Keeping your head above water

June is going to be an exceptionally busy month for me, and what a contrast it will be to last year, when I was forced to put my feet up after abominable (sorry, abdominal) surgery. This June, instead of putting my feet up, I'm going to be trying to keep my head above water.... My first speaking engagement is at the Learning and Skills Group Conference at Olympia, in London. The invited workshop I'm presenting is titled: "Collaborative and Cooperative Learning - the how and the why" in which I will look at choosing online tools, creativity, the role of Web 2.0 and problem based learning approaches, and much more during the 70 minutes I have been allocated. As soon as this workshop is over, I dash off to Gatwick Airport, to catch my flight to Valencia, Spain.

I will be in Valencia to speak at this year's European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN) Conference, on the subject of "Learning Space Mashups". I'm going to be talking about my recent research into combining Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs to promote reflective and collaborative learning, and will be outlining some of the difficulties and successes of these projects. EDEN is a great conference for networking and hearing about all the latest European transnational projects on e-learning, and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone in that field.

In the third week of June I have no less than 3 keynotes to present. My first takes place in relatively nearby Taunton, when I address the Association of Colleges Higher Education Managers event at Oake Manor on 22nd. Two days later on 24th I'm farther up the coast giving the opening keynote for the Learning and Teaching Conference at the University of Portsmouth. The title of my speech is: "Lifelong Learning in a Digital Age: Inspiration and Innovation through Social Media."

My final speaking engagement of the week is on 29th June, at the University of Middlesex, where I will be one of the keynotes at the Engaging the Digital Generation in Academic Literacy Conference. I blogged previously about this event where I'm speaking on the subject of "Digital Tribes and the Social Web: How Web 2.0 will Transform Learning in Higher Education." It's a quick dash back that evening to Plymouth, where the following morning, during the VC's Learning and Teaching Conference at the University of Plymouth, I will pick up my Teaching Fellowship Award. But... I can only stay until lunch, because then I'm dashing back off to Heathrow Airport to fly to Helsinki, where...... (but more about that later).

How did June get to be so busy? Well, don't look now, but July is even worse. I suppose I now have to earn my new title of Professor....

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Keeping your heads above water by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

World Health 2.0

I'm very pleased to see that a paper I have been working on with colleagues was published this week in a very specialised health related journal: Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine. It's one of a suite of papers Maged Boulos and I have been working on with colleagues around the world over the last 3 years, and this one is particularly exciting because it shows how to harness Web 2.0 tools, mashups and aggregators to predict localised social trends such as flu epidemics. I have to admit I was inspired when I first heard of the concept of Techno-social Predictive Analysis (TPA), and even more intrigued when I saw how it worked. We wrote it around the time of the Swine Flu reports last year, and we hope the paper has some impact on how Web 2.0 tools can be used in new ways to benefit society as a whole. Have a read of the abstract, and then make your own mind up how much positive impact this approach might have on the future health and well-being of the planet...

Social Web mining and exploitation for serious applications: Technosocial Predictive Analytics and related technologies for public health, environmental and national security surveillance

Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Antonio P. Sanfilippo, Courtney D. Corley and Steve Wheeler

Abstract
This paper explores Technosocial Predictive Analytics (TPA) and related methods for Web “data mining” where users’ posts and queries are garnered from Social Web (“Web 2.0”) tools such as blogs, micro-blogging and social networking sites to form coherent representations of real-time health events. The paper includes a brief introduction to commonly used Social Web tools such as mashups and aggregators, and maps their exponential growth as an open architecture of participation for the masses and an emerging way to gain insight about people's collective health status of whole populations. Several health related tool examples are described and demonstrated as practical means through which health professionals might create clear location specific pictures of epidemiological data such as flu outbreaks.

Keywords: Social Web; Web 2.0; Disease surveillance; Technosocial Predictive Analytics

Other Boulos and Wheeler papers:

Kamel Boulos M N, and Wheeler S (2007) The emerging Web 2.0 social software: An enabling suite of sociable technologies in health and healthcare education. [Abstract] [Full Text] Health Information and Libraries Journal, 24 (1), 2-23.

Wheeler S and Kamel Boulos M N (2007) Mashing, Burning, Mixing and the Destructive Creativity of Web 2.0: Applications for Medical Education. [Abstract] [Full Text] Electronic Journal of Communication, Information and Innovation in Health, 1 (1), 27-33.

Kamel Boulos M N, Hetherington L and Wheeler S (2007) Second Life: The potential of 3D virtual worlds in medical and health education. [Abstract] [Full Text] Health Information and Libraries Journal. 24 (4), 233-245.

Kamel Boulos M N, Maramba, I and Wheeler S (2006) Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education. [Abstract] [Full text] BMC Medical Education, 6 (41).

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