'The End' and 'Who is the winner?'

The End

We've finally reached the official end of the six weeks of 11½ Things. The blog will remain available, however, and may be added to and kept up to date as new social media tools are developed. So don't worry if you haven't completed all the 'Things' - feel free to do so in you own time, or to recommend the course to your colleagues.

We hope you have enjoyed the course and have learnt about some useful tools, not only to use yourselves but also so you can help our library users in the use of these tools. As was mentioned back in the introduction to the course, we are hoping to create an online resource to help support our users in the use of social media and provide examples of relevance to them. We're not sure yet what form this resource might take, but if you're interested then watch this space as we may be welcoming contributors and will keep you up to date with progress. An interesting example of such a resource at another university is that produced by Newcastle University for arts and humanities researchers.

A few more useful links on social media

• The RIN (Research Information Network) has done some interesting work on the use of social media by researchers. Their 2010 project If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0 was followed up in 2011 by their useful Social media: A guide for researchers.
• You may have already come across UCL's very own site to support UCL staff in their use of social media.

We value your feedback

We'd really like to know what you thought about the 11½ Things. We've been interested in reading your final blog posts, but if you haven't had a chance to post your final post yet, or if you'd like to give us some feedback about the course without posting it on your blog then we'd be really greatful if you could fill in the feedback form on Moodle (UCL userid required).

So who's the winner?

Well done to all of you for all your hard work in exploring the tools and carrying out the Things. We've been really impressed by the enthusiasm that has been displayed and the great contributions via your blogs and other social media tools. Particular congratulations to those of you who managed to complete all the 'Things' by today.

We promised a prize for the person who contributed the best examples of 'Things' over the 6 weeks of the course. It's been a really tough and close decision but unfortunately there can only be one winner. We are delighted to announce that, owing to her excellent examples and thoughtful reflections the winner of 11½ Things 2011 is Louise Ashton @Louise_Ashton from the Queen Square Library, UCL Institute of Neurology.

You can check out her blog at http://librarian-lou.blogspot.com/

The prize of an Amazon voucher for 11½ pounds, ie. £11.50, is now on its way to you, Louise, via your UCL email address.

It just remains to say thanks to all of you for taking part and for contributing to the success of 11½ Things and we hope you're all able to make use of your new Web 2.0 knowledge!

Best wishes from Angela and the rest of the 11½ Things team.

Week 6: Images and audiovisual tools

It’s the final week of 11½ Things and this week we’ll be exploring images and audiovisual tools, specifically to enable sharing of images, videos and audiovisual recordings.

Warning

• This week we are looking at some resources that require sound. If you are on a WTS computer or a computer that does not have sound available you will not be able to listen to the sound accompanying any videos. You could go to a Myriad cluster computer or come to the Royal Free Library where we can log you on.
• Further down this page we'll be talking about iTunes, which is not web-based but needs to be downloaded on a computer. It is not available on WTS or Myriad computers. If you want to investigate iTunes or iTunes U and do not have access to a computer at home please email 11andahalfthings@gmail.com and we can arrange for you to come and use a computer at the Royal Free Library.

Flickr

Flickr is no doubt the best known photo sharing website, and lots of you use it already. It contains over 5 billion images which you can view and download, and also can be used for sharing videos. With a Flickr account you can make use of lots of Web 2.0 features: upload your images, set privacy controls so you can decide who can view your images, set up groups with whom to share your pictures, tag your images with relevant words, set up RSS feeds from your favourite Flickr authors or post an image on your Facebook or Twitter account.

Mast cells, by Euthman (Flickr)

Tip: To embed a Flickr image in your blog (like we have done with the image on the right):

• From the buttons above the image in Flickr, click on the drop-down arrow next to the facebook and twitter icons to see ‘more ways to share’
• Click on the Grab the HTML/BBCode link
• Copy the HTML code and paste it into your blog (you’ll need to edit the blog in HTML format when you paste in the code).

If you want to re-use images you find on Flickr you need to check the license as some images require you to request permission from the copyright owner or author of the photo. If you search using the Advanced Search you can restrict your search to items licensed under creative commons, a licensing scheme designed for the sharing capabilities of social media, and can easily identify images that allow you to re-use or even re-work the images. Flickr includes a page that explains the different licences. In many cases you’ll be able to re-use the image if you include an attribution to the author.

Why might researchers, academics and clinicians want to use Flickr?

Those of you familiar with flickr might use it primarily for sharing your personal photos, but it’s also used for professional purposes. Images can be useful:

• for research or teaching purposes, eg. to see what a particular dermatological condition looks like
• for livening up a presentation, website or blog
• to upload and share images relating to research or clinical practice to get feedback, comments etc.

Why not do a search on flickr to see what kind of medical images you can find?

 
Did you know? Flickr is not the only image sharing site available. You might also want to check out Picasa Web Albums (from Google), Kodak Gallery or Photobucket. UCL's ISD also has a useful web page on finding images. 

You Tube

You Tube is probably the best known and biggest video sharing website. Many of the videos are social and posted for fun but there are also professional ones that could be relevant to academics, researchers or clinicians, such as films of clinical procedures or academic lectures.

Anyone can search and play videos on You Tube but to upload them you need to create a free account. You can then rate and comment on videos, store them in your favourites, create playlists and subscribe to particular ‘channels’.

Tip: You Tube channels - every author on You Tube has their own ‘channel’, which is effectively their homepage with links to their videos, favourites and details of their activity. To view someone’s ‘channel’ just click on their name below a video they have authored.

Did you know: Many universities, including UCL, have their own You Tube channel so they can broadcast to millions of people worldwide.

You can search for videos in You Tube or browse categories, including ‘Education’, which allows you to search videos from You Tube Edu. This brings together videos from universities from all around the world, although the majority are US based.
Many of the reasons why academics, researchers or clinicians might want to use You Tube are the same reasons we discussed when we were looking at sharing presentations via Slideshare or Prezi in Week 4. These include:

• For research purposes, to find videos of interest to their discipline
• To share their work and obtain a larger audience, such as for public engagement or to invite comment from their peers, eg. posting videos of lectures

We found this interesting historical video about the food in the UCL refectory in 1959!



Why not have a browse on You Tube for videos that might be of interest to our user groups?

You Tube isn’t the only video sharing site. We’ve already mentioned that videos can be shared on Flickr. Other options include Google Video.

Podcasts

Podcasts are audio files (such as lectures, radio programmes, readings, interviews or music) which may be accompanied by video and are available on the Web for download. They are typically made as part of a series (although in reality many are one-offs) and they utilise RSS (see Week 1) to allow for people to follow the series. Anyone with a computer and microphone can theoretically create a podcast.



You can usually listen to or view podcasts simply by finding them on the Web and clicking on play or you can subscribe to them through an RSS reader. Some RSS readers are designed especially for reading podcasts. These are called Podcatchers, the best known of which is iTunes, which you can download to your computer for free, but there are many others – if you are interested, check out this list on Wikipedia. Podcatchers also often facilitate the transfer of podcasts to an mp3 player - it doesn't have to be an iPod, any mp3 player will do.

How to find podcasts

There are search tools available specifically to find podcasts, including iTunes. Some web-based tools, which also allow you to upload and share podcasts, include Podcastalley and PodOmatic.

The iTunes Store has a special area for educational content, called iTunes U. It’s widely used by higher education institutions worldwide to make lectures, videos and films available as podcasts.

Did you know?

• UCL produces podcasts and has its own iTunes U channel. Most are videos, many are promotional or cover a particular aspect of the university but there are also hundreds of lectures (or 'lecturecasts') available.
• UCL Library Services has created podcasts on various topics available on the library’s website and via iTunes U.

Why not have a look for podcasts on iTunes or the web-based tools mentioned above and think about how our user groups might benefit from using these tools?

Thing 11

As it's the last week of 11½ Things we'd like you to think back over the last 6 weeks and reflect on what you've learnt. Then write a blog post to summarise your thoughts. You might like to include:

• What were the best / worst bits
• Which tool you found the most interesting or useful
• Any comments on what you have learnt from the course
• If there are any social media tools you might now make use of in your work or social life
• Your thoughts on whether our users are using these tools or might want to utilise them already
• How you think we in Library Services might best be able to support our users in their use of social media applications
• Any other examples of social media / Web 2.0 applications that you think are worth mentioning

Thing 11½

Well done! You've reached the final 'Thing' on the 11½ Things course. All we'd like you to do for the final 'Half Thing' is relax, put your feet up, have a cup of tea (or whatever tipple takes your fancy) and congratulate yourself for completing the course.

Remember that there is a prize for the person who has contributed the best examples of 'Things' over the past 6 weeks. This prize was to be presented at the MedLibMeet on Tuesday 16 August, but unfortunately this event has had to be cancelled owing to lack of contributions. We shall therefore be deciding on the winner on Tuesday 16 August and this will be announced via the 11 ½ Things blog. This means you have until 9am on Tuesday 16 August to complete any of the 'Things' in order to be considered for the prize.

Don't worry if you haven't managed to work through the whole course or complete all the 'Things'. The 11½ Things blog will remain open after that, so if you haven’t had time to complete it all by then you can do so at your leisure, although any work or entries submitted after 9am on Tuesday 16 August won’t be considered for the prize.
Good luck!

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Optional extras

Editing images

Want to edit your own images online? Check out the following free tools: 

• Picnik  (There is a reduced-feature version of Picnik built into Flickr as its default photo editor)
• Foto Flexer
• Pixer.us

Online image generators

Can’t find an appropriate image to go on your blog / in your presentation? How about trying out an online image generator to create or manipulate images you find on the web to come up with something unique?

Examples include:

• Spell with flickr: Creates words from letters found in images in Flickr so you can download it or use the HTML code given so you can embed it in your blog, website, etc. like we’ve done with the word 'Podcasts' above
• South Park Studio: Create your own customised South Park characters
• Wordle: for creating word clouds from the text you produce. Here is one for this week's blog post!

• Strip generator: Create comic strip cartoons from your own images
• Dynamic Einstein: Add your own words to the Einstein image you see here:

There are loads more out there – just try Googling ‘online image generators’.

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Week 5: Collaborative tools for research and clinical practice

We hope you’ve been enjoying the 11½ Things so far. This is the penultimate week, but don't worry if you are behind, the blog won't suddenly disappear at the end of the six weeks, you can always catch up in your own time. Over the last few weeks we’ve been exploring tools to share website bookmarks, citations, presentations, documents and other files online. This week we’re going to focus on tools that not only allow you to share, but allow you to collaborate on a piece of work.

Wikis

Wikis are the most obvious example of a Web 2.0 tool that allows people to collaborate on a piece of work. The word 'wiki' comes from a Hawaian word meaning 'fast'. A wiki is a webpage that can be edited by anyone or a defined set of people from within the Web browser, no other editing tools are required. As it's all stored online and they often allow you to upload documents and other files, they can be a useful tool for groups collaborating on a piece of work.

The best known example of a wiki is Wikipedia, where anyone can go in and add or amend an entry and anyone can see the entries you have made. The lack of editorial control can make the information in Wikipedia unreliable so they have editorial guidance in place to try to ensure the quality of the entries and you can look back to see what changes have been made to a page. For some pages editorial control is restricted to registered users or even particular individuals. If you are setting up your own wiki you can usually set it to allow only certain people to access it and/or edit it.

Wiki software is available to download to your PC or you can use an online wiki tool. Freely available online wiki tools include WikiSpaces (which offers free spaces for higher education), WetPaint and PBWorks. There are lots more examples out there. You might like to explore WikiMatrix, which is a site that compares wiki sites.

Did you know?
UCL has its own wiki service and Library Services has a number of wikis set up, available to library users or which can only be viewed or edited by Library Services staff, or a select group of library staff.

Why might researchers, academics and clinicians want to use wikis?

• As with sharing social media tools, wikis can be used to share and disseminate ideas or reach a wider audience, to engage with the public, to invite comments and feedback. 
• To invite other people to contribute their knowledge on a topic – ‘crowdsourcing’.
• For open peer review of articles.
• To invite updates for systematic reviews.
• To provide online collaborative portals of data, information or other resources in a particular field which may be used as reference sources.
• For sharing and developing educational materials.
• As a forum for debate and discussion, and a place to keep a record of discussions.
• To facilitate group work on projects by their students, increase student engagement or have students read and review the work of their peers.

Want to know more about wikis as a medium for publishing? Read this article on wikis as a publishing platform in medicine. 

Google docs

Google docs is an example of an Office 2.0 tool. Office 2.0 refers to online applications that allow you to create documents, spreadsheets etc. Instead of using software installed on your individual computer you are using software that is hosted in a remote ‘cloud’. This means you don’t need to be on your own computer to access your files, you just need a computer with an Internet connection. You also don’t need to worry about software upgrades and because everything is available over the Internet it facilitates sharing and collaboration. The downsides can be that these applications currently have limited functionality compared to Microsoft Office, for example, and you are dependent on a decent Internet connection to access your files.

Google Docs allows you to share and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings online. You can create them from scratch in Google Docs or upload them and amend them in Google Docs. This can be really useful for people who work in different departments or even different institutions who are collaborating on a piece of work and need to work on documents together.

Other office 2.0 alternatives include Think Free Office and  Zoho Office Suite.

Thing 9: See if you can find any examples of wikis that might be of use to our user groups: academics, researchers, students or clinicians. You could try searching Google, searching the websites of HE institutions, or searching the literature for articles about good examples, or finding them any other way you can. If you find other good ways to identify wiki examples, why not share this information on your blog?

Thing 10: This week, instead of (or as well as if you wish!) sharing a useful resource via your blog you are asked to share it via a wiki. You should have received an email on Friday 29 July inviting you to join the 11½ Things wiki. Follow the instructions in the email and then on the front page of the wiki to become a member of the wiki and contribute an example to the pages on the wiki.

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Optional extras

Optional ‘Thing’: Have a go at creating a document in Google Docs and sharing it with a colleague or a fellow 11½ Things participant.

Scheduling meetings or events

Researchers often work in groups and may wish to arrange meetings, decide on deadlines or inform each other about conferences or other relevant events. Clinicians may have similar requirements if working together, for example to discuss a particular case or work on an audit or guideline. We are all used to using the Oracle calendar system (soon to be replaced with the Outlook calendar as part of Live@UCL) to help with all of these things, but how would we do it with a group that included members from another institution, for example? Social media tools are there to help us again. Here are some examples you might like to explore, although there are many others out there:

• Google calendar: As with many Google products, probably the lead player in this area. Lets you share your calendar with anyone, and invite people to events in your calendar.
• Doodle: A free tool for scheduling events between a group of people. It works by creating a poll which is sent out to the people you want to meet with by email. They then respond to the poll so you can select the most popular date and time.
• Meet-o-matic: Another free meeting scheduler that uses a simple web-form and emails people to ask them to select a preferred date and time.
• tungle.me: Another scheduling application that can sync with your online calendar, eg. Outlook or Google Calendar.

Did you know? Virtual Research Environments
The development of online tools such as those we've been exploring has initiated various projects to create Virtual Research Environments (VREs), a set of online tools and resources designed specifically to support the research process. They allow collaboration amongst researchers as well as ways of managing and manipulating data. In the UK, JISC is funding various projects to support the development of VREs.

Next week is the last week, and we'll be having some fun with images and audiovisual tools!

Week 4 - Tools for sharing presentations, documents and more

We’ve already explored tools that facilitate sharing website bookmarks and citations. This week we’ll be exploring tools that allow you to share presentations, documents and other files online.

Note for WTS users: You will not be able to hear any audio files if you are accessing the following resources via WTS. You may also experience difficulties playing videos on SlideShare and Prezi presentations may be jerky. If you’d like to use a computer where you will have full functionality you could go to a UCL cluster room with Myriad computers or come to the Royal Free Library where we’ll be happy to log you on to a computer.

SlideShare

SlideShare is perhaps the best known, and most widely used, website for sharing presentations, but it also allows you to share documents, PDFs and videos. Presentations can be accompanied by audio to make them ‘slidecasts’. You can add comments and tags to your own presentations and those by other people. SlideShare also allows you to download presentations and re-use or amend them, or simply use them as inspiration for your own presentations.

As with most Web 2.0 applications there is a free version and a premium version, which has more features. SlideShare Pro, for example, allows you to share your presentations privately as well as publicly.

Why might researchers or clinicians want to use SlideShare?

• To share presentations with anyone who might not get to see it otherwise, eg. for people unable to attend a conference. SlideShare presentations can easily be embedded into your blog, website, twitter or facebook.
• To share and disseminate ideas or reach a wider audience. This could include engaging with the public and on a massive scale.
• To invite comments and feedback and so get new ideas to develop their work or make their presentations better.
• To make international contacts and network with people with similar work interests.
• To download presentations that are relevant to them and re-use or re-mix them.

Prezi

Prezi provides a new and alternative approach to creating presentations. Instead of a linear progression from slide to slide, as you get in PowerPoint, with Prezi you work on a single canvas which you move around or zoom in and out, making for a more dynamic interpretation. It's a web-based package so you create your presentation online but can download it for use offline. For an idea as to what a Prezi presentation looks like, take a look at the presentation we did for this year's summer school session on competencies. (We're not claiming this is a perfect example of the capabilities of Prezi!)

Competencies on Prezi

Prezi is freely available, although you can pay for a premium version. With the standard version all slides are automatically made public so you need to take into account copyright rules if including images or screenshots in your presentation. This makes it more suited to some uses than others. eg. you need to be careful about copyrighted images.

As with SlideShare, Prezi presentations can be shared, downloaded and re-worked by others, you can post comments or upload audio files to accompany your presentation. You can also collaborate online with other authors to create a Prezi together, and you can download it and play it offline if you need to present on a computer with no Internet access.

Why might researchers or clinicians want to use Prezi?

Many of the reasons to do with sharing and disseminating presentations are similar to those for SlideShare. In addition Prezi provides an alternative format for presentations, and allows collaborative online working.

Thing 7: Try searching for presentations on SlideShare or Prezi that might be of interest to a researcher, academic, student or clinician in the fields of biomedicine or health (or a subject relevant to your role) to see what kind of presentations are out there.

Thing 8: Write a post on your blog about your experiences of using SlideShare and/or Prezi. You might want to consider some of the following points:

• How easy are they to use?
• Do you think they are a useful tool for the user groups we are considering?
• What might be the issues or concerns that people might have if making their presentations publicly available through these tools? Could plagiarism and the stealing of other people’s work be an issue? Are there any copyright issues? (You might want to explore the support or help sections on the websites for more information about copyright).
• Why not try linking to a presentation you find interesting, or even embedding it in your blog post? (see Optional Extras section below for instructions).

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Optional extras

SlideShare and Prezi
You could try creating your own accounts on SlideShare and/or Prezi, and try uploading or downloading a presentation, or creating one from scratch in Prezi. The Prezi manual has good instructions on getting started and the following presentation gives some great tips on creating a successful Prezi.

How to use prezi and WIN

View more presentations from Ned Potter

Tips: How to embed presentations in your blog or website

SlideShare and Prezi both allow you to copy and paste HTML code for a presentation into a blog or website. In Blogger you need to view the post in the Edit HTML screen rather than the Compose screen when pasting the code.

• SlideShare: From the page for a presentation in SlideShare, click on the Embed link above the slides. Copy the HTML code. Paste this code into your blog post.
• Prezi: Click on the Share link below a Prezi and then click on Embed. The HTML code is displayed – click on Copy code to clipboard. Then paste this code into your blog post.

Other tools for sharing presentations, documents and more:
SlideShare and Prezi are not the only tools for sharing presentations. Lesser known examples include:

• Slide Boom allows you to upload presentations, which can be converted to flash retaining audio and video. Like SlideShare you can search for other presentations and post comments etc.
• Scribd.com claims to be the world’s largest social reading and publishing company. It allows you to share PDF, Word and PowerPoint files.
• Screencast.com is designed for business or academic professionals to share multimedia content via the Web.

Did you know?
There are various projects and initiatives set up to help facilitate the sharing of educational resources online, not just presentations but any teaching and learning materials that you can use or re-use for free. These are known as Open Education Resources (OER). If you’re interested, why not explore the following links:

• OER Commons: Database that allows you to search, browse, evaluate, or discuss over 30,000 high-quality OERs already available on the Web.
• The Higher Education Academy and JISC are working in partnership on a HEFCE funded Open Educational Resources Programme whereby it has been funding various UK OER initiatives, including:
  - PORSCHE (Pathways for Open Resource Sharing through Convergence in Healthcare Education), which is exploring ways of sharing healthcare related OERs across the NHS and HE
  - ACTOR (Accredited Clinical Teaching Open Resources) project, which is seeking to increase the sharing, repurposing and utilisation of educational development resources for PG Certificate clinical education programmes.
  - OER Digital Humanities project, based at UCL.

Week 3: Tagging, social bookmarking and social citation-sharing

Last week we looked at social networking, sites that enable you to share thoughts, ideas and opinions. This week we’ll be looking at tools to help you manage and share information, whether online information from websites and social media sites, or more traditional forms of scholarly information such as journal articles and references to books and other publications.

Tagging

Tagging is a system for assigning keywords to web-based content (such as websites, images or blogs) so that you can easily retrieve items on a particular topic and so that others can use your tags to find those items, or choose to assign similar tags to their items. As librarians we may shudder at the thought of there being no controlled vocabulary in the use of tags, but they are a convenient and easy to use tool to help organise information on Web 2.0 sites.

You may have already made use of tags in creating your blog posts in week 1 and 2. When you entered a term in the ‘Labels’ box (if using Blogger) for your blog post you were ‘tagging’ that post. If you didn’t add any tags you can always go back and add them now.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a method for saving links to websites that allows you to access your ‘bookmarks’ or ‘favorites’ from anywhere, rather than just within your Web browser on a particular PC, because they are all stored within your online account. You can then organise your bookmarks by adding tags. It becomes ‘social’ because other users can see the tags and browse for websites by the tags that have been assigned to them by other people. That means you can identify websites relevant to you that have already been identified by human beings as being useful sources. This can make a refreshing alternative to sifting through hundreds of search engine results.

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is possibly the best known social bookmarking site. In addition to allowing you to save and tag your bookmarks, it lets you see bookmarks other people have made, see how popular they are and see the tags that have been applied to them. You can set up RSS feeds from another Del.icio.us user so you can be alerted when they add a new bookmark. It also allows you to easily share your bookmarks, either by creating a 'network' of Del.icio.us users or by creating a page of links that you can then link to from your own website or blog.

Did you know: If you’ve already heard of Del.icio.us you may have heard rumours that it was to be terminated. Well there’s good news. It’s been taken over by AVOS (the company behind YouTube) who plan to continue Del.icio.us. See Del.icio.us FAQs for more information.

Diigo

Like Delicious, Diigo ("Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff") is a social bookmarking site, allowing you to bookmark webpages, tag them and find other webpages by using other people’s tags. But Diigo does more than that, its aim being to "focus on providing better ways to process, manage, share and discover information" it is a constantly evolving resource, "a research and collaborative research tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site on the other." See http://www.diigo.com/about.

The additional features you get from Diigo include:

• The ability to highlight portions of web pages and attach sticky notes, save these so you can come back to them later and share them with friends and colleagues using groups
• News and recommended sites personalised to your interests.
• The ability to see who else has bookmarked a page and what similar sites they have bookmarked giving you another avenue for identifying relevant websites. You can search for "people like me" based on similar interests, tags or sites. Diigo then allows social networking allowing you to connect with these people by inviting them to be a ‘friend’, sending them messages, inviting them to join a group or adding them to your watchlist.

The standard version of Diigo is free to register.

For a demonstration of the features of diigo, watch this short video:

Thing 5: Set up an account on Diigo and bookmark, tag and highlight a page and add a sticky note to it.

To set up an account on Diigo:

• From the Diigo home page, click on Get Started Now! or on the Join Diigo link to the right of the top menu bar.
• Enter your details and click on Continue. You will be sent a confirmation email with a link in it on which you need to click to activate your account.
• Once you have clicked on the link in the email, follow the on-screen instructions to add the diigolet to your favourites / links bar or install the Diigo toolbar. The quickest and easiest option is to add the diigolet, but frequent users of Diigo may feel they benefit from installing the toolbar as it has more features (this requires admin rights on your computer).
  Tip: Diigo works on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. If using Staff WTS, however, you may not be able to capture the bookmarklet in IE – use Firefox instead. It should work fine on Staff WTS 2010. We also had problems making the bookmarklet work on a Windows Vista computer using IE and a computer that had bookmarklets added from lots of other programs. Email us if you are having problems installing the diigolet.
• You’re now ready to start adding pages to your library. Go to any website and click on the diigolet on your favorites / links bar. From the toolbar that appears you can choose to highlight text, bookmark it to your Diigo account (including adding tags), add a sticky note, share on twitter, facebook or by email or simply link to your diigo account.

Optional extra:
You might like to try investigating using lists on Diigo and searching for other people’s sites using the search box to explore the community library or look for groups or users interested in that topic. You can even add feeds to your Diigo bookmarks so they appear on your blog (look at the options under Tools). We’ve done this on the 11½ Things blog – look to the right under the Blog Archive.

Did you know:

• You can migrate bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo
• There are iPhone and iPad apps for Diigo which allow you to bookmark sites on the go, or read websites offline.

Social citation-sharing

You could easily use social bookmarking sites to bookmark the webpages of particular journal articles and share them amongst a group of colleagues (bearing in mind access to the full text for colleagues would depend on their subscription or institutional subscription). There are other sites set up, however, that are designed specifically for that purpose and have additional related features. Some of them function as full bibliographic software packages which enable you to insert citations in Word documents and generate a bibliography. Examples include Mendeley and Zotero.

We’re not going to go into detail here because the summer school session on Freely available bibliographic management and collaboration tools running on Friday 15 July is all about these tools. If you didn’t get a chance to attend the session you can check out the presentation, handouts and worksheets on the Summmer School Moodle course.

Thing 6: Post an entry on your blog saying what your impressions are of Diigo, or any other tool mentioned this week, and why you think this tool might be of particular use to researchers, academics or clinicians.

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Optional extras:

If you want to know more then have a go at exploring some of the following sites:

Library Thing
LibraryThing is a social bookmarking site for book lovers. It allows you to create an online catalogue of books and connects you to other people who have similar collections.


Mendeley, Zotero, CiteULike and EndNote Web
Check out the material on social citation software from this week’s summer school session, available on the Summer School Moodle course. There are worksheets to help you explore the resources.

Further information
Check out the websites we found on Diigo on social bookmarking.

Week 2: Social, academic and professional networking tools

Well done to everyone for setting up their blogs and for finding such a good range of useful blogs for researchers and clinicians. If you haven't yet registered your blog with us, please send the URL to 11andahalfthings@gmail.com.

This week we're focussing on social, academic and professional networking tools. These are tools that enable to you keep in contact with other people and keep up to date with what they are doing. Many include features such as email and instant messaging, and allow you to upload images and videos. Quite a few of you already use some of these tools, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. We'll explore these and some other tools that might be of interest to academics or clinicians.

There has been some debate about privacy issues on social networking sites, which might make people disinclined to sign up or put them off using them as a tool for their work. Many sites have privacy settings but the point of ‘social media’ is to be social, so if a researcher, academic or clinician is worried about making their work public in this way it's probably not the tool for them.

Twitter

Twitter is sometimes classed as a social networking tool, and we feel it fits in to this week's theme as it is about keeping in touch and networking as well as sharing thoughts and information. Twitter is also defined as a micro-blogging tool, a quick way of widely sharing your thoughts or information in 140 characters or less. Twitter has been reported to have around 200 million followers. Wikipedia provides a good background and history to Twitter.

Why tweet?

• Twitter can be used for both dissemination and gathering of information. Researchers might want to tell people about their own research and events and find out what other people in their field are doing and reading
• Twitter can be used to ask a question or ask for advice from people with similar interests.
• Many professional organisations, government bodies and funding councils use Twitter to keep people up to date with news and opportunities. Look out for 'Follow us on Twitter' links on their websites.
• Twitter is now widely used at conferences, so delegates can post thoughts about the speakers, lectures or seminars. It's also a useful tool for people who were unable to go to a conference - they can follow what's being said on Twitter.
• Informal peer review - social media tools such as Twitter provide a much faster method for people to comment on new publications, such as journal articles, than traditional scholarly methods. See this article in Nature for more on this.

Thing 3: Set up an account on Twitter, tweet about 11½ Things and start following our twitter account

If you don't already have a Twitter account we'd like you to set one up. If you do already have a Twitter account then you're welcome to use that account.

1. Go to http://twitter.com/ and follow the steps to create an account.
2. You are taken to a screen where you can choose people to follow based on your interests or friends. You can browse or search for people to follow. You do not have to choose anyone at this stage if you don't want to, and can just continue to the next step.
3. Once your account is set up you will receive a confirmation email from Twitter. You need to click on the link in the email to compete your registration.

Now you're ready to tweet! Convention in Twitter is to assign a 'tag' for a particular topic thread. This is a relevant word about your tweet with a hash symbol # in front of it. These are called 'hashtags'. We've decided on the following hashtag for 11½ Things: #11andahalfthings.

From your Twitter home page type a comment about 11½ Things in the 'What's happening' box and click on Tweet. Make sure you include the hashtag #11andahalfthings in your tweet.  Remember you can only use a maximum of 140 characters!

To search for tweets on a particular topic you can enter a search term or hashtag into the search box at the top of the screen. Try carrying out a search for #11andahalfthings to see what other people have been tweeting.

WARNINGS:

• It's very easy to type your search term into the 'What's happening' box, rather than the search box. Don't do this or you'll end up tweeting your search terms!
• Some tweets may not appear in a search - Twitter explains that due to resource constraints not every tweet can be indexed in Twitter Search. Do not fret if you do not see your tweet when you do your search. If anyone is following you they should still see all your tweets.

Tips: Saving searches and reducing URL lengths
You can save your search and come back to it at any time from the 'Searches' tab to see more tweets on that topic. If you want to start a topic thread then you can always make up your own hashtag, but it's a good idea to search for the hashtag first to make sure it isn't already in use!

Information you want to share on Twitter may include useful websites, but URLs can sometimes be long and take up a lot of characters. You can use a free website such as https://bitly.com/ or http://tinyurl.com/ to create an alternative short URL to link to any website.

How to follow someone on Twitter
To follow someone on Twitter, click on the 'Who to follow' link from the black bar at the top of the page. You can then browse by interest, find friends from your email address book or just carry out a search for someone. Then click on 'Follow'.

Now start following us on Twitter. Our twitter username is 11andahalfthing.

Tip: Another Twitter convention
If you want to address another person in your tweet, add an @ to the front of their username. This shows you are addressing them and it also means your tweet will appear in their 'Mentions' tab when they log in to Twitter so they can see who is addressing them or referring to them. For an example of using the @ and # in a tweet, you might type: #11andahalfthings @11andahalfthing Thanks for putting together this course!

Facebook

Probably the best known social networking site is Facebook. You can set up a personal profile and link to friends, but can also create or join groups or set up a facebook page, like a webpage, or become a fan of a page. Many companies or organisations choose to do this as a promotional tool and a way of keeping in touch with their customers or members. The 'groups' facility also provides a simple way to send a message to all members of the group at once.

Why use Facebook in a professional context? Many of the reasons mentioned above for Twitter also apply to Facebook. Here are some further reasons:

• Monitor news and opportunities from relevant organisations and professional bodies – look out for ‘Follow us on Facebook’ links on organisations’ websites.
• The flexibility of being able to include text, photos and videos and inviting interaction means that researchers and research groups might want to use facebook to publicise their work or invite comments or debate.
• To get feedback on an issue from a large number of people. eg. See this article in the Lancet about how discussions on Facebook helped change health policy in Taiwan.

But where should you draw the line between personal and professional networking? For those of us concerned with making a distinction there are social networking sites set up purely for professional networking. Follow this link for a debate on using Facebook for professional reasons.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social networking site set up specifically for professionals and has over 100 million members worldwide. It demonstrates that, especially in business, it's not what you know but who you know that counts. It enables you to create links with colleagues or professional contacts, to keep ahead of the job market through inside connections and ask for advice or contribute to debate with fellow industry experts. You can link directly with people, but can also make second or third degree connections through people they know. LinkedIn also has groups that you can join.
 
Doctors.net.uk

There are other social networking sites that are set up for particular communities. Doctors.net.uk is the biggest medical networking resource in the UK, available to UK-registered doctors in primary and secondary care and has around 140,000 members. Although it doesn’t have all the interactive features of sites such as Facebook, it includes clinical and non-clinical forums which allow discussion and interaction between its members. It also offers a professional e-mail facility, medical news and continuing professional development tools.

Thing 4: Find an example of the use of a social networking site and share it on your blog

Try to find a profile, group or page on a social networking site that might be of use to a researcher, academic or clinician to support their research or practice, or created by them to assist with their work.

You could explore the sites we've already mentioned or explore some of the other sites mentioned in the Optional extras section below, or other sites you may know about. For most sites you should be able to access them and carry out limited searches without logging in but to get the full search capabilities you may need to set up a profile.

Alternatively you could try to find an instance where someone has written about how social networking has helped them in their research, academic work or clinical practice. For example, you could look in newspapers, journals or search the web for blog posts.

Post your example, or examples, on your blog. Add the tag 'Thing 4' to the labels box, and any other tags you might think are appropriate. You also might want to tweet about your examples or your thoughts on this week!

We look forward to reading your blog post.

The next set of 'Things' will be posted on this blog next Friday, 15 July 2011. We'll be looking at social bookmarking and social citation-sharing. If you're interested in social citation-sharing you might want to come to the Summer School session on 'Freely available bibliographic management and collaboration tools' on Friday 15 July from 10.00-12.00. We'll be exploring freely available social citation sharing tools such as Mendeley, Zotero and CiteULike. See the Summer School Moodle course for more information. 

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Optional extras

Oher social networking sites

Here are some examples of other social networking sites you might like to explore:

Conferences and events:

• Lanyrd describes itself as a social conference directory. It utilises your social networking links set up through twitter to help you identify conferences that might be of interest. It alerts you to conferences that people you follow on twitter have found interesting. You can also add details of your own conferences or events and you can add slides, videos and audio files. Or you can search for conferences and then simply click on a link to share a conference on Twitter. You don’t need to register, just log in with your Twitter account and have a browse around.

Social networking sites for particular user groups:

• MethodSpace - a site for researchers engaged in research methods
• Graduate Junction - for postgraduate students in any subject doing a Masters or PhD, to connect with other postgrad students with similar academic interests
• Sermo - largest online physician community in the United States

Tools for creating social networking sites:

• Ning - A subscription-based site that allows you to create your own social network.  Eg. The Master Clinician Network is a project designed to make peer reviewed examples of evidence-based clinical practice in speech-language pathology available for observation and critical discourse.
• Ozmosis - US-based company providing software solutions for healthcare companies and organisations who wish to establish social networking, content management and communication channels.

Tip: Adding social networking links to your blog

You can add links on your blog or website to your Twitter, Facebook or other social networking profiles you may have. For example:

• Twitter resources
• Facebook badges

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