They can also engender the drawing together of small virtual groupings of individuals interested in co-constructing knowledge around a common topic within a community of practice.
Standard blog features include easy posting, archives of previous posts, and a standalone Web page for each post to the blog with a unique URL. The latter feature facilitates linking to and organising content within the same blog and from external sites [ 13 ]. Posting a clinical photo from a digital camera directly to a blog after optimisation and adding of a blogger's comments can also be made at the touch of a button using, for example, a free Google product called Picasa [ 30 ]. Podcasts are already being used in medical school curricula [ 36 ].
Meng [ 37 ] describes many educational applications of podcasting and videocasting, including:. Podcasts can be created from written text using text-to-speech synthesizer software, but better podcasts featuring real human voice and radio-style programmes are also available [ 38 ]. Health-related podcasts are also available for patients and the general public. The Arizona Heart Institute [ 45 ] and the Cleveland Clinic [ 46 ] offer video podcasts for healthcare professionals as well as for patients.
The notion of 'anytime, anyplace' learning has been difficult to achieve but, recently, the advent of cheaper, better supported mobile, personal technology is making mobile learning or m-Learning more achievable and more ubiquitous u-learning than ever before.
Students are now more mobile than ever, and often find themselves multi-tasking, working in part-time jobs, or located some distance from a parent institution on professional practice placement. A similar situation is faced by clinicians in remote and rural areas, who often lack training and proper academic support because of their geographic isolation from the large central hospitals and academic centres of excellence in the main cities.
In such situations, students can feel pressurised, unsupported and socially isolated from tutors and peers [ 50 ], and may even become discouraged and drop out from the course [ 51 ]; professionally isolated clinicians may also lag behind in their CPD. In this context, quality learner support is vital, and social presence [ 52 ] becomes a highly desirable feature to embed within the delivery of any learning product. Furthermore, previous studies into the impacts of e-Learning have highlighted a number of quality concerns [ 53 ] prompting calls for improved delivery to learners in terms of cost benefits and better learning outcomes [ 54 ].
Wheeler et al. Although the potential impact of wiki, blog and podcast technologies on higher education in the UK and elsewhere is immense, it is perhaps the combined use of the three applications as 'mind tools' [ 55 ] that may yield the most powerful learning experiences. According to Jonassen et al. Wikis in particular, and blogs to a lesser extent, enable such activities, and actively involve learners in their own construction of knowledge.
The uses of such technologies to encourage learners' deeper engagement with learning materials, and the affordance of shared working spaces to improve collaboration between learners are desirable outcomes. It is generally held by many educators that students of all ages learn best when immersed within a culturally and socially rich environment in which scaffolding of learning can be achieved [ 56 ].
Further, where learners and peers are committed to achieving the same goals, they tend to regulate each other's performances [ 55 ], a positive outcome that can be facilitated through the use of shared, digital learning environments. The combination of wikis, blogs and podcasting technologies, then, has the potential to both liberate and tie learners together [ 55 ], creating dynamic learning communities. However, as research has already shown, technology is neutral until it delivers content [ 57 ] and will lose its effectiveness if it is not applied in a planned and systematic manner [ 58 ].
It will, therefore, be important to effectively demonstrate how tutors successfully deploy such technologies in live learning contexts, and how dynamic content can be developed, edited, reused, and negotiated within a virtual community of professional practice [ 59 ]. It may also be necessary to re-educate learners regarding their participation within such a dynamic learning environment, for as Jonassen and his colleagues suggest, old models of education have left their legacy.
Many students have been so busy memorising what teachers tell them, they may need some support when they first attempt to communicate with others using collaborative technologies [ 55 ]. See also 'What's next? A research and development agenda' below. Examples of the latter include MediaWiki Open Source — the same software package that runs Wikipedia [ 60 ] and Google Blogger free [ 61 ]. However, audio and video files can be large in size; users must have sufficient bandwidth to download them.
One of the most famous documented examples of Web vandalism occurred on Wikipedia in the biographical article about John Seigenthaler, Sr. There is also the problem of protecting patient anonymity when clinical data and images are posted on the Web. The lack of vital article meta-information is another potentially serious issue. All what one usually finds in wikis are IP addresses and nicknames of authors and editors. Wiki author anonymity also poses enormous questions for higher education institutions where assessment and grading are still typically based on individual efforts [ 69 ].
On the other hand, it is this very openness of wikis that gives rise to the concept of "Darwikinism" [ 66 ], which is a concept that describes the "socially Darwinian process" that wiki pages are subject to. Basically, because of the openness and rapidity that wiki pages can be edited, the pages undergo an evolutionary selection process not unlike that which nature subjects to living organisms.
Whilst such openness may invite "vandalism" and the posting of untrue information, this same openness also makes it possible to rapidly correct or restore a "quality" wiki page. What follows is an approach to the management of content adopted by Wikipedia [ 21 ]. Wiki and blog software packages have built-in Administrator's functionalities to support these tasks. However, monitoring, moderation and administration tasks can be very time-consuming due to the requirement for intensive human resourcing, and may prove to be too great a challenge to ask of educators who already lack time and resources [ 69 , 71 , 72 ].
Another alternative approach is what these authors call the 'closed environment' scenario. Perhaps the best example of such a closed environment is Ganfyd [ 24 , 73 ]. This scenario would be suitable for wikis of the kind proposed by Wang [ 2 ].
The articles in Britannica are written by authors both identifiable and credible. Many articles provide references to books and other sources about the topic covered.
Articles are edited for length, the goal being to provide students and other researchers with sufficient background information without overwhelming them. Undergraduates are rarely permitted to cite encyclopedia articles. Ask your professor if you plan to do so. The reason for this prohibition has to do with the function of reference works. Encyclopedias are best suited to providing background information rather than in-depth analysis or novel perspective. The "conversation" among literary scholars and historians—or academics in any other discipline for that matter—does not occur within the pages or pixels of encyclopedia articles.
Wikipedia is " written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world" and relies on the collective wisdom of its volunteers to get the facts right and to balance the opinions expressed.
This was his advice to me in the early s with reference to what was later dubbed USENET, but since generalized to the Web and the Internet as a whole.
Ward is now famous as the inventor of the Wiki. Ironically, Wikipedia is now perhaps the most widely-known proof of Cunningham's Law. If you do they will instantly shut up like an oyster. If you listen to them under protest, as it were, you are very likely to get what you want.
The entries in question do little more than substitute occasional, and often wrongly spelled, Scots words into English grammatical constructions.
As a result, the project often inadvertently ends up being used to bolster arguments that Scots is not a language in its own right. They engaged in cultural vandalism on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Someone stepped up because no one else did. That person was never given any guidance.
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