Slides to accompany my 15 minute talk at the 2013 Digital Economy 'All Hands' conference in Salford Quays, UK. I discussed some exploratory data collection and analysis we have performed into the ways in which speech and language therapists use social media and blogs to share knowledge and experiences of using iPads and specific Apps in therapy sessions. We start to untangle the problems facing new technologies being introduced in healthcare and a lack of evidence base on their use. The accompanying short paper can be accessed here: http://de2013.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/de2013_submission_22.pdf

1. Trust and Evidence in an Online
Community of Speech and Language
Therapists: The Case of iPad Use
Selina Sutton, John Vines,
Roisin McNaney, Mary Webster, & Patrick Olivier

5. online
community of practice

6. the study
systematic search and identification of blogs
and social media being used by SLTs
92 blogs and 1140 unique posts
Summative Content Analysis (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005)

7. the study
Grounded Theory Analysis (Charmaz, 2006)
on 777 posts categorised as ‘Review’

8. theme 1:
supporting & changing practice
theme 2:
knowledge
theme 3:
commoditisation
theme 4:
integrity

9. knowledge
‘all can access or edit, with the idea being that it will
grow with everyone's contributions (so I am not really in
charge of populating it, WE are)’
‘Classical music plays [...] in the background’ and ‘I
found the basketball game to be awkward. The area of
play is narrow’.
‘we need to be careful what we share and how we
present information as parents WILL innocently misuse
techniques [...] or misdiagnose their own children –
potentially to their own detriment’.

10. commoditisation
‘I have worked for 6 months on this list in my spare time
after school’
‘there is a PayPal button [...] if you would like to donate’
‘The app world is very Vendor driven – those with the
deepest pockets are getting the most coverage through
peer review sites, many of whom are driven by giveaways and freebies’

11. future work
more field work – interviews, session observations &
design workshops
#1 - supporting independent use
#2 - automatic evidence collection
#3 - communities of evidence collection

12. Research supported by: