Well the new semester starts soon. I will be doing more teaching in SL using Colin the virtual patient and his new heart and lung sounds which are embeded in his chest. This is controlled by the lecturer who can change the sounds – normal, aortic stenosis etc (great work Andy).
I will also be teaching history taking and look forward to welcoming new volunteers who let my students take their real life health history from the comfort of their homes.
This wil be the second round of my action research project. Data will be collected using student and lecturer diaries. Hope to present the results later in the year at a conference in the USA.
We are also working on a web interface which will allow us to add to the case based histories which will speak to our AIML bots and add any missing questions to the answers. This will help create and refine cases.
Well that’s me at the moment, catch you later, Kali/Evelyn
This is round one of an action reserach project I am undertaking. The poster has some of the the conclusions drawn from the students diaries and self -assessment of group work. I have still to collate the data from their presence and immersion questionnaire. What fun SPSS!
We are continuing to work on the patient chat-bots and recruiting more volunteers over the summer.
The first round results of my action research project on teaching healthcare students in virtual worlds will be up within the next month. Some very positve data and a great amount of work done by the students. Also I will update you soon on my work with real people who have volunteered to allow my students to take their medical history via Second Life. Early days with this project but hoping to recruit more people over the summer.
Theresa Price has just returned from a succesful NETNEP conference in Australia (just got back due to the ash).
We are building on and developing a few new projects. An action research project is ongoing and will be evaluated soon. We will share our initial results on the blog. Do please keep an eye out.
Please feel free to comment on any of our work so far. Also if you are interested in any collaboration, please contact us.
Check out the video below for our work so far.
Regards Kali/ Evelyn.McElhinney@gcal.ac.uk on behalf of the team at the School of Health
A little sampler video sequence to show our work on connecting “Second Life” avatar-patient-bots with specially written AIML [artificial intelligence markup language] and speech synthesis software.
Hopefully we’ll add speech recognition too This project is being used with Nurse Practitioner students. However it could be used for a number of healthcare professionals. Please feel free to add a comment.
There’s more info below, see the post on Sep 16 2009 “Taking a patient history from a virtual patient”
This was a small scale qualitative evaluation of the lecturers’ (researchers’) and students’ experience of using Second Life in order to learn decision-making. Students assumed Avatars (a student nurse image in Second Life) and accessed the Clinical Simulation Laboratory within Second Life following changing into nursing uniform. They then worked through a scenario based activity. Over a six week period each student carried out a communication and visual assessment of six patients in one ward based area (one session for each student). At the end of the session the student was asked to prioritise the care for these patients and explain their decisions. The students then recorded their experiences during a one-to-one semi-structured interview and focus group.
The research team acted as the students’ mentors via their individual Avatars and provided feedback and guidance to the student Avatar.
A pragmatic approach was taken that included elements of:
• Case based learning: six realistic, interactive scenarios were developed at the appropriate level for the students
• Discovery learning: students interacted with others within the clinical simulation environment providing opportunities for incidental learning
• Reflective Learning: students used interview to record activities and reflect on their relevance to nursing theory and practice
This project is being used with Nurse Practitioner students. However it could be used for a number of healthcare professionals. Please feel free to add a comment. 
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