Web technology, autonomous learning and professional development in physiotherapy
New web technology has given us the opportunity to take independent control of our learning and professional development. Traditionally our professional development has arisen from face to face courses, however now we can choose what, when and how we learn in a time and cost effective way. Here are some of the free options that I use every day that are available to us all:
- Sign up to RSS feeds of your favourite journals and create RSS feeds in PubMed for your particular areas of interest
- Sign up to a feed aggregator to collect your RSS feeds
- Start a blog, you can keep this private or make it public and get your mentors/colleagues to comment
- Create a Physiopedia account
- Read and review articles of interest from your RSS feeds and comment on them on your blog or add new evidence to Physiopedia.
- Listen to podcasts in your redundant time such as during your commute to work, comment on new things you have learned in your blog or add new evidence to Physiopedia
- Connect with like minded colleagues on Twitter and LinkedIn, blog about connections and collaborations that emerge
- Follow like minded colleagues recommendations on content communities and blog about new and interesting information that you come across
- Follow Facebook pages of your favourite physiotherapy organisations and blog about new information or record it in Physiopedia
- Write new evidence based articles in Physiopedia to contribute your knowledge and work to the profession
- Collect interesting articles that you come across in Zotero or Mendeley and share them with your colleagues
- Keep an on-line portfolio, this can easily be done with a personal blogging tool by recording all your new learning activities mentioned above!
As you can see this list has a bias towards blogging and contributing to Physiopedia. This is because I firmly believe that these are the best ways to contribute to our own learning. Blogging is a great reflective tool as well as a place to store information, and a wiki such as Physiopedia (the only physiotherapy specific wiki) is a good place to collate, develop and contribute your knowledge.
Can you think of any other good ways to use technology for perssonal learning and professional development?
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