Author: Katja Reuter

“From Twitter To Tenure”: MD Shares How Twitter Can Be A Valuable Tool For Academics

/ Katja Reuter

Credit: Jason Archer, http://www.academictechnology.org

There is still considerable resistance to embracing social media tools for academic purposes, but if you are reading this blog post on FutureDocs by Vineet Arora, MD,  you are probably willing to consider their positive effects. And the list of academic tweeters is growing.

Vineet shares the various ways social media has impacted her academic career including finding grant opportunities, disseminating research results, and being found as an expert for media interviews and lectures. Here is her list:

  • Media interviews – I was interviewed by Dr Pauline Chen through the New York Times who located me through – you guessed it Twitter!  She actually approached me for the interview by direct messaging me through Twitter.  She was following me and noticed my interests in handoffs on my Google profile which is linked to my Twitter account.  She was also very encouraging when I started the blog which was exciting!
  • Workshop presentations– I presented a workshop on social media in medical education (#SMIME as we like to call it), at 2 major medical meetings with 3 others (including @MotherInMed who encouraged me to start a blog and also is my copresenter at SGIM).  The idea was borne on Twitter…and the first time I actually met one of the workshop presenters (who I knew on Twitter) was at the workshop.
  • Acquired new skills  – My workshop co-presenter who I only knew through Twitter ended up being Carrie Saarinen, an instructional technologist (a very cool job and every school needs one!).  She is an amazing resource and taught me how to do a wiki.  After my period of ‘lurking’, I started my own ‘course’ wiki  dedicated to helping students do research and scholarly work which we are launching in a week.
  • Lecture invitations – Several of my lecture invitations come through social media.  Most notably, I was invited to speak for an AMSA webinar on handoffs and also speak to the Committee of Interns and Residents on teaching trainees about cost conscious medicine.  Both invitations started with a reference to finding me through Twitter or the blog.
  • Committee invitations – I am now on the SGIM communications task force as a result of my interest in social media.  Our most recent effort was a piece about‘tweeting the meeting’ with @medrants and an older piece focused on the top Twitter Myths and Tips.
  • Grant opportunities – I recently submitted a grant with an organization that I learned of on Twitter – Initially, I had contacted Neel Shah from Costs of Careasking him if they had a curriculum on healthcare costs.  They did not, but were interested in writing a grant to develop a curriculum so they brought my team on board and we submitted together (fingers crossed).
  • Dissemination – One of the defining features of scholarship (the currency of promotion in academic medical centers) is that it has to be shared.   Well, social media is one of the most powerful ways to share information.   In a recent example, we entered a social media contest media video contest on the media sharing site Slideshare.  Using social media, we were able to obtain the most number of ‘shares’ on Facebook on Twitter which led to the most number of views and ultimately won ‘Best Professional Video.’  To date, this video, has received over 13,000 views, which I was able to highlight as a form of ‘dissemination’ in a recent meeting with our Chairman about medical education scholarship.    While digital scholarship is still under investigation with vocal critics and enthusiasticproponents debating the value of digital scholarship in academia, digital scholarship does appear to have a place for spreading nontraditional media that cannot be shared via peer review.

Further reading:

Social Media Week, February 2012

/ Katja Reuter

Organizers host the five-day conference (February 13-17, 2012) simultaneously in London, Berlin, New York, Toronto, San Francisco and São Paulo. 

The event will explore the impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large.

Among the topics:

  • Mining Social Media for Consumer Insight
  • Dashboards and Metrics
  • Topical Influencers: Who Are They and How Do We Reach Them?
  • Creating Social Utilities That People Will Actually Use

More at http://socialmediaweek.org/

“Using What We Know About Spam to Fight AIDS”, Interesting Technorati Post

/ Katja Reuter / 1 Comment

This is noteworthy. Together with colleagues, Microsoft researchers David Heckerman and Jonathan Carlson have developed a computational biology tool using some of the algorithms from Microsoft’s anti-spam filters and high-performance computing to analyze changes in the human immune system and mutations in the HIV virus to learn more about how to effectively fight HIV.

The post on Technorati reads:

The Spammers are ingenious. If email administrators block a few words that are common spam words, they send spam as an image instead of text. If administrators block certain domains known for spam, they spoof or hack new domains to send from. Turns out, HIV acts in a similar fashion as it tries to avoid the human immune system.

Why Do Americans Use Social Media?

/ Katja Reuter

These days, “66%, two-thirds of online adults, use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn,” states the latest  PEW Research report.  And while we are thinking about how we can leverage social media at academic institutions to support research, for example to foster internal communication and knowledge sharing, the report adds numbers to some of the known reasons that motivate people to use social media.

(The 66%) say that connections with family members and friends (both new and old) are a primary consideration in their adoption of social media tools. Roughly two thirds of social media users say that staying in touch with current friends and family members is a major reason they use these sites, while half say that connecting with old friends they’ve lost touch with is a major reason behind their use of these technologies.

Other factors play a much smaller role: 14% of users say that connecting around a shared hobby or interest is a major reason they use social media and 9% say that making new friends is equally important. Reading comments by public figures and finding potential romantic partners are cited as major factors by just 5% and 3% of social media users, respectively.

See the full report for more details, including differences among age and ethnic groups when it comes to what they value most in social media.

Revamping Education: Where Are We Going With Online Learning?

/ Katja Reuter

Class Differences

“How Online Innovators Are Disrupting Education” is the title of an interesting article published on the HBR blog that describes the rise of online learning in the U.S.

In fact, Education Department data from last year reported that “students in online conditions performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction.”

Other report findings include:

  • According to the 2010 Sloan Survey of Online Learning, approximately 5.6 million students took at least one web-based class during the fall 2009 semester, which marked a 21% growth from the previous year. That’s up from 45,000 in 2000 and experts predict that online education could reach 14 million in 2014.
  • Almost two-thirds of for-profit institutions now say that online learning is a critical part of their long term strategy.
  • The 21%growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 2% growth in the overall higher education student population.
  • Nearly one-half of institutions report that the economic downturn has increased demand for face-to-face courses and programs.
  • Three-quarters of institutions report that the economic downturn has increased demand for online courses and programs.

View the full report

Have you heard of the Crowdsortium?

/ Katja Reuter

It’s a group of currently more than 75 crowdsourcing industry practitioners that share “best practices, education, data collection and public dialog.” Interesting for us, as problems become more complex, the Consortium could be helpful in defining the right crowdsourcing model for future crowdsourcing needs at UCSF and CTSI.

The Crowdsortium aims to provide each of these constituents with the knowledge, data and best practices to get the most out of participating in crowdsourcing.

The Crowdsortium recognizes that the crowdsourcing ecosystem is comprised of five participants: funders, practitioners, customers, the crowd and researchers.

As the problems crowdsourcing address become more complex, so do the problems that the crowdsourcing ecosystem face.

For example:                                                                         THE CROWDSOURCING ECOSYSTEM

• What crowdsourcing model should we use?
• How do we handle intellectual property rights?
• How do we logistically manage international participants?
• How do we fairly reward participants for their work?
• What are the benefits of monetary versus non-monetary rewards?
• How can game mechanics influence crowd dynamics?
• Should the crowd be anonymous or individually identified with their real names?

Anyone may participate in the public forums, feeds and email lists related to this website, members, however, enjoy additional benefits. Membership is currently available for funders, practitioners, customers and researchers at no cost. More at http://www.crowdsortium.org/

New Online Lab Network at UCSF

/ Katja Reuter / 2 Comments

This morning UCSF’s McCormick lab announced the launch of LabCollaborate, a new website with the goal to “provide a way to easily share data, ideas and generally foster communication between labs as well as provide some useful tools for running the lab.”

I signed up to learn more about how it works. Here is what I have learned so far:

1. Lab Home Page: This is the page you see when you sign in. All the lab members profiles appear across the top, and you can see individual contact info and research interests (as well as update your own) by clicking on the pictures. As the first person to sign up the lab, you are an “admin”. Admins can add/remove lab members, edit library files and approve/delete friendships with other labs. You can extend these powers to any other user by clicking “Make admin” on their profile. If you want to.

2. Whiteboard: Here you can post comments or questions- they will be seen by your lab as well as your lab friends, but not by labs you are not friends with.

3. Friends: These are labs you want to keep in touch with and share data with. They can see and download all protocols, presentations and papers in your Library (unless marked “visible to my lab only”) as well as write on your whiteboard. A newsfeed to keep updated with what they’re doing is coming soon.

4. Libraries: These are collections of papers, presentations and protocols. Files can be tagged with keywords to organize into projects, ideas, lab members, whatever. And they are searchable! So you can group any number of protocols, literature references and presentations by whatever tag(s) you choose and find them all later with a simple search.

5. Ordering: The ordering system records vendor, quantity, and description as well as providing a direct link to the product page. It is also searchable to easily find past orders. Admins can mark orders as placed and the time of initial reqest and placement is recorded.

6. Find collaborators: The search box at the top of the page searches for words in the research interests of all labs and lab members on the network. So if you want to find other labs interested in “cancer”, just search and connect with new friends.

I am wondering whether – at some point – we can leverage the information LabCollaborate provides to enrich UCSF Profiles, and how on other hand LabCollaborate  can benefit from the UCSF Profiles data (tools).

I guess our tech team is aware of this. Looking forward to getting your thoughts, guys.

Real-Time Stats from Google Analytics: Could we integrate the data with our UCSF Profiles activity stream and future dashboards?

/ Katja Reuter / 2 Comments

I’m wondering what our tech team thinks about that…  

The “New Version” link is in the top right of Google Analytics. Real-Time reports are in the Dashboards tab (though they will move to the Home tab in the updated interface next week) .

More information

Are you thinking about eTrails? Andy Grove does too…

/ Katja Reuter

In his latest commentary, Andrew “Andy” Grove, former Chief Executive Officer of Intel Corporation and patient advocate at the University of California, San Francisco, envisions an eTrial system similar to Amazon.com.

….Amazon.com is a good example. A large database of customers and products form the kernel of its operation. A customer’s characteristics (like buying history and preferences) are observed and stored. Customers can be grouped and the buying behavior of any individual or group can be compared with corresponding behavior of others. Amazon can also track how a group or an individual responds to an outside action (such as advertising).

We might conceptualize an “e-trial” system along similar lines. Drug safety would continue to be ensured by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. While safety-focused Phase I trials would continue under their jurisdiction, establishing efficacy would no longer be under their purview. Once safety is proven, patients could access the medicine in question through qualified physicians. Patients’ responses to a drug would be stored in a database, along with their medical histories. Patient identity would be protected by biometric identifiers, and the database would be open to qualified medical researchers as a “commons.” The response of any patient or group of patients to a drug or treatment would be tracked and compared to those of others in the database who were treated in a different manner or not at all. These comparisons would provide insights into the factors that determine real-life efficacy: how individuals or subgroups respond to the drug. This would liberate drugs from the tyranny of the averages that characterize trial information today. The technology would facilitate such comparisons at incredible speeds and could quickly highlight negative results. As the patient population in the database grows and time passes, analysis of the data would also provide the information needed to conduct postmarketing studies and comparative effectiveness research.

Today’s e-commerce systems started small and took nearly 20 years to develop. Adapting this kind of capability to medical information would be a monumental undertaking. Initiating and overseeing it would be an appropriate task for the professional societies. There are encouraging signs, including a call in 2004 by the American Medical Association for public registries of drugs, as well as a proposal for trials that incorporate feed-forward mechanisms. (…) Another proposal would allow patients to choose between medicines whose efficacy has been determined in different manners. There is also a suggestion to use control of pricing to encourage drug developers to move forward in a “progressive” trial design.

The full article: Science 23 September 2011, Vol. 333 no. 6050 p. 1679, DOI: 10.1126/science.1212118