprofits (and others) and download music for use in non-commercial film or video. It’s maintained by the Moby, the musician.

A quick note of explanation – you can’t legally use any old music you find online in your video. Someone will have rights to the music you want to use; you need to get permission from them. Some folks make is easy and affordable; some do not. Rather than create something that you may not be able to show anywhere they care about copyright, you might consider using MobyGratis. (Businesses can also download music there for a fee.)

On an unrelated note, I’ll be giving an intro webinar on Google Analytics through MNREM (as part of a project called MIRC):
When: May 3 at noon (CST)
Register here: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/980553998

I’m back from Colby College in Maine which also signals the almost-end to the six-month experiment I’ve been running on my Feminist Online Spaces project, and at real places across the country (Concordia in Montreal, UCLA, Rutgers in NJ, Yale in CT, Occidental in CA, Re:Humanities in PA, Feminist Documentary at Smith in MA , and Colby) as I attempt to use an Online Space to enact and hold a set of media objects and circular (Call and Response and Call Again) movements that might propel feminists from:

• Reception to Production

• Commenting to Connection

• Production to Collaboration

• and the Internet to the Real World (and back again)

The successes seem notable: the primary being the palpable sense of excitement, shock, playfulness, worry, and community that was produced in each and every place on my road trip when I unmade protocol by asking audience members to respond to my scholarly talk by making something quick and rudimentary that would last, that would become public, that would leave their place and sit on mine, that represented each one of them and their place and their ideas about feminism and place, and that would give them each some small piece of authorial control in a situation not typically structured to do so. Make they did, and many of the objects were quite extraordinary (especially given how quickly they were made), and all of them were generous and generative.

My main goal, however–again, I think successfully played out–was less things than process based: not to acquire the objects and more to turn the room into something holding interactions akin to those of the Internet, and then allowing the felt experience of this altered interaction to shed light on the different ways we form community and connection in live, digital, and their linked places.

But lots of this didn’t work so well, too, in ways that were informative. First off, there was a structuring power imbalance between me, the outsider (with the website, and the plane ticket and speaker’s stipend, and the carefully crafted and long talk) and the placed audience (who freely gave up their words but with only five minutes to author them) that most closely mirrors the imbalance of (corporate) websites. The impulse or call was mine and my feminist audiences playfully or politely responded. For the most part, they then produced the expendable, one-off objects that define most of our interactions online, albeit, in this case, more focused on one sustained question and politics.

This led me to try to imagine how I might enable more careful, and communal, interaction and towards this I began collaborating with some of the people I had met along the way, most critically with Wendy Hsu and Carey Sargent (Grapefruit Experiment), who I met at Occidental College, where they are post-docs in the Digital Humanities. I invited them to remix something from the Gallery of audience-made objects, which led to the “But I Like Kittens Remix,” and I then connected them to Marty Fink, at Concordia, who worked with them, and others from her local community, to make the song’s cover art.

Then, when I went to the Tri-College Digital Humanities Conference and to Women, Social Justice and Documentary at Smith, I tried (working with Wendy and Carey) to more strongly align community response towards building something together, and requested that people provide sounds that would be used in a song made again by Grapefruit Experiment. From this was made Kong Jian. At Colby, we asked for cover art, and got great stuff again.

Needless to say, while I love all the things people made, and even the process(es), I learned that the ownership, structure, impulse, and infrastructure, while certainly dispersed, stay locked or perhaps laced to me: the instigator and authority. While I am aware that seeds have been planted in many places by using the road, and planes, and rooms, and from those many theres, people will take these ideas and use them as they will, I am still interested in thinking about the best uses of on and offline spaces for making production, connection, collaboration and community, something yet unrealized (by me, online).

I’ve written about Android in medicine several times and now I’m asking you whether you have ideas about it or you know iPhone apps which should have Android alternatives as well.

From the introduction:

The inaugural Social Media Sustainability Index trawled through 287 major companies in North America and Europe and found 120 that were using social media for sustainability comms. Yet, when we dug deeper, just 60 of those were devoting any dedicated resources to that mission.

Fast-forward to the end of 2011 and a new landscape of social media sustainability has emerged. Today, at least 250 major corporates are engaged in some form of social media sustainability comms and more than 100 have a blog, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter channel dedicated to talking about sustainability.

Confused about copyright and how it impacts you and your students? Come learn about some basic ‘big ideas” in copyright, including Fair Use and Creative Commons licensing.  Leave this workshop with a clearer understanding of the issues and a thoughtful process to think through them. We will explore a variety of practical tools and copyright-friendly resources that will enable you and your students to be creative and share their work with the world. Costs: $75 CSD member; $89 non-member. Register here.

Please spread the word about it and get the information about the course to your local medical school or association.

Many thanks!

For example, I follow Cash Mob Minneapolis on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/CashMobMpls I saw on Facebook that they were planning a Cash Mob near me. I got the notice a couple hours in advance but it worked for us and we went up and spent about $20. It was a small shop, jammed with people who were all clearly happy to be supporting the local business. Then I proceeded to stop in several other shops in the area spreading more good cheer and money. So it’s not the kind of thing you’d want to attend weekly – but it was fun and hopefully good for the business and area.

You can find a Cash Mob near your neighborhood online: http://cashmobs.wordpress.com/near-you/ If there isn’t one near you, you might consider starting one. I think it’s such a good idea to boost a little local economic development.

The program will be available by live stream or by viewing the recording after the event. Live streams (there is a limited number of sites the library will connect to, so sign up fast!) will use a computer with an Internet connection, and Windows Media Player is required. The event recording will be available after the storytelling session is over, and a link will be sent to your email account.

Here are the registration forms:
Texas Schools Registration for Peter Rabbit
Non-Texas Schools Registration for Peter Rabbit

a). Unlikely to happen
b). Unlikely to create anything of value

So Many Collaboration Platforms, So Little Collaboration!

Collaboration platforms are everywhere!  Most IT shops have at least one collaboration platform (usually SharePoint) and often several others.  And some people do participate.  The question is, with what result?  The answer often is little that is really worthwhile, and even less that can truly be called “collaboration.”

I used to wonder if there was something in our human nature that inherently resisted collaboration.  Of course, the opposite is true – human beings are both inherently gregarious and naturally collaborative – it’s in our instinct for survival.  The reason I was seeing so little collaboration on collaboration platforms was not that people did not want to collaborate – it’s that they did not understand (or believe in, or want) the purpose for collaboration.

The Collaboration Context

Alan Kay is credited with one of my favorite quotes, “Context is worth 80 IQ points!” In the case of collaboration, context not just the extra IQ points – it’s the whole enchilada of collaboration!

Several years ago, while I was an Executive Vice President at the The Concours Group – a management consulting, research and executive education firm, we were acquired by a company that had developed a collaboration platform.  Our new management was very keen for us to “eat our own dog food” and encouraged everyone in the company to get on the platform and ‘collaborate.’

I found this to be an interesting and enlightening experiment.  Most of us did indeed get on the platform.  Thoughts were posted and commented upon.  Interest groups popped up.  We had a ‘social reputation’ system, and I was proud the day my avatar suddenly listed me as a “Docent”, though I could not find out what that actually meant in this context!  After an early spike, usage dropped.

After a while, someone introduced Yammer into the firm.  A new groundswell of so-called “collaboration” surfaced, but after a while, that too dropped.  I observed that in spite of putting time and energy into “collaboration”, in reality, people were engaging in conversations that, while they may have been interesting, never went anywhere.  Conclusions were never drawn, deliverables were never created, insights never extracted, lessons never learned and applied.

The problem was not the tool – it was a lack of context.  There was no clear purpose or intent to the collaboration.

So, What’s Your Collaborative Intent?

• Are you trying to engage people in problem solving?  For example, stakeholders and/or subject matter experts might be invited to review and expand upon a cause-effect analysis.
• Are you trying to create a deliverable, such as a project proposal?  People might work together on creating the proposal, perhaps each working on their own section, but reviewing and commenting on others sections such that the whole is coherently structured and internally consistent.  Or you might wish to get everyone’s input to the whole proposal, rather than have people focus on their section.
• Do you want a community of practice or interest to capture and evolve a body of knowledge – best practices, templates, examples of how to do something, such as charter a project?
• Are you creating an ‘operating manual’ for an organization, with processes, roles, competencies, rules of engagement, and so on?  Perhaps people will be encouraged to not only create and/or refine the knowledge content, but will also rate the content based upon usability, clarity or how well the organization handles a given situation.
• Are you encouraging people to share across organizational silos – looking for points of leverage or redundancy?

Each of these ‘collaborative intents’ implies a specific goal or set of goals.  And each goal, in turn, might lend itself to a different type of collaboration mechanism.  While content or document management systems might be great for managing ‘documents of record’, they might not be so effective at encouraging multiple authorship.  In fact, document-centric tools tend to deepen and strengthen the traditional document mindset, where a document is something you email around to people to get their input.

It’s all a question of context – what are you hoping to gain through collaboration?  Is the goal clear?  Do those that must participate understand and believe in the goal?

Graphic courtesy of diagoal

Related articles

• The Semantic Wiki – Driving IT Organizational Clarity and Performance (vaughanmerlyn.com)
• The Semantic Wiki – Driving IT Organizational Clarity and Performance: Part 2 (vaughanmerlyn.com)
• The maturation of enterprise social collaboration (blogs.computerworlduk.com)

 Web 1.0 was the first generation of the Web. During this phase the focus was primarily on building the Web, making it accessible, and commercialising it for the first time.  Due to this it was also very “flat” with little interaction from the consumer and the content was mainly static pages which could only be consumed.

 Web 2.0 (where we are believed to be now) refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services — such as social networking sites, wikis and communication tools that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

 Web3.0 refers to a proposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called “the intelligent” or semantic Web which emphasise machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.  It is believed that we will reach this stage somewhere between now and 2020.

 Even though the above is now widely used it is still very architectural based and due to this; a new concept “the Internet of Everything” is beginning to emerge. 

 The premise of this is that at some time in the future (probably when the semantic web is with us) the Internet of everything will be widespread i.e. every device purchased will have an ability to connect to the web and will have its own unique IP address (to emphasis the scale of this belief it is calculated that by 2020 there will be >30 billion permanently Internet – connected devices and >200 billion intermittently Internet-connected devices).

 So what does this mean? The potential to connect everything to the internet means that inanimate objects can drive hyper-connected businesses and create new value chains and in essence the more information we have about the environment we live in the easier it will be able to create new and innovative cost models.  Burglars would certainly need a new career if you could track every object you own. The impact on business models is almost infinite.

 There is a catch however…if a business is to benefit from the “Internet of Everything” investment in technology will certainly need to increase as the amount of storage which will be needed in the future to store all these events and run analytics will be immense.

You just can't copy & paste images from Google!

Finding Needles in a Haystack: Google Search & Web Literacy is scheduled for June 14th at Cooperating School Districts.  Do you ever have trouble finding what you are looking for on the Internet? Would you like some tips and tricks for finding those needles in the haystack? Save time and become more efficient in your research! You’ll learn advanced search techniques and discover easy ways to find images, books, videos, and other educational resources using Google. Be introduced to many hidden search features that will make you say WOW! After finding these web resources, how do you evaluate them? Too often, information published on the Internet is viewed as truth, but is it really?  We will learn how to find out who owns the website, who wrote the information, and whether it is valid. We will then explore sites like EasyBib to learn how to create a proper list of citations easily. Also, what about copyright? Do students have the legal right to copy and paste information from a website into their multi-media presentations and/or their own documents and websites? Investigating Advanced Search, Creative Commons and Fair Use will help you and your students become web literate in today’s world. This 1-day workshop runs 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and costs $149 for CSD members and $189 for non-members. Additionally, if you are interested in graduate credit, there is is 1 available with this course.

You’ll find plenty of information on:

• Support Staff Academy’s Mini-Conference in June
• Free teacher resources
• Tomorrow’s Discovery Education event at CSD
• How to access past Wednesday Webinars
• Summer workshops in the tele
• plus more…

1) From now, you can rate each curated resource, leave comments and share individually.

2) You will see a floating share box as well on each collection.

3) PeRSSonalized Medicine has a new design and some other changes to keep you up-to-date as easily and comfortably as possible.

4) You can now log in by using your Facebook, Twitter or Google+ accounts.