I’ve just returned from the APTA’s Combined Sections Meeting in New Orleans. It was a busy event for me as I was presenting a session, reporting for the press team over at Physiospot, sharing Physiopedia at TechnoPalooza and meeting up with my Twitter buddies, all of whom I had never my before!
Unfortunately for our presentation we got the graveyard slot, again. They say that they keep the good speakers until last to try to encourage people to stay until the very end of the conference, but I’m not so sure about that! Never the less, we had a really engaged audience and quality is better than quantity, right? Elaine Lonnemann, Eric Robertson and I discussed wikis, wiki use in physiotherapy and reported on the recent educational projects in Physiopedia. For those that were unable to attend here is the presentation that we gave:
Whenever I attend conferences I always try and do some reporting from the event, whether it be on the conference blog (as I did at ICMD), in my own blog (as I did for the education sessions of CSP Congress a few years ago) or over at Physiospot, as I did for this conference. This time, as well as writing a daily blog post, I tried out a live reporting tool which allowed me to make short entries for people to follow live. This could be seen on a specific page that I created in Physiospot for the event, the page also houses the tweets from the hashtag for the event and the blog posts that I wrote about the event. You can see it all here. I think what I learned from all of this is that firstly, I should have integrated the tweets from the event into the live reporting tool which would have created a natural archive for them, and secondly, it would have been better to have had a team of people doing the reporting from such a large event to really make a live report worth watching. We live and learn!
TechnoPalooza was a new feature of CSM this year. It was designed for CSM attendees to exchange ideas about how interactive technology is shaping the profession within five areas including the clinic, the home, education, gaming, and the office/mobile app. It proved to be a really interactive part of the exhibition hall where I was fortunate enough to spend some time demonstrating Physiopedia to attendees. It was also a great place for people who have previously been involved in Physiopedia to come and find me and for us to meet up and exchange ideas. So, thanks to all who made it along, it really was great to meet you.
Meeting people really was a feature of this conference for me. There are many people that I virtually communicate with, many of them on Twitter and most of whom I have never met. During my time in New Orleans I managed to meet up with a lot of these people for the first time and actually put a real live face to the name and icon that I have been chatting to for many years! Twitter does not particularly have a great purpose for most people and is often reported as a waste of time. Personally I consider it to be a great success which is evidenced by the people that I have met and the places that I have been, all down to a little bit of Tweeting!!
In many ways, the entire conference has been about ‘connecting the classroom and the clinic’. We have been connecting students in Physiopedia to complete classroom assignments on-line, the live reporting that went on shows how we can connect people in the clinic and classroom to a live event like this when they are unable to attend, Technopalooza showed many ways in which rehabilitation and learning in the clinic can be connected by technology, and Twitter just proves that you can connect with like minded people from all over the world. Long may these connections continue!
