An exciting event has been planned to celebrate International Day of the Midwife. Dr Deborah Davis from the University of Technology (UTS) in Sydney and Sarah Stewart Otago Polytechnic Education Development Centre in NZ have planned and coordinated a fabulous, innovative virtual conference.
Presentations, discussions, chat room and webpage discussions, videos and podcasts are all planned to occur on the day.
You can have a look at last year's event and explore the presentations there to get a sense of what you can expect this year.
You will learn all about working with a Wiki which is a website where people can create and edit pages about topics/areas that interest them together. Links can be made to resources and further pages. People can work cooperatively on policy and guidelines development, research and networking on a Wiki. The 24 hour virtual International Day of the Midwife Celebration and Conference is all on a Wiki, with links to events, tools, videos and podcasts provided within the Wiki.
Going to conferences is always fun. I love them, but geography, finances and time zones prevent many midwives meeting on an international level. Online resources and tools such as Second Life, Elluminate and Skype overcome those limitations and enable midwives to meet, communicate, share information and resources in a far more flexible way than face-to-face meetings. This 24 hour virtual celebration of midwifery is a means of providing us with an opportunity to meet at some stage during the day either 'live' in real time meetings or at recorded events at a time that suits us individually.
Elluminate is a virtual meeting room. You can listen, watch, interact in the Elluminate meeting room. You will need to get familiar with Elluminate before the sessions you want to take part in. Sarah Stewart has kindly offered to take you through Elluminate and show you how it functions. Contact Sarah to book a time to do so if you would like that help. I'm certainly going to take her up on her generous offer.
5 comments:
Thanks for advertising the Virtual IDM, Carolyn...look forward to 'meeting' you and anyone else who wants to join us :)
My pleasure Sarah. This virtual conference is a fabulous idea. Do you want to set some times so that people who want to do a tour of Elluminate can come along? I'm sure there will be a few who are interested in getting the technology sorted out in their heads and hands before the big day! No one would be happy to miss out on great presentations or being able to contribute because of a lack of knowledge
At this stage I am happy for people to contact me and I'll make times that suit individual people. My contact details are:
Email: sarahstewart07(at)gmail.com
Twitter: SarahStewart
Skype: sarah.m.stewart
Blog: http://sarahstewart.blogspot.com
I should also have said that I am on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/sarahmstewart
Thanks Sarah, that's great! I reckon you will be inundated with requests once people work out how brilliant this conference is!
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