Survey

I have created an online survey using freely available software. This will gather anonymous data about the impression midwives and others have about second life and its potential use in midwifery education and professional development. I have loaded a link to this survey into my side bar so it is permanently available here. I have also loaded a link onto the Midwives in Second Life Wiki

I hope to gather some data to support any future publication or presentations I may make about the use of second life for midwives.

I would value your input to this and it will take very little time to complete. When you click on the link the survey should appear straight away and you can complete it there and then,

Thanks for your help

Minutes from midwives in Second life

I have created a wikieducator page to save documentation from our virtual meetings in second life. Here you will find two links at the moment, one to the notes or 'minutes' that were made of the meeting, which is stored on another Wikieducator page. The other is to the complete transcript of the meeting which is stored in Google docs.

If you have information you feel could be added to the Wikieducator page please feel free to do so. You will need to register with Wikieducator first but this is free and simple to do. You then just need to hit the edit button and you can edit the page. If you wish you can hit the Discussion tab at the top of the page and leave a comment. I welcome your feedback on this. Thanks to Clare for this picture.

By the way I finally managed to add a photo to Wikieducator with a lot of help from the tutorials for wikieducator.

Safer Motherhood. Supporting midwives in third world countries.

Image : Mother and son. from Teseum's photos on flickr.com








While I am busy trying to provide an opportunity for midwives to come together and collaborate, using second life, my thoughts go to midwives working in situations of poverty, in third world countries. These midwives and the women they are caring for need our support. Her is a link to a shocking statistic that I think will impact on anyone who sees it. At the time of writing this 89,365 women have died due to childbirth related causes in 2008 when you read it it will have ticked up even more.

The midwives who are struggling to provide care and support to women in these situations must find the whole situation so emotionally draining. I just cannot imagine it. One such midwife is an amazing young woman who has made her home in Malawi. It is this blog posting that made me think of this in the first instance. Many of her postings bring tears to my eyes and I admire her hugely. I was going to suggest she might find some support by connecting with other midwives, perhaps through this virtual environment and then I think about the challenges that she faces on a daily basis. Would this provide her with support or appear shallow and futile? Can collaboration in this way do anything to support midwives and women in these environments? Would she even be able to find the resources to do this. Clearly she does have internet access at least from time to time as she blogs.
What about midwives working in war torn areas of the world, Iraq, Afghanistan, what could we possibly do for them. Or the poverty stricken areas of South America or Asia. I was also moved byt the trailer for this movie Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids.
I would love to help and support these people in some way.

Here is one young mothers story


Just wanted to add a little to this post. I was chatting with a fellow midwife here recently and we were talking about the dreadfully high caesarean section rate in parts of South America. This midwife had spoken with someone who told her that women in the location he came from choose elective caesarean a little before the due date as they do not want to have to travel to the hospital in the middle of the night when they could be hijacked shot and/or robbed. Elective ceasarean is by far the safer option. It does put another perspective on the situation doesn't it?

Next second life meeting

We need to organise the next second life meeting quite speedily as the weekend fast approaches again. I have not yet documented my full reflection but I am basing this meeting on some feedback from the previous meeting. Someone wanted to see how it would be to explore a topic that we might discuss in real life to compare the quality of the interaction. I would appreciate your thoughts on this and if you feel changes need to be made. I have been thinking more about this and want to talk about what we might do on the day rather than nail it down here now.

Date: Sunday 9th March
Time: 09.30am NZ, 3.30pm New York, 8.30pm London, 0530 am Perth (sorry :)), 0730 am Sydney, 12.30 pm Vancouver.
Here is a link to World times for this meeting
(Please note that this clock was stating Friday 7th this was incorrect, the meeting is Sunday 9th morning as now stated on this time chart. Sorry about this, I have trouble keeping the time and date correct while I paste for some reason)

Place:
Meeting in second life on at the Kiwi educators meeting place on Koru Island (Koru 155,122,27 (PG)-Koru)

Theme: Supporting normal, natural childbirth. (Alternatively we could go to the sandbox and play at building things).

Agenda:
All gather at the Koru Island meeting place.
If we have a large group we could break into smaller groups to brainstorm the topic. Have a think about what you would like to do. It would be fine to go and practice building. We will be talking while we do that. Arwenna has a couple of good ideas also. Can you give me suggestions for how long this should last, I think at least 30 minutes perhaps 45 minutes.

Introduce Midwives group. Get contact details for those who wish to give this. Discuss theme, time and place for the next meeting and firm up arrangements before leaving.

We made it. Midwives met in Second life

Thanks to everyone who who supported this initiative and came along to our midwives and educators meeting in second life on Kiwi educators Koru Island. I am still feeling a bit tired so just a brief feedback from this session at this time and I will write more comprehensively later.


I am particularly grateful to the following people
Claire Atkins (Arwenna) has been wonderful supporting me to learn more about second life. Setting up the slide show and redoing the whole thing at the last minute when I wanted to change things. Claire also helped me keep an eye on the crowd and helped me to make sure everyone had a chance to participate. The meeting would not have been nearly as successful without her.

Merrolee Penman (Koru Bracken) . Merrolee is and Ocupational therapy lecturer and is a leader in blogging for that profession. She also has an interest in exploring Web 2.0 uses in tertiary education. Merrolee was keen to come along and I co-opted her to keep some notes, rough minutes, of this meeting. She did this job superbly for me. I will finalise these soon and post them in Google docs, linking here very soon. These notes of the meeting are available now in Wikieducator with a link also to the transcript of the meeting which is available in google docs

Sarah Sewart (Petal Stransky) who has encouraged and supported me to get to this point. Sarah came along and contributed to the conversation keeping this alive when I was busy concentrating on other things.

Brownyn (Branwen) and Leigh (leeroy) who ran the course on 'facilitating online learning communities'. I have learned so much from this course and would never have explored second life at all had it not been for this course.

The meeting was a great success, most particpants were from the UK, one came from Michigan where it was 3am when the meeting stared. Arwenna and her co-owner of Koru Island Isa Goodman gave everyone Kiwi Educator status which means they cna return here and can practice constructing things here also. We have been welcomed to return and hold further meeting here. Everyone was keen to meet again in one week. It was suggested that we make it Morning for NZ and evening for UK. This would make it midday or afternoon in North America and a better time for North American residents to participate. There were several midwives from North America and Canada who were interested but were not able to attend. I had met one Trinny Dreamscape from Vncouver a little before the meeting. also met up with Aastra Apflebaum who had difficulty with her computer crashing in second life. She popped in and out a couple of times but had to quit in the end.

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Here is the slide show presentation that I gave to the group to initiate discussion about the usefulness of second life for professional networking and midwifery education.

Final instructions for virtual midwives meeting

Meeting 9pm tonight our time
2100hrs-NZ, 0800hrs-UK, 0300hrs-New York, Midnight-Vancouver, 7pm-Sydney, 5pm-Perth.

Meeting at Koru Island, Kiwi educators meeting place.
Second life coordinates; Koru 155,122,27 (PG)-Koru

When you go online I should see that you are there and will offer to
teleport you to Koru Island, you should accept this invitation. If I do not
see you immediately give me a minute or two, it could take some time
to get everyone sorted. If you are late arriving and I don't notice
you are there can you send me an instant message (IM)? Sarah will be
helping me (Petal Stransky), so she may offer to teleport you also, you can accept either invitation.

If you are having difficulties, you could send me a message either by email cardacs@gmail.com or through skype - carolynmcintosh . Both of these will let me know instantly that I have a message.

Hope that all who wish to attend make it, fingers crossed for a successful meeting. It will be interesting to see how this works for us and will be good comparison with Sarah's previous Elluminate meeting and the upcoming Elluminate virtual conference on the 6th of March, see previous email from Soo.

See you tonight on Koru.
Carolyn
Dacary Dumpling (Second life)
carolynmcintosh (skype)
cardacs@gmail.com (email)

Last night before the midwives meeting

I arrived home tonight from a visit to my Mother-in-Law to find several more midwives signed up with second life and ready to participate in our meeting tomorrow night. Very exciting! Some of my colleagues from Otago Polytechnic and the "facilitating online learning communities course' that Sarah and I are completing are also going to join us. One of these is a colleague from Occupational therapy at Otago Polytechnic who has been a leader in blogging for this profession and has developed quite a community of OT bloggers. My mentor in second-life, Arwenna, who has helped me with setting up my presentation and other aspects of second life, will also be there helping me out, thank goodness. I hope she, and some of the others with more skills in second-life than myself, will be able to help answer some of your questions.

The meeting is tomorrow night at 2100hrs -NZ time 0800hrs-UK time 0300hrs-Montreal, 0100-Edmonton, Midnight-Vancouver. Midnight-secondlife

Hope this is helpful, here are the other word times for this meeting.

When people arrive I will teleport them to the location for the meeting. There will be some displays with one or two helpful 'how to's' to help get you started communicating. I will ask everyone to give brief introduction about their professional background and interest in Second-life. I have a small presentation prepared to introduce some of the possibilities I have discovered in Second-life and where my interest arises. I will then open the floor to everyone to discuss their thoughts about this medium and how it might be used for the benefit of the midwifery profession and midwifery education. I am hoping we can get people communicating in voice however if this is too difficult we will revert to text communication. When communicating in voice online it is important to watch for the signal above an avatars head, indicating that they are speaking. Trying to have one person speaking at a time is important. We will need to discuss these ground rules before we all start trying to communicate. Participants will be able to also communicate by text even if we are communicating with voice. Thankfully Sarah will be there to help me too. Hopefully between the two of us and with Arwenna's help we will be able to keep ahead and eye on communication and make sure everyone gets a chance to speak. I also want to try to keep some minutes of the meeting and might be able to delegate this task to one of my friends.

After the meeting if people want to go together to explore another second-life environment we might be able to do this, although it may be a challenge to get everyone moving together. If there is enough interest we may be able to arrange a future meeting before we leave. I also hope to get a photo of all participants if we can manage this.