Results of my poll

There were 16 responses to the poll on my side bar recently asking "what kind of support should New Zealand women have after homebirth or early discharge from hospital" .
Of the 16, 9 or 56% felt that there should be state funded homehelp.
5 or 31% felt there should be state funded doula support.
No one thought women should pay for these services themselves.
Two thought women should rely on support from family and friends and one felt that none of these options answered this question.

There is not enough information here to draw any conclusions. However most seemed to think that there should some extra government funded support for women and their families.

Managing my online life in igoogle

On the right is my igoogle home page. On this page I have some online newspapers and my gmail account feeding in. My gmail is automatically loaded and shows here as soon as an email is received.



Above is my midwifery page. I access this by clicking on the second tab (see arrow). It has midwifery blogs, including my own and Sarah Stewart's feeding into it. I have also performed a google blog search for words such as midwifery, midwives and childbirth. Items which are posted with these words also feed in to specific widgets on this page.


Here is my elearning page. Again accessed through a tab at the top of page. Here items which are posted on elearning are updated.

Finally his is my last igoogle page. It is on facilitating learning communites. I have done a google blog search for these terms and created widgets which update whenever items are posted on these topics.

I can create more pages if I wish and if I think of more areas I would like to cover. All of the photos here were taken by me with jing and transferred to flickr then onto my hard drive. I did this to make the file size manageable.

Just adding one more picture. this is a close up of the tabs section of my igoogle page.This is the second page, my midwifery page.

How and why to wash your hands.

This is a fairly good video about hand washing. I suppose stating she is a doctor gives her some credibility. I do not think the list of when to wash hands is a complete list, for example you should wash your hands after touching an animal, I am sure there are more examples of when to wash hands. If you stick with the video I think the demo of hand washing is quite good. This is a very important issue which I have blogged about previously.

Pushing up daisies in second life

Last night I was in email contact with on online friend/mentor/colleague expressing my frustration and not having a home. She (Arwena Stardust) then helped me to set my home to Koru Island, the Kiwi educators second life island. I am so pleased I finally feel I belong somewhere. Also if I do get into a tricky situation in second life it is much easier to run away if your have a home to run to.

After getting me sorted with my new home Arwena taught me how to start building things in second life. This is not something I had anticipated doing. I thought I would leave this up to others with more skill. Very quickly though she had me pushing up daisies. I made a box, flattened it and added a texture of daises. This is the basis of how things are created in second life. So maybe I will have a bit of a play and see what else I can create.

Image: Daisy from Bigtallguy's photos on flickr.com

What is the good evidence for midwifery practice?

With such an overwhelming amount of information available on matters to do with pregnancy and childbirth how do midwives and midwifery students make sense of the often conflicting information they may find. A Student guide to the medical literature is a very good guide to accessing evaluating and utilising evidence for practice. I found this link in Helge Sherlund's blog.

Sarah Stewart discussed the value of blogs in her posting on the academic credibility of social networking. I believe that blogs may provide an opportunity for those with an interest in a particular topic to present evidence they have found to support their perspective. Whether or not this can be considered as a reliable source depends very much on the credibility of the blogger and the evidence that has been presented. Those seeking to use this as evidence have a responsibility to verify the sources presented and critique their suitability.


Image: Another day in library from Svenwerk's photos on Flickr.com

Gilly Salmon talks about designing elearning

This is Gilly Salmon who is well known for her 5 stage model of online facilitation, mentioned by Sarah Stewart in her posting about online facilitation.

Liecester university introduction to elearning in second life

A wee bit more about the potential of second life in higher education. Am I posting too much on this topic?