Hospital Music has a new home (and a slight name change — Hospital Songs) at http://www.hospitalsongs.com !
Please visit and update your bookmarks!
Brand-new look and fresh posts to come.
Let’s face it. The last two weeks of gently fiddling with Google Wave (effy [dot] han [at] googlewave.com) really weren’t all that gentle. From painful slowness on Firefox to the most awkward reply structure ever (someone please explain this to me!) to extensions that would barely load let alone function – Wave was more of a rollercoaster than the idyllic sea that its name was probably meant to evocate. I’m still just as excited about Wave in health care as I was in July, but there is plenty more to consider now that many of us have gotten our hands wet. Is our ideal feasible?
A health information system built on Wave could take patient empowerment to the next level.
My take on the utility of Wave in health care grew out of a quote from The Possibilities for Patient-Centered Communication:
Doctors and patients are able to initiate communicate around a condition and all things related to the patient’s condition are captured within a wavelet (individual conversations/collaborations). Things like MRI’s and test results can be appended to a wave and doctors and specialists can collaborate through the wave. Since the communication is server-based, these conversations can be captured, secured, tagged, searched, etc.
In my mind, it looks something like this:
The fishiness explained.
The Fishbone represents my (Liz’s) wave swimming along in a big happy ocean of health (…). The first level is an example sequence of actions (mostly from the health professional’s point of view) starting from the tail, when the patient’s problem starts. The red terms are features that I believe should be accommodated within the wavelet. Some, like Maps and Calendar, can be readily pulled from existing Google services.
The order of the tasks/wavelets is not absolute, but I think that part of the genius of Wave is the ambition to allow an (invited) participant to join at any time and immediately understand the progression of events that has led to the current state of collaboration on the wave. Tag/group support and accurate timestamping is paramount.
At any branch, a patient can insert a reply (ugh, if they ever figure the current reply structure out, anyway), start a chat, go nuts with Playback. There should also be a gallery of useful interpretative extensions available, including live language translation, medical jargon lookup, hive mind experiences.
As DrV noted, if the physician doesn’t provide the information, the patient’s just going to go home and Google it. Even I feed many of my smaller irritations through an AskMetafilter search first because these people are fast and well-articulated.
Others have been even more productive.
And by more, I mean much, much more.
- Siamak Ashrafi at Ylabz recently put together an excellent video depicting how a doctor and nurse could communicate in real-time [Youtube] on a Wave-based system with support for Google Health. Most interestingly, he suggests that “a hospital could install Google Wave inside their firewall and obtain full compliance”.
- Quite appropriately, there’s a wave on this topic that is generating top-notch discussion. This is a text version, which naturally makes me wonder if public waves can be linked to (similar to the Google Reader’s public share page). The URL within Wave is here, if you’re interested.
- And don’t forget the always-excellent Cameron Neylon of Science in the Open, who has been hard at work spreading the Google Wave love. This video demos some research-helpful extensions [Viddler] such as Nature’s adorably-named Igor (search and insert citations).
Then again, maybe it’s premature: what [the wave] is and what never should be.
So that was the good news.
Unfortunately, or perhaps not–at this stage, we are all just playing around with our new toy—the reality could rapidly devolve into this:
- Empty wavelets
- Vandalism
- Scary embedded media
- Advertising
- 100 000+ pairs of eyes glazing over
Next Wave post: I’d like to do a run-down of what I think are the most useful Wave extensions for health care. Stay tuned.
A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.
Do you believe this? A recent question on Ask Mefi wondered the same thing, and received many interesting responses, both agreeing:
It’s supposedly one of the six universal expressions.
In my psychology class in college, the prof told us (IIRC) that these are the six expressions/emotions that babies have before they’re socialized to experience more self-conscious feelings like pride, shame, etc.
and disagreeing:
I’ve read that Vietnamese smile when they are frightened to show subservience and that this made American GIs think they were laughing at them with sometimes tragic results.
This, along with a conversation with a patient (Mr. H, detailed below), set me wondering:
If even a smile is not universal, how universal can a medical tool that mediates human expression really be?
And furthermore, how universal can medicine 2.0 be?
Maybe this is a huge leap of logic to you, but this is actually how my mind works 
I love the idea of med 2.0, truly. Flashy toys, social media, buzz. Love it. But if it’s going to work in the real world, we have to be constantly reminded of why we really pursue “2.0”. How can the best version of medicine help us to become the best version of ourselves? The person is of course the end point, not the technology.
My emotion research in a nutshell.
Mr. H started out by playfully scolding my ineptitude at manipulating the cast room cot (“The spinal cord is a very fragile thing, my dear!”). Then, when I had recovered from embarrassment, we talked about my research, which happens to be on emotion and perhaps the analysis of the aforementioned smiles.
I have to admit: I’m a starting to be a bit in love with my project. Essentially, I am interested in developing a new modality that will enable children with profound disabilities — who are unable to physically or verbally express themselves – to communicate their emotions and preferences.
Why is this necessary? Well, children in complex continuing care (CCC) units can experience unimaginable frustration when attempting to communicate simple feeling such a pleasure and aversion. Likewise, clinical staff and family face intense difficulties providing care for patients who may not be able to provide feedback and engagement. My expectation is to harness the patterns evident in the children’s physiological signals and clarify how (and if!) they correspond to contextual data.
“We detect emotions,” I concluded with a grandiose flourish.
Mr. H says I need a bigger shell.
Mr. H thought it was just fantastic. So fantastic that it should be applied beyond children with disabilities.
“Well, what about me?” he asked.
And I considered him carefully.
As a lifelong student of Taoist philosophy, he has trained his body to shun anxiety. His heartbeat stays regular; his temperature maintains well between limits. Indeed, preliminary evidence from another lab at our institute indicates that even a somewhat obscure parameter as electrodermal activity can also be brought under voluntary control with practice (think secret agents fooling polygraphs). Mr. H’s comment got me thinking on how we would handle that, especially since the use of autonomic signals has been touted as pretty darn culturally-competent already, compared to the social masking that may accompany self-report of emotions.
How okay is it to assume that an elevated heartbeat is a universal measure of fear or anger?
Is it perhaps archaic even to be tossing discrete labels like “fear” and “anger” around?
The truth of the matter is: there really is no such thing as being culturally-competent enough, is there? If we start getting starry-eyed about our 2.0s and our panaceas, we are bound to overlook the patient.
Never. Overlook. The patient.
So I told him I would definitely work on it. And I will.
The universal languages, the universal expressions, are those avenues that we manage to create out of almost a desperation to communicate. They change when we change. Sometimes from medical necessity, sometimes from repercussions of following our own path.
In my research, I hope that I will be able to make a first step in eradicating some of the barriers to a patient-specific, context-sensitive device. Savvy technology for savvy patients. And in my personal culture, that’s something to smile about.
Handwashing seems like such a reaction sport.
Ever since word got out that the hotel in which I’m currently residing may potentially contain an H1N1 case (100% not confirmed – imagine the PR nightmare), the handwashing has been religious. A side effect is that I’ve found myself paying more attention to public washroom facilities like soap dispensers and hand dryers.
Of the latter, this caught my eye…
…along with its accompanying instruction plate:
- Insert your hands and Airblade will start automatically.
- Withdraw your hands slowly upwards through the air.
- On doing this your hands will be dry in 10 seconds!
The Dyson Airblade.
Earlier this week, I tweeted about finding these Dyson Airblade dryers in the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library (first floor, for those who want to check it out) because they are just so funny-looking…with even funnier “instructions”! Whitney Hess, an independent user experience designer posted at Pleasure and Pain with similar sentiments:
When I’m in a strange, public place, the last thing I want to do is insert my hands anywhere.
Quoted for truth. Dyson is flaunting how much thought it put into the design (the website claims that engineers spent three years refining it) and yet just looking at it made me wary.
Well, of course I had to try it. So I inserted my hands. The first thing I noticed was that the airflow was as strong as one might expect from a device with the word “blade” in its name. The drying experience was therefore quite rapid and effective. though definitely not without paranoia that something would go terribly wrong inside. For me this led to a problem, as said paranoia dissuaded me from inserting my hands to the optimal depth (which I think should probably be more clearly indicated), and I left me with wet lower-palms/wrists. I also stayed for a minute afterwards and observed that none of the next five people who finished washing their hands chose the Airblade over the paper towel, not even the one who had been close enough to see me use it.
Conclusion: black boxes are scary. Internal organs are scary. Things that happen in the dark are scary. It kind of reminds me of a quote from Harry Potter:
Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.
Not that the Airblade is anywhere near thinking for itself, but it just goes to show you the difficulty of getting something new and foreign (usability-wise) out there.
We’ve always used “external” components in washrooms. Soap dispensers, paper towel dispensers, the faucet itself – these allow us to keep our hands where we can see them, and that’s comforting. In fact, the closest we come to experiencing “insertion” is slipping a coin in the slot to get a tampon. And now, there’s this grey thing tacked to a wall with the word “blade” in its name, two black holes, and its own 3-step instruction plate? Never mind that it’s fast, non-heated (apparently, heated air increases bacterial proliferation), and pre-filtered…it’s also terrifying.
Later in the week, I visited the food court washroom at Toronto’s MaRS Center, where Excel Xlerators, from Dyson’s competitor, have been installed.
Now this is straightforward. I wasn’t as excited to use it, but I knew how. There’s an arrow and something that looks like a dispenser — continuity for the win!
And someone lined up behind me to use it.
Welcome to the first edition of mixtapes & meds, a top-whatever list of medicine 2.0 stories and links from my Twitter and around the web, updating weekly.
- Nothin’ like a good incentive! Bayer’s Didget attaches to the Nintendo DS and rewards young people for monitoring their blood glucose levels. Dedicated checkers get instant access to goodies such as extra game levels.
- “First, Do Harm.” Mother Jones weighs in with this cutting feature on doctors in the military – from withholding treatment to participating in torture.
- University of Toronto’s Robart’s Library washrooms apparently have new Dyson Airblade hand dryers. The Dyson website claims it dries your hands in 12 seconds or less (15 is the cutoff?).
- Say bye-bye to medical receptionists? Design her electronic replacement at OliviaGreets.
DrV’s new post, a discussion on why teenagers don’t use Twitter (itself inspired by a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern’s tech report), started me thinking on some conversations I’ve had this week with various teenagers aged 14 to 17.
Now these are pretty web-savvy teens – they have their own domain names, build websites for their schools, and had plenty to say when I picked their brains on Google Wave, Bing, Wolfram Alpha, iPhone, and a lot more. However, they were nowhere near as excited as I was about Twitter. Perceptions of the micro-blogging website (even this terminology was alien to them) generally fell along these lines:
- Twitter is for old people. They’ve heard about Twitter as a networking tool, but believe that networking is “something to worry about when I get a job”. Ditto for the “personal brand”, which has become one of my favourite ideas to talk about of late.
- Twitter is for following celebrities. A few were vaguely interested in following Obama (and Ashton Kutcher?)…otherwise…
- Nobody they know (or care about) is on Twitter. And thus it’s…
- Unnecessary. The old argument that Twitter is an entire social network dedicated to Facebook statuses. Why sign up for another site, especially when the attention span of the internet is so short? Even among fad-happy teenagers, there’s a certain amount of backlash against the concept of hype itself. They want to be given a little credit. And sometimes they would like to be convinced of a tool’s utility over its popularity.
- …And even unsafe? “I don’t want all my stuff on the internet like that.” Broadcasting beyond their immediate Facebook network has little appeal to teenagers. The risks of exposure and loss of privacy far outweigh any perceived benefits.
For example, one of the teens I talked to set up a website with a forum and contact list to help his friends from summer camp stay in touch during the school year. However, he balked when a few camp administrators got wind of the site and signed up. He later explained to me that since the point was to connect with a very specific group of friends, privacy and exclusivity was paramount. They had no news that they wanted to broadcast to the world, but they certainly had information that they wanted to keep from the world. Their purpose was therefore far better served by a private forum than by Twitter.
I’ve decided that it’s not that teenagers have no use for networking – they simply have no use for Twitter-esque professional networking until they reach a very specific activation energy. Perhaps by starting a business or heaven forbid…getting old 
Dr. Vartabedian (@Doctor_V) recently posted about the pre-emptive strike delivered by a patient’s mother as DrV was trying to explain the condition. The weapon? Google!
I recently discussed endoscopic biopsy results with a patient’s mother. Her child had inflammation in the upper intestinal tract with cells called eosinophils. As I began to explain the basics of tummy irritation and the significance of the eosinophils in her daughter’s duodenum she cut me off, “Actually doctor, you don’t need to go into too much detail, just spell ‘eosinophil’ for me if you would.”
As it turns out mom was more interested in getting to Google than listening to how I think her daughter’s biopsy results related to her problem.
DrV’s story highlights a fundamental struggle in the development of Patient 2.0. On one hand, the technology is facilitating patient education and empowerment in a myriad of ways. Knowing the name of a condition, I can look up treatments; knowing my symptoms, I can follow a flow-chart JPEG and self-diagnose; tracking how I eat/sleep/exercise/smoke/drink/etc. via DailyBurn-esque services, I can analyze habits from the comfort of my home. But the flip side is that the infosphere lacks guidance: accessibility to information is not a problem, yet accessibility to knowledge is.
Remember Google Answers? Nowadays, it has been written about in articles counting down the top Google Labs failures (couldn’t compete with Yahoo! Answers), but I believe it is useful to recall the reason for its creation. Google Answers employed real people who searched the Google inundation for the answers to your questions. The important point is that they didn’t simply give link lists; they tailored and annotated the answers extensively. It was like having a personal tour-guide to your own question. Similarly, the best-case scenario for the patient is to have a personal tour-guide to his condition, but the internet alone fails at this. It is a bit like being given the map, but not the guide.
So what does this mean for the current and next generation of physicians? As DrV pointed out: “The internet isn’t going anywhere. If anything the web’s capacity to support patients will only improve.” It is only natural that patients and their families’ use of the web will grow more sophisticated, whether they are looking because it’s the middle of the night and they can’t go to the doctor, because they aren’t comfortable talking about their condition, or simply because they are interested in trying out these tools for themselves. We cannot begin to elucidate the gamut of reasons. Therefore, the paramount task of physicians will be to master the web to better support tech-savvy patients.
“Pre-Emptive Online Literacy”
Physicians should explore the web themselves and know what their patients will be seeing when they Google, something that DrV call Pre-Emptive Online Health Literacy. For example, a patient might find that the treatment for his condition that garners the most hits or that is treated in the most detail on Wikipedia is the not the one his doctor recommends; the doctor should be ready to explain why certain information on the web is not applicable to the patient’s specific situation.
1 Monologue + 1 Monologue /= Dialogue! If the doctor is able to anticipate the results of patient empowerment and act accordingly, then we have synergy. This is what makes the web truly useful.
By now many of us know about Google Wave and have watched the truly epic introductory video. I won’t try to summarize the OMG!PONIES effect – you’ve got to see it to believe it.
What I will say is this: Wave has been framed as the technology that could kill email, IM, photo/music/video sharing, and more; and it has also been getting quite a bit of attention for its potential to become the quintessential collaborative tool in science and medicine.
Cameron Neylon who writes the blog Science in the Open summarized the (tentative) excitement superbly:
Those of us interested in web-based and electronic recording and communication of science have spent a lot of the last few years trying to describe how we need to glue the existing tools together, mailing lists, wikis, blogs, documents, databases, papers. The framework was never right so a lot of attention was focused on moving things backwards and forwards, how to connect one thing to another. That problem, as far as I can see has now ceased to exist. The challenge now is in building the right plugins and making sure the architecture is compatible with existing tools. But fundamentally the framework seems to be there. It seems like it’s time to build.
Med 2.0 Inundation and Other Disasters
I think that quote really hits the nail on the head. The volume of medicine 2.0 tools is growing faster than ever, but that growth is also kind of digging itself into a hole.
For example, it’s been discussed that if Nature could only combine all its great Science 2.0 tools, including Connotea, Precedings, Second Nature (the Nature island in Second Life!), Nature Blogs, Nature Podcasts, etc., into a one-stop resource, then there would be no question that every scientist on the planet would use it. As it stands, the dispersion seems like a safe way for Nature to experiment with a lot of ideas and see what sticks. The stickies thrive in semi-obscurity; the un-stickies disappear into the web 2.0 deadpool (as popularized by TechCrunch).
But I guess we can’t really blame Nature for being cautious…the one-stop resource is truly a daunting feat. Take Facebook, for example. Facebook has been (in my opinion, unsuccessfully) trying to do this via the Applications feature. Maybe some people can’t live without their photos, SuperWall, iLike profile (seriously, where would iLike be without Facebook?), and What Pirate Are You? results on the same site, but to me the addends are just overcomplicated and distracting. Science 2.0 has to overcome that and set standards – Wave might be just what we need.
How About These Neat Applications?
With my pre-adulation out of the way, here are links to Science in the Open’s and HealthySpacesRx’s excellent follow-up posts, which throw out a few possible applications of Wave in medicine.
- Part I: Papers
- Part II: The Lab Record
- The Possibilities for Patient-Centered Communication
“Things like MRI’s and test results can be appended to a wave and doctors and specialists can collaborate through the wave.”
Paper-writing flow with Wave:
- Write collaboratively using the inline commenting feature. Wave updates everything in real-time and tracks the whole history of changes. History is playback-able.
- Add citations with a Citations Bot
- Spellcheck, check terminology, translate with a Language Bot
- Add charts and graphs with a Data Bot that links up to spreadsheets and other programs
- Get peer-reviewed by adding reviewers as participants. Comment dialogue proceeds write on the Wave in real-time.
- Submit to journal by adding a Submit Bot. Maybe each Journal will have its own Bot?
Electronic Medical Records (EMR) flow with Wave:
- Every patient gets his own Wave.
- As they come in, doctors add test results to the Wave. Other health care professionals can then access. The results can include photos, videos, text, x-rays, consent forms…
- Patient adds his own progress to the Wave. For example, by adding journal entries logging incidences of chronic pain, frequency of exercise, smoking.
- Caretakers and family members add important notes.
- Health care professionals discuss and decide on treatment right on the Wave. Get quick second opinions from professionals around the world.
What’s next?
So, as I see it, the first major issue to watch as we integrate Wave with medicine will be the task of developing these mysterious Wave participants that I’ve been calling Bots. As a related example, consider that most physicians are more keen to adopt the iPhone than EMR simply because existing EMR systems are poorly designed, and because EMR vendors haven’t opened up their APIs to facilitate the kind of application-developing that drives the Apple AppStore. Similarly, the success of Wave in medicine will depend on a strong community consisting of developers who will make these peer-review, language translation, video support “participants” possible.
With the tools in place, we must also carefully consider the implications of Wave and its imitators on existing controversies relating to privacy and accessibility. Who will be allowed to participate in the Wave? How will Wave participants be authenticated? How much access should patients have to their own Wave? Do patients even own the data? These are discussions that are not only important for Wave, but also for the notion of EHR in general.
Finally, what about the human touch – does Wave pose a threat? Are we, as patients, ready to become patients 2.0 to such an extent? What kind of proof-of-principle and education will get us there? Surely it will take much more than an hour-and-a-half-long video?
Stay tuned for more updates.
Professors, principal investigators (PIs), and other academics can’t overlook the importance of their online presence.
I’ve always thought of academia as a ball sport. When you’re the student you hear this “plunk, plunk” sound that’s like Chinese water torture – the ever-comforting audio of the ball not being in your court.
…Except at the beginnings.
“Eh? What kind of beginnings?” you ask.
Behold: starry-eyed undergraduates looking for the perfect summer supervisor, and slightly more jaded new graduates looking for the perfect Master’s/PhD advisor (for a satirical view, see my short story on Research Season).
They desperately want to be liked, but they also want to choose. And by perfect, they think that they aren’t asking for too much. They want someone who is:
-
Interesting
-
Available
Now pay attention to the following truth!
One needs to be somewhat available in order to be found at all interesting.
In other words, if a professor falls down in the woods and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
An absent professor is not interesting. He is simply not there.
So what? So that’s what his website is for!
This really matters, guys.
One of my former advisors started his new lab by giving each of his grad students a present: a huge book on laboratory life from aseptic technique to lab politics.
As a bored undergrad flunkie, I borrowed this treasury on more than one occasion.
And what was the most well-thumbed section? Surprise, surprise! How to present yourself and your research.
I remember being endlessly castigated on how to write and deliver effective abstracts, posters, review articles, journal articles, podium presentations. I remember sitting through keynotes at conferences while grad students whispered to each other that they might find the research fascinating if the the guy and his slides weren’t so damn brain-clot-inducing–
In fact, we’re told over and over again that marketing is just as important in academia as in other fields – if not more important because of the potential impact that acceptance of our science may have – yet we get this nightmare when confronted with arguably the first line of exposure most students have to real research…wait for it…
A decent academic website.
I’m now going to explain what I think constitutes a good academic website, both from the design and content standpoints. This might take a few posts, so will start with the most basic offenders, which I shall dub:
The Inexcusables (a.k.a. Don’t Even Go There)
-
Your name is not hyperlinked/ERROR 404.
Maybe this PI is new to the university. Okay. But here’s the thing: there are lists and lists of professors, so we just go on to the next name. A dead link is just lazy.
In fact, you know what would be even more helpful than a dead link? A link to a Google search of your name. Please just do something about it.
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The One-Pager.
Too many profs think photo + email + research summary + selected publications = okay I’m done can I go now?
I applaud the fact that you are able to summarize your research in a concise manner, and those elements are certainly important, but I’d like to think that your research warrants multiple pages and hopefully an entire page that focuses on how I can get involved in your exciting domain!
I want to know that you’re excited about your research and/or can at least coerce one of your tech-savvy graduate students to make a site for you!
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The Institutional Site.
Some of these are not that bad. They’re usually held up to the institution’s standard, so you get something like the one-pager.
However, I strongly urge that every PI builds a separate website for his lab. Even better, have his own domain name.
This way, you won’t send students on wild link-clicking chases that end up with Error 404s.
You’ll also have your stuff all in one place – the beginning of your personal brand online.
Still not convinced?
Well, this is just one research student’s opinion. But I hope this series provokes some reflection at least. When I see a good website, I see a good PI and a good working group. I see confidence and I envision myself being confident working for that person. I’m not unwilling to search for information – after all, it’s my research future and eventual brand as well – but I’m looking for a group that meets me halfway.
In A Separate Peace, John Knowles wrote about the feeling of alienation that 16 year olds seemed to induce during WWII – because they were the ones that everyone knew would be fighting on behalf of the country and of the adults one day; as a PI, your reputation should be built on the quality of your research, which will be done by this novel audience of web-savvy undergrads, who can and will judge you based on how you present what you’ve already accomplished and hope to accomplish.
I think that’s worth fighting for.
Stay tuned for Part II, when I get into content.
A 2.0 service that I’ve been enjoying a lot is LibraryThing. Like GoodReads and Shelfari, it’s based around the idea of a personal library or reading list.
Users maintain a catalogue by adding books from a wide range (660+ from around the world) of available databases, although Amazon will usually have what you’re looking for.
I’ve been using my catalogue to track my post-bacc summer reading push, since we all know it’s not just in medicine that the word accountability is key! The litany of features including a speedy review/rating system, recommended reading, calculators (every wonder what your dead author/live author ratio is???), and community zeitgeist are truly excellent.
Early Reviewers
Today, I logged my latest conquest (About A Boy by Nick Hornby – even better than the movie! Can you tell I have a Hornby obsession?) and noted that the June batch of Early Reviewers books were in.
I think Early Reviewers is such a great idea. Basically, LibraryThing aims to help authors build word-of-mouth hype before the formal publication date. It does this by giving away free books in exchange for reviews of those books. Here’s how it works:
- Register for the Early Reviewers program for free. Provide your mailing address.
- Every month, LibraryThing posts new books with plot summaries and the countries that the publisher is willing to ship to.
- Requesting books is as easy as clicking a button. The site shows you how many copies are available and how many people have requested so far.
- At the end of the requesting period, LibraryThing will notify you if you’ve been selected to receive a book.
Who doesn’t love free stuff? It reminds me of Food for Thought in my undergrad, which the Faculty framed as sessions during which they fed us in exchange for our opinions.
It would be great to have something similar in place for science and medicine. Getting early reviews from knowledgeable peers could be excellent help for scientific writers, whether it be pre-publication journal articles or university textbooks.
Sort of similar to that idea, Nature (see ScienceRoll’s excellent Why Nature is the Best in Science 2.0) has something right now called Precedings, a community where researchers post preliminary scientific communications to get feedback and (in a way) stake their claims on ideas before publication. I checked it out this week – so far, looks promising, but there’s not too much on there yet. As CBC reported in January, the obstacle might be changing the stiff paradigm of peer-reviewed science that’s been the standard for the last century:
While these are only a sampling of scientific Web 2.0 projects, Nielsen says the shift faces significant obstacles. The biggest, he says, is a scientific culture that emphasizes formal publication as the key to prestige, funding and academic tenure.
"You build your career by publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals," he says. "You don’t do it by contributing to wikis."
What is needed is a way of recognizing contributions to wikis and other online resources, Nielsen says — and there is evidence it can happen.
More on this topic in the future; I’m certainly interested in what happens when web 2.0 really does become accepted as having transcended the Facebook/Myspace world. I think that the current zeitgeist is still something like furiously trying to build as many sites as possible catering to as many “hobby” activities as possible (music, video, games, books…) – and in fact, sort of tying into my earlier post on the Twitter team’s defense of its own Twitter use: the average user is still not convinced. There is a big divide between the power user and the person who signed up to see what’s it’s like. And right now, the site’s target demographic is most likely not the power-user.
But anyway.
For now, gotta love LibraryThing.*
*My only real gripe with LibraryThing is that the visuals are not as “pretty” as its competitors. I’ve been wracking my brain and I can only say that it’s 2.0 in concept and functionality, but kind of looks 1.0. I even think it might be using frames. But oh well.
