Curate, Collaborate, and the Common Cold

Hello all,

This week in ADED 1P32, various web curation tools were explored. I found Diigo to be particularly useful because not only does it allow you to bookmark pages to go back to in the future, it also allows for annotation and highlighting of webpages. To familiarize myself with Diigo, I began by doing a search of pre-operative clinic assessments for my health quality improvement project. I hope to share this tool with the rest of my team so that we can collaborate when working on our literature review by annotating the articles and highlighting the key points from each. This way, everyone can get a general overview about the articles and not have to worry about spending countless hours reading through information that may not be relevant to our topic.

I think that Diigo will also be useful when studying for an infection control class that I am currently enrolled in. Each week, we are required to read a pre-selected article pertaining to infection control and safety topics. I uploaded this week's article to Diigo and was able to highlight the key points that show up in a list in the "My Library" section underneath the article title. I found this to be very beneficial because each week, we are quizzed on these articles. Being able to highlight and review a list of key points will save time while studying as I can review the list made, rather than re-reading the full article repeatedly. I will be adding this to the aggregate category of my PLE as it is a great way to collect information and store it in one spot for future reference.

Another curation tool that I discovered this week was Flipboard. It reminds me of Pinterest, but instead, is more specific and revolves around finding articles and recent news updates related to various topics. I enjoy the fact that my cover stories are tailored to my interests and it is convenient to be able to save specific articles by "flipping" them into your own digital magazine. This tool also fits well under the aggregate section of my PLE. I can see it being beneficial in the future for sharing common interests, or for sharing information regarding project topics and also to know why people "flipped" certain stories into the magazine (Flipboard provides a section when flipping to leave a comment so that others know why it was saved).

As a student, I often (actually, more like always) find myself spending far more time studying and completing school work than sleeping. Due to the fact that it is cold and flu season (and also midterm season), it seemed fitting to read an article in my Feedly reader that described the link between sleep and colds. One of the most interesting facts was that those who sleep less than 7 hours were 3 times more likely to catch a cold after exposure compared to those who sleep 8 hours or more. I tend to have good time management skills, so hopefully between that and relying on hand sanitizer, echinacea, and vitamin C, I can stay healthy enough to ace all of my exams!

Until next week,

Megan