The MEdTech Bookmark Manager is a tool which allows users to store bookmarks online, tag them, and share them with others. Not only are bookmarks stored in one easy to access place, but this application allows users to rate and comment on bookmarks, as well as choose to keep them private or share them with others. The bookmark manager was especially designed for medical students and faculty at Queen’s and contains several features not found in traditional social bookmarking applications, such as a thumbnail screen shot of the page you are bookmarking and the ability to rate your bookmarks and share these ratings with others.
The bookmark manager is accessible to all staff and faculty of the School of Medicine that have a MEdTech account. To begin using, simply log on to the MEdTech Bookmark Manager and begin adding bookmarks. For more information on how to import existing bookmarks from your browser and how to customize the bookmark manager visit the About page.
Originally published October 18, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
The MEdTech Academic Journal Directory is now live and is a listing of academic journals concerned with the use of technology in medical education. There over 40 journals listed by subject from educational technology to medical informatics and each journal is described in terms of thier target audience and topic areas.
Originally published October 17, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
Earlier this summer I was playing around with Tiddlywiki and after a few hours of experimentation I came up with Wiktionary, a wiki of web technology terms which I just posted to the MEdTech Labs site.
Although I was impressed with the original and lightweight version of TiddlyWiki, I choose to implement Wiktionary using MyWiki, a server-side offshot of TiddlyWiki. Wiktionary stores the definitions as pieces of mircocontent (or tiddlers) just like TiddlyWiki does but writes the data to a file on the server as opposed to a local HTML file. This allows for the wiki to persist over time and supports multiple contributions, all accomplished without the overhead of a database or a single page refresh.
Wiktionary and MyWiki are just two of many adaptations of the ever versatile TiddlyWiki. For more information on adaptations to TiddlyWiki, check out TiddlyWiki Mania.
Originally published June 14, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
The Department of Anatomy at the Univeristy of Toronto has just released Neurons: Animated Cellular and Molecular Concepts, a web-based tutorial which includes some very high-quality Flash animations. Not only have they made the tutorial available to other institutions, but each of the animations used in the tutorial is available for download and use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs license. This means that teachers can use the animations in their lectures and include them when creating thier tutorials, provided of course that they do not alter them in accordance with the no derivatives restriction. Sharing these animations is a step in the right direction towards open knowledge and it would be great to see these animations added to the various repositories such as HealthLibrary.ca and Heal.
Originally published September 23, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
Konfabulator is an application which allows you to run widgets on your desktop. Not only is it free, thanks to a recent aquisition by Yahoo, but it works on both platforms allowing Windows users to wallow in widget bliss.
Originally published August 24, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
Thanks to the Amnesty WIdget Browser, widgets are now free from the dark and isolated Dashboard environment and can live directly on the desktop.
Using Amnesty, widgets can be accessed from the menu bar and once on the desktop, they behave like any other desktop window with additional customization options. The WordPress and php.net search widget are now permanent fixtures on my desktop, and the CSS Ref and ColorSafe widgets (which come in handy when doing web development work) are just a click a way.
Originally published July 7, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
A really nice theme to the WordPress admin interface inspired by OS X Tiger, which is huge improvement over the defalt interface. This theme is very slick - not only is easy on the eyes but it’s a breeze to navigate.
The theme was created by the very talented CSS designer Steve Smith of Ordered List and it can be downloaded here.
Originally published June 17, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
This is my first post from the WordPress Dashboard widget. I also just set up the Google Maps widget and the Marquee widget which displays local showtimes.
I must admit, I haven’t used the widgets as much as I intially thought I would. This is partly because I already have some of the functionality offered by the widgets in my Firefox search toolbar - it’s a lot easier to search Wikipeadia from within the browser than to toggle back and forth between the browser and the dashboard. However, given how easy some of these widgets are to configure and access, I can see myself using them a lot more for applications where they decrease the number of steps involved. This is especially true in the case of the Marquee and Wordpress widgets as now I have one-click access to view showtimes and post to my blog.
Originally published June 14, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I just came across this interesting quote while reading an article on knowledge work. The quote is from The Social Life of Paper by Malcolm Gladwell (published in the New Yorker):
“But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.”
As I take a look at my work area - both my physical and virtual desktop - I realize that it does in a sense represent my current state of mind at work. Spread out are the files and papers that are on my mind both at the conscious and unconscious level - the things that need to get done and things I’m not sure how to do yet. The charts on the wall and the files on my desktop are there not because I need them right away, but because looking at them every day and having them in my peripheral view helps the ideas percolate and eventually come into focus.
Originally published June 10, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I’ve been using del.icio.us for several months now as a way to catalogue all of my bookmarks. So far so good, although I find myself yearning for some additional features, such as ratings, notes, and the ability to export the bookmarks. Then along came de.lirio.us, an open-source knockoff of del.icio.us that would allow me to make my own social bookmarking application with the features I wanted. Despite my best efforts I’ve found it nearly impossible to get the required Perl modules up and running, mostly due to my innate aversion to Perl and a set of very ambiguous installation instructions.
So, I’m very happy to report that today I found a much more elegant and sophisticated solution done in PHP/mySQL called Scuttle. Not only did it take less that 10 minutes to install (which is nothing compared to the hours spent trying to understand the cryptic Rubric installation instructions), it’s also has a much nicer GUI than the del.icio.us-style interface of de.lirio.us, and it’s got a handy import feature so that all my del.irio.us bookmarks were in the system in no time. Scuttle can be downloaded from Sourceforge here.
My Scuttle bookmarks can be found here, and previews of my own implementation of Scuttle will be coming soon.
Originally published June 8, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
