Our Supporting Breastfeeding Mothers E-Learning package has been shortlisted in the Johnson & Johnson Award for Excellence in Midwifery Education category of this year’s RCM Midwifery Awards. The RCM Annual Midwifery Awards each year help to promote and celebrate the best in midwifery with the awards lunch taking place in London on Wednesday 27 January where the winners and runners-up will be announced at the lunch to an audience of guests from throughout the world of midwifery and healthcare.

Shortlisted entrants were invited to present their projects to the judging panel in London on 16 and 17 November 2009. As previously blogged, our package is a high quality, interactive, web-based ‘reusable learning object’, aimed at final year student midwives, using video narratives of women’s lived experiences of breastfeeding selected from Healthtalkonline. A demonstration version is available from the Healthtalkonline website in the Teaching and Learning Section.

RCM website

RCM Midwifery Awards

Visit Healthtalkonline

The Educause Horizon Report for 2010 has just been published. It makes predictions about the emerging technologies that are likely to have a significant impact on education. This year’s predictions are: mobile computing, open content, electronic books, simple augmented reality, gesture-based
computing and visual data analysis.

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A nice positive review from the latest edition (Volume 41 Issue 1, Pages 147) of the British Journal of Educational technology for Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts & More…….

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I was really delighted to see that a new journal is appearing next year concerning comics and graphic novels. The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics covers all aspects of the graphic novel, comic strip and comic book, with the emphasis on comics in their cultural, institutional and creative contexts. Its scope is interdisciplinary and international, covering not only English language comics but also worldwide comic culture. Good to see Paul Gravett on their editorial board too.

As a long-term and continuing fan of comics and graphic novels from when I was young they’ve long been viewed in an unfavourable light and dismissed by both academia and wider media culture and it’s about time they were given consideration as a serious art form (gets off soapbox at this point)

I will definitely be sending something into them for review next year (but so much to choose from!) and will be looking forward to reading it as well (which you can’t say about all academic journals)….

Pleased to report that a demonstration version of our Supporting Breastfeeding Mothers E-Learning package is now available on the Healthtalkonline website in the Teaching and Learning Section.

The package is a high quality, interactive, web-based ‘reusable learning object’, aimed at final year student midwives. Using video narratives of women’s lived experiences of breastfeeding selected from Healthtalkonline, together with other published evidence, students are provided with an enhanced insight about what kind of support is effective, empowering and valued, and what support is regarded as unhelpful, detrimental and disempowering. They are then encouraged to critically evaluate and challenge current practices that influence the initiation and continuation of breastfeeding, as well as reflect on their own practice and attitudes to breastfeeding.

Visit Healthtalkonline

A very interesting study has revealed that Wikipedia lost 49,000 of its contributors in the first three months of 2009. The figure comes from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, which created software to track the edits made by three million active Wikipedia contributors in ten different languages.

Source : Macuser News

Wikipedia has responded to this news story here…..

Wikipedia reponse – Wikipedia’s Volunteer Story

Flook is a free app that’s an interesting and creative twist on location-based services writes Mashable. It’s social, fun, interesting, and can help you learn new facts and places to go in your local world or while travelling. It has that simple yet useful and potentially addictive game-like mechanic to it that’s bolstered by its playful design.

Source : Mashable

News comes via press release of a new free online training resource which is available via the STARs (Stroke Training and Awareness Resources) website.

The website aims to provide an interactive way of learning where images, quizzes, animations and video clips are incorporated into a series of patient scenarios. Throughout the resource links to other learning and reference materials are provided. Each of the 5 topics has a Module Test which if successfully completed will awarded a certificate…..

Interesting NHS Choices response to a Daily Mail Article How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer ….

Smokescreen is a cutting-edge Channel 4 game that teaches young players about the potential pitfalls of posting their every thought and action online……

Source : The Wired Blog