The problem:

• 800 community-based faculty scattered over 651,036 sq km (251,366 sq mi)
• full time physicians are unwilling/unable to come to a major centre for Faculty Development
• the University of Saskatchewan is located in Saskatoon, which is in the lower 1/3 of the province.

The solution:

• most physicians have computers
• most communities have Internet access
• Web 2.0 is interactive, and accessible from any computer at any time

Use Web 2.0 technology to provide access to faculty development opportunities.

Examples from the University of Saskatchewan

Blogs

A blog is an on-line journal similar to a newsletter that people can read and comment on. Articles are usually 1-2 pages and can be search by date or keywords. Blog Carnivals ask people to submit articles to a monthly digest. The editor chooses the best ones for publication.

Medical Education Blog

Active Learning Blog Carnival

Social Bookmarking

Every site you bookmark can be accessed by students or readers through a system of keywords. They can be added to a blog as a tag-cloud, so people can look up articles about your topic.

Active Learning Bookmarks on Del.icio.us

Tag-cloud added to a Blog Carnival

Wikis

A wiki is an interactive document that several people contribute to. It is always changing and evolving as new material is added over time.

Medical Education

wePapers.com - An academic papers sharing and managing tool

Post Workshop Resource

Post Conference Resource

Committee Wiki -very useful to store information, inform members about project progress and create documents, it also teaches people to use wikis.

Elluminate

Elluminate is an interactive, synchronous system that works well in low bandwidths. It has two-way voice and video, PowerPoint capabilities, interactive whiteboards for participants and voting capabilities. We do monthly sessions with Elluminate across the province but it is too difficult to demonstrate in the time allowed. If you would like to participate in a session, please email me.

V-Room
Elluminate offers free three person rooms to try out the tool.

Social Networking

NING provides social networking sites that you create, for example:

Women in Health Sciences

Medical Education Evolution (not created by the U.of S. but worth knowing about.)

Pod-casting

Pod-casting involves posting audio files of presentations on-line.
http://www.medicine.usask.ca/faculty/cbf/podcasts

Results

Successes

Blog
Active Learning Carnival receives about 500 readers/month from every country except Russia and 70 submissions. In 8 months there have been over 3,000 separate users. Three of our Faculty have created their own blogs.

Wiki
Medical Education is too new to judge.
Post Workshop wiki has received over 3000 hits in two years.

Elluminate
Our Elluminate sessions are held monthly and are restricted to 15 people. We fill these sessions.

Unsuccessful

Blog
Medical Education receives about 50 readers/month

Pod-casting
The cost of creating the pod-casts was too high for the low readership.

Social Networking
I attracted only three participants to Women in Health Sciences group.

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