I’m a MscOT student at the university of alberta. Previously I spent 10 years in IT.
I’ve just posted my OT blog aggregator at http://www.otblogs.org for my classmates and others to
find blogs relating to occupational therapy. I’ve also organized the blogs by country of
origin under the categories tab.

If for any reason you would not to be on this site please let me know. I will simply
mark your blog as private and then only i can see it.

The idea behind this is to share my work so others can become blog enthusiasts. They can
link directly to your blog and subscribe to your feed if they want to individualize the
blogs of interest.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at joan.guetschow@ualberta.ca.

Thanks for the great posts!

Joan

James
http://www.housingot.co.uk/page9.htm

I believe we need to get our professional initials out in regular publications (Parents; Exceptional Parent; Beautiful Homes and Gardens…) as well as in the professional literature just to raise awareness that we exist and have a lot to offer in many areas.

What I am finding in doing literature reviews is the variance in terms, which leads to why you can’t find much information using “our” OT terminology. Something as simple as “handwriting” requires you to look under “graphomotor” or “orthograpic.” In the move towards universal terminology, it is becoming much more difficult to locate information related to sensory. I am finding many articles related to SPD in journals related to neurology and the brain. I actually like this, though it depends on who is putting out the research, as it broadens our radar for exposure. As OTs, we just have to keep abreast of research and actually CONTRIBUTE rather than CRITICIZE those efforts put forth by therapists seeking to add to the literature base.

The ability to synthesize is a whole other topic worth exploring.

My thoughts – and I had quite a few so I’m trying to think of which to start with! Umm… first off – I think of the learning styles of occupational therapists – now in Australia and New Zealand we tend to be kinesthetic learners (I’m referring to the VARK here). So in some ways I’m not surprised that you wonder what’s happened to the readers – if you were here I’d say actually our profession is very much about doing.. and then visual – so it makes sense that others start with their peers around them – rather than heading to the text books first! I think I wrote in my article that some theorists describe how we believe that our knowledge resides in our friends and colleagues – so we see their ‘expert’ opinion first then move outwards from there? These people often know our context as well – so while the books provide useful theories… they often don’t say – this works and I know it because I tried it…! So the evidence people see is practice evidence, rather than evidence=based practice!

I think too people turn to the web because it is more up-to-date – and blogs are certainly one way of capturing up-to-date ideas. I’m realising more and more that the literature we read in 2007, may well have been submitted in 2005 to the journal based on 2004 or older research? So when currency of knowledge is needed, then can the web provide that immediacy we seek?

Is it reading that is the lost art – or is it the ability to analyse and synthesize the information – these are information literacy skills – or if using digital means (ie the web) known as digital information literacy skills – is it these we should be teaching in education, particularly when the information available to us has exploded!!

And there’s a thought – when we went through OT school, there was probably about 5 or 6 OT journals that we accessed (published about every second month or four times a year)… and the text books were few and far between – now look at how much literature we are swamped with – not to mention what is available on the internet – I guess its not surprising that students decide to turn to their friends as a starting point – rather than the books….

Not sure if this is helpful or not.. but hopefully we might see more comments?