Been learning a lot about social media from following 11andahalfthings. This week was all about social networking. I've been having fun getting to grips with twitter.
Now for Thing 4 I've been exploring examples of social networking being used by researchers or academics in biomedicine and health, and by clinicians. I decided quite quickly that the search facility in Facebook has a lot to be desired! To focus my search I tried looking for groups on Facebook related to UCL and came up with a few different types of examples:
Student groups
Students are big users of facebook. I found lots of student groups just from UCL! One example is the UCL Neuroscience Reading Group, a closed group for any Masters students from UCL's Neuroscience and Phonetics & Linguistics departments.
Academic departments
An example is the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience members, a closed group for anyone who attends, attended, works or worked in this department.
Recruitment for studies
And here's a real life experience example. Just recently a friend posted a message to all her friends on facebook. She was going to use a questionnaire as part of a study for her PhD and needed people on whom to trial-run the questionnaire. By posting it to all her contacts on facebook she was able to quickly and easily get feedback and everyone could see each other's comments and contribute to a discussion on the questionnaire.
It seems she's not alone. I came across quite a few Facebook profiles set up to recruit participants for studies, such as one from UCL's Dept of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology recruiting people to participate in a study on alcohol craving. And in the clinical context, seems Facebook is widely used for recruiting participants in clinical trials, eg. a Canadian trial on smoking cessation.
Other examples
There's an interesting article I found in Nature on how social media has increased public awareness of issues arising from research and consequently has put public pressure on research funding bodies as people put together support groups and air their views on Facebook.
I've always felt that Facebook is something that should be kept for non-professional activities, and maybe it is in terms of the use of a personal profile. But the groups feature allows for easy interaction and networking amongst like-minded people or colleagues and could be a useful tool in this context.
Interestingly I wasn't getting many hits for big organisations relating to biomedicine or health when searching Facebook, so I took a look at some of their websites to see if I could find 'Follow us on facebook' links. Perhaps they share my feeling about Facebook being for social purposes but many don't seem to have a facebook page, although lots share their news on Twitter. Eg: MRC, Department of Health, NICE, Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.
Thursday 14 July 2011
Friday 1 July 2011
Things 1 and 2 - useful blogs
Thing 1 was to create this blog - I can tick that off my list!
Thing 2 is to come up with an example of a blog that a researcher, academic, student or clinician might use.
I carried out a search on Google Blog Search and on Technorati (don't get so many hits here). It was quite easy to identify blogs that researchers, clinicians, etc. in biomedicine or health might want to follow to keep up to date with developments in their field. Some examples I found include:
MRC News - this blog is integrated into their webpage and is to distribute MRC news
BMJ Blogs - The BMJ hosts a wide range of blogs. Many are connected to particular BMJ journals but the Doc2Doc blogs include a news blogs and open blogs for doctors or medical students to post comments on anything they wish.
It was harder trying to find examples of blogs created by researchers or clinicians to assist them with their work or research. Perhaps these personal blogs are not as well indexed, or have strange titles which makes them harder to find? Or perhaps biomedical researchers don't want to share their findings too soon on a publicly available page as it could have implications for malpractice or effect patient care? Maybe in other disciplines you want to show you are the first to discover something, eg. in Maths, where something is either right or wrong. Perhaps in the biomedical or health context you need to keep things under wraps until you have enough evidence.
The best example I found was not from the UK, but was from a statistical genetics research group at Colombia University, StatGene Research Group Blog. This is a great example, I think, as they use the blog in a number of ways: to share information about new papers that have come out, to document their meetings and to summarise progress on their work Apart from one recent entry they haven't been very active on the blog for a couple of years.
Other examples include blogs by individuals, such as an academic at Oxford University, who seems to primarily use the blog to promote his publications and activities such as conference presentations, and a PhD student at Imperial who uses it as a tool for self-reflection.
I also found an example of a Wordpress blog being used by a research group, the Clinical and Biomedical Computing Unit - Research, to create a website rather than making use of the interactivity of a blog.
I'm looking forward to seeing the examples that everyone else comes up with!
Thing 2 is to come up with an example of a blog that a researcher, academic, student or clinician might use.
I carried out a search on Google Blog Search and on Technorati (don't get so many hits here). It was quite easy to identify blogs that researchers, clinicians, etc. in biomedicine or health might want to follow to keep up to date with developments in their field. Some examples I found include:
MRC News - this blog is integrated into their webpage and is to distribute MRC news
BMJ Blogs - The BMJ hosts a wide range of blogs. Many are connected to particular BMJ journals but the Doc2Doc blogs include a news blogs and open blogs for doctors or medical students to post comments on anything they wish.
It was harder trying to find examples of blogs created by researchers or clinicians to assist them with their work or research. Perhaps these personal blogs are not as well indexed, or have strange titles which makes them harder to find? Or perhaps biomedical researchers don't want to share their findings too soon on a publicly available page as it could have implications for malpractice or effect patient care? Maybe in other disciplines you want to show you are the first to discover something, eg. in Maths, where something is either right or wrong. Perhaps in the biomedical or health context you need to keep things under wraps until you have enough evidence.
The best example I found was not from the UK, but was from a statistical genetics research group at Colombia University, StatGene Research Group Blog. This is a great example, I think, as they use the blog in a number of ways: to share information about new papers that have come out, to document their meetings and to summarise progress on their work Apart from one recent entry they haven't been very active on the blog for a couple of years.
Other examples include blogs by individuals, such as an academic at Oxford University, who seems to primarily use the blog to promote his publications and activities such as conference presentations, and a PhD student at Imperial who uses it as a tool for self-reflection.
I also found an example of a Wordpress blog being used by a research group, the Clinical and Biomedical Computing Unit - Research, to create a website rather than making use of the interactivity of a blog.
I'm looking forward to seeing the examples that everyone else comes up with!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)