Because working on it consumes your thoughts entirely. I have been working on the CNSA website, forums, and social media pretty much non-stop since I got admin rights. I just LOVE it. I love playing with the code (although, admittedly, I am entirely self-taught and barely know anything), I love improving the site nav and content, and I LOVE seeing the numbers climb after I installed Site Meter Pro.

I had some struggles with the old forum software (phpBB 2.x) and not having access to the database so I could mod the registration page to at least semi-prevent spambot registrations. I ended up manually adding approved posters to a group, and then giving that group permission to post. It's not ideal and I am worried I may have killed the forums, but they were pretty much dead anyway. One page worth of posts in a year...

I sent emails to the CNSA web host, Director Communications, and President of CNSA to try and persuade them to upgrade the entire site platform to vBulletin. From what I've seen, people either love it or hate it, and the people who hate it seem to be developers who are looking for ++intensive modifications, which doesn't affect me. I played with a demo version of the admin panel and I am pleased with vBulletin's community-centric nature. I WANT Regional Executives to be able to upload their own content and maintain a web presence for their community. I want the BoD to maintain blogs and reach out to the members. I want people to visit cnsa.ca and want to BE a member.

I'm also intrigued by the calendar functions, the events manager (hugely important for an organization which exists primarily through conferences), and social networking integration such as Facebook Connect. If we make it easy for our members to get involved and stay involved, they might actually take an interest in it - particularly those members (such as myself) who live in areas where CNSA has no physical presence.

Anyway, Reading Week is drawing to a close and I am scrambling to finish the major adjustments to the website so that, by Monday, I have my head back in the clinicals game ;)

I hope you all had/are having a great holiday! I got to spend some time with my fella's family over Christmas and that was wonderful. They have grandkids so they did the whole Christmas Is Magical thing. I absolutely love Christmas. I'm not really into gifts, exactly - the best part for me is hanging out, enjoying family, and listening to carols.... really! I've decided that next year I will, in lieu of gifts, sponsor a needy family.

I did buy myself something a special something yesterday. I've been wanting one for a long time, now, and I wasn't ready to make the plunge..... until I saw they were on sale for 60% off, and I almost-simultaneously got an email from Skyscape giving me a $50 gift certificate for participating in their scholarship contest. I guess some good came from it after all :)

So, when the planets aligned - I bought a BlackBerry. It's a Curve 8530 - last year's model, I think - hence the sale (see below... like my Link wallpaper? ;)


I know, I know, you can all pick your jaws up off the floor - it's not an iPhone.

Reasons I did not buy an iPhone:

-They are ungodly expensive
-They are slightly less expensive if you choose sell your soul to a carrier on a 3 year contract......and I don't do contracts, anymore
-iPhones will be a nice upgrade from this one when I am ready/employed, unless Android makes me happier with less money
-I still love QWERTY!

So far I am quite pleased with it, except for falling prey to the dreaded Disappearing App World Icon. Luckily, there is a metric TON of BB resources around the interwebs and I was able to get it resolved with a few Googlin's and some wasted time setting up the settings I'd lost.

I'm impressed with the integration with just about everything. I had a Palm about 7 years ago, and I spent ages getting it all set up. Then I let the battery die one day.... losing everything. The BB software sets my mind at ease with the Desktop Manager (for Mac, hooray!) and the syncing and the backups. Lesson learned in syncing more frequently AKA before major un/installs or after extensive setting changes.

This model has WiFi and whatever wireless network Koodo offers. It's not 3G, I don't think, and not superfast, but I am new to the idea of mobile browsing so it works for me.

So far, I've installed apps for both of my banks, Dropbox, KeePass, Facebook, Google Mobile,  and Skyscape. I am also SO PLEASED that I can handle my email without being on WiFi or within range of a public computer. It made me twitchy staying over at my boyfriend's house and not being able to instantly access my email. I think I am an email junkie.

I spent quite a bit of time browsing Skyscape trying to decide how to maximize my gift certificate. They also had a deal going that, if I purchased by Dec 31, I would get an additional 25% off. They also suggested I share the link, so here you go: www.skyscape.com/share25off.... offer expires March 31, 2011.

I ended up purchasing a few titles:

• RNotes®: Nurse's Clinical Pocket Guide
• Davis's Drug Guide for Nurses
• Davis's Comprehensive Handbook of Laboratory and Diagnostic Tests with Nursing Implications

They threw in a med calculator and the International Classification of Disease as well.

So far, I am happy with Skyscape. I emailed them a problem with my order last night and they had it resolved by noon. I was NOT thrilled with the installation process, which could use an App World update, because it was hunt-and-peck 24 digit serial numbers to install each title. I'm also not thrilled with the setup of the Skyscape app. For something that I paid for, it sure does spend a lot of time trying to convince me to download other free software.

Anyhow, I am pretty excited to use my BB in clinicals! There is a TON of information in my pocket. The drug guide seems a lot handier than my hard copy - search for drug names and the info is there, no holding books open required. RNotes also has a good mix of L&D resources in it. The med calculator is pretty good too, it has everything from IV infusions to Apgar scoring.

More reviews and from-the-trenches stories of using my BB in clinicals to follow in the new year :)

Best wishes for 2011, everyone!

While at work over the last few days, I have spent a few hours browsing iTunes U for various Nursing vodcasts. It's really, really fascinating to see how other schools teach their students. For those who don't know, iTunes U provides a medium for educational institutions to post video or audio feeds of their lectures, and they are free to view for anyone who has iTunes (also free). There are lectures on every subject you can think of. I love to just browse different topics and learn. The other day I watched a vodcast about Relativity. For no real reason, just because I could. [Photo Credit]

My school, new as it is, was built as a 'smart' institution with microphone hookups and live feed capabilities in pretty well every classroom. It doesn't currently participate in iTunes U, however. I think my school is concerned over privacy issues and intellectual property. I have this dream that instead of burying their heads in the sand and choosing not to address the promise of global education, our nursing faculty would embrace the accessibility of information and begin to publish some of our classes. (Check out the iTunes U how-to guide!)

I find it very exciting to think of how this technology could be utilized by the nursing community at large. For curious students (or would-be students!) like me, it is an easily accessible look at various aspects of nursing and it can introduce us to all kinds of specialties that we may not have known about. How awesome would it be to browse to a central organization website like the CNA, and be able to find and view lecture classes for specialties that you might be interested in? I am thinking specifically of the CCU certification I am interested in, or other advanced Post-RN coursework available at my university like Advanced Wound Care. You could utilize other schools' lectures to supplement your own - maybe to get a different point of view on difficult concepts, or to expand on something that you found interesting. You could even see how other student nurses in the world are learning.

On a larger scale, this could be utilized as refresher courses for distance learning or a video log of the entire class you took. I, for one, would LOVE a v-library of my lectures. I would pay extra to have a permanent record of the classes I take. I feel like I only ever take away about 30% of the information from any given lecture, because really, there's just way too much information assaulting my neurons at once. And how great would a v-library be for studying??

Imagine being an outpost nurse who is planning a community-scale intervention in diabetes management. Sure, you can spend hours and hours digging up relevant research (and you probably will), but imagine if you could visit the site for The Diabetes Nursing Interest Group and find podcasts for the most up-to-date EBP based on current research.

In short, you could find out how other nurses are nursing, straight from the specialty's organization. They could put out quarterly updates with new information or the latest in EBP.

How is this different from the newsletters or PDF publications that are already sent out, you ask?

The big differences would be accessibility - anyone could view this information, not just the organization and not just nurses (!) - and method of delivery.

Reading through a 37-page PDF is a lot more tedious and abstract than viewing a 10-minute video showing the latest in nursing interventions. How much easier is it to learn when you can actually watch a video of a nurse interacting with a patient, instead of just reading about it? Things that are best shown visually with an accompanying explanation, like new methods for IM injections or crisis interventions.

The possibilities are massive. This could theoretically be on a huge scale, with global involvement. Ideally, having this kind of information available from such reputable sources (CNA, PHAC, and NIH, to name a few) in such an incredibly accessible format - over 200 million iPods sold, worldwide! - could even be utilized to educate and influence public health. Inexpensively... AND "upstream" in that nebulous idea of primary health care.

I believe people are becoming increasingly open to being involved in their own preventive health maintenance (anyone notice how popular the Doctors have become? I laugh every time I see them in their pristine TV scrubs). I think that good, reliable information is hard to come by. Google any medical question and you're going to get 2,000 results from Yahoo! Answers or wrongdiagnosis.com. The world is ripe for reliable information at our fingertips. This kind of health information is mostly an untapped market, IMO. I find this all very very exciting.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that post secondary education and research isn't off in some ivory tower (or imposing brick-and-ivy academia) anymore. You don't have to get periodicals from the library to keep up with the current knowledge base. Any layperson can experience the post-secondary environment for free via one of the most accessible mediums to have ever been invented, short of the Internet itself. The information found there is (presumably) based on the most up-to-date resources available.

While I am waiting for the world to catch up to my ramblings, here are a few nursing-related lecture podcasts on iTunes U that I have subscribed to. I haven't watched them all, yet, but they're pretty much everything that I could find that was published from a School of Nursing. Please leave links to your favorite nursing podcasts in the comments and I'll update them here! Happy watching/listening :)

Acute Adult Nursing
Adult Health III
Clinical Skills for Student Child Health Nurses
College of Nursing Lectures - Video
Diabetes Care
NURS 083A: Pediatric Nursing
Nursing Informatics Program
Nursing Skills: Techniques for Sub Cutaneous and Intra Muscular Injections
Penn Nursing: Care to Change the World
Pharmacology for Future Nurses
Nursing-Psychology 342
The School of Nursing - Art of Bedside Care
The School of Nursing - NCLEX Review
Surgery ICU Rounds Podcast
Yale Health & Medicine

Of pure bliss.

Ahhh, at last.

Yesterday we had an interesting workshop on researching information and how to find what you want. Since I've been a student for a few years now, I've already attended similar workshops and I thought it would be boring to go again. My prof, however, told us: Even if you've already been to an information literacy workshop, I highly suggest you attend this one.

My group and I did our presentation today on the roles of unions in nursing. I had pretty well finished my Keynote presentation last week, but last night I buckled down and put the finishing touches on it. I had thought I only had a few minor changes to make, but one change led to another, and I ended up putting in another 6+ hours on it! While I was searching for the sources/authors for the media I used, I stumbled upon a great Vodcast that highlighted some of the exact points that our presentation was trying to cover. I embedded a few minutes of it into my Keynote and it worked perfectly... after a few hours of troubleshooting.

Considering that I grew up without a computer and did not start playing with them until I was well into my teens, I imagine myself to be somewhat proficient at this thing we call technology. I can usually find my way around a program without much help, I know what an L2 cache is, and I can troubleshoot a no-POST if I really have to.

So I have had access to Blackboard (then-webCT) for the last few years in college. I understand the general purpose and the potential for integrating the coursework to make everything highly accessible from wherever the student may be - I think it's a great idea! However, exactly one of my professors has ever used it, and that was 3 years ago. I think I've just got this picture in my head of the hopelessly confused teacher trying to find the "play" button on the VCR and pretty well every instructor ever since has fallen into that category.

To those who find me from http://twitter.com/ugrn, hi! I found you through Pixel RN's post and I'm still feeling on the fence about using Twitter, but I'd like to give it a shot. So here goes. :)

that Apple is finally opening a store in Alberta!