Saturday, August 25, 2007

Blogs for midwives

I am writing a column for midwives in the New Zealand College of Midwives Journal and was really stuck on what sites to talk about. So I started thinking about the various tools we use for communication and collaboration. Tools such as blogs and wikis are really useful for midwives to reflect and learn together, but they are also ideal for when midwives are collaborating on projects, such as putting together a proposal or submission, or nutting out guidelines and so on. I have recently been writing an article with a colleague in Australia and sending it back and forth by email. But that became a real drag because the emails kept crossing in the post and it was quite difficult to keep track of at times. Of course, there are concerns about how secure these online resources are, but maybe if we kept our work 'open source' or available to everyone, we would find a growing national and international community of midwives working together. I would love to know how many times we replicate the work that we're doing all over the world ie how often do we re-invent the wheel?

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