Ruminations of an Online Instructor / MD

Researching Personal Branding on Day 27

I wasn’t exactly sure what constituted a “Personal Brand” so I started today’s activity by trying to figure it out. I found Michele’s Martin’s post on Building Your Online Brand: Start with the Message. She looked at two aspects, a personal brand and the elements of your personal brand:

What Is a “Personal Brand”?

Your personal brand is the perception that people have of you, as compared to other people in similar positions.

The Elements of Your Personal Brand
Your personal brand is the sum total of information about you that people will use to form an impression of your value. Your appearance, your personal characteristics, your work experience and education, your strengths, your passions, your work values and your accomplishments are all factors in developing your brand.

For Michele, the goal of personal branding is to create a consistent, positive message about who you are and what you stand for that will make you stand out from the crowd.

Determining my Online Identity Score

After getting a definition of a Personal Brand, from there I went on to determine my Online Identity Score following another one of Michele’s posts on What’s Your Online Identity Score and What Does it Say About You? She recommended running a little experiment:

• Type your name (with quotes) into Google.

• Look at the first three pages of results–how many of these references are about you?

• How many of those results would convey the right message to a future employer or client?

I discovered 19600 documents using my name as Kirsti A. Dyer (my preferred branding). All 30 of the results on the first three pages were actually about me. The results were the same if I ran the search in Kirsti Dyer.

The results show my diverse interests from Journey of Hearts website, to teaching, to work with Grief, Loss & Bereavement, involvement with NICU Parent Support and the various websites where I have published articles.

One of the interesting discoveries was a post on WinterQuake Blog, Thoughts in a Bottle on the Ocean from last week that featured one of my old poems, Darkness from circa 1996. It helped me realize that the information that we continue to make available on Journey of Hearts, which has been online now for over 10 years, is still very helpful for those going through loss.

Career Distinction’s Online Identity Score

As part of the What’s Your Online Identity Score and What Does it Say About You? Michele recommended using the handy tool from Career Distinction to calculate your “online identity score.”

While I didn’t get a number the way that Michele’s example showed I did get the following response:

Congratulations. You are digitally distinct.

This is the nirvana of online identity. Keep up the good work, and remember that your Google results can change as fast as the weather in New England. So, regularly monitor your online identity.

I wonder if that means I got a 10 out of 10?

Thoughts on Personal Blog Brand

I filed these under the Reflections & Revelations for Day 27.

Continue reading Researching Personal Branding on Day 27…

Exploring Other Ways to Comment for Day 26

Since the challenge for today was to think about using multimedia and other ways to comment on blogs I decided to review and explore some ways of using multimedia in this blog and for blog commenting.

My Voki

The first multimedia application that came to mind for today’s activity was the use of the Voki.

The Voki is a fun way of creating a talking voice character or a computer-generated avatar, but it wouldn’t be easily available for posting comments in a blog.

Sharing a Health, Nutrition & Wellness Lecture

The next multimedia option was using .docstoc. I’ve already included one lecture of my on the Ethical Challenges of the Medical and Healthcare Internet in a prior post on Discovering Medical Ethical Challenges Lecture on .docstoc.

I uploaded a new lecture to my .docstoc one that I recently gave on Health, Nutrition and Wellness, on How to Live a HEALTHY LIFE.

.docstoc is a great way of sharing professional documents, such as PowerPoint presentations. It would be more than one might need to respond to a typical blog post, but might be included as a linked reference.

A Look at Other Multimedia Options

I’d already briefly looked at several multimedia options for getting PowerPoint Lectures online.

• .docstoc – http://www.docstoc.com - .docstoc is a user generated community where you can find and share professional documents. Upload your documents for all the world to share.
• Slideshare – http://www.slideshare.net – SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. It is the best way to get your slides out there on the web, so your ideas can be found and shared by a wide audience.
• Slides on Line – http://www.slidesonline.org – a digital library made for physicians worldwide to access slide presentation on most updated research and clinical disorders.

Two new Multimedia options discovered as part of Day 24’s post include:

• VoiceThread – http://voicethread.com – A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways – using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) – and share them with anyone they wish. They can even be exported to an Archival Movie for offline use on a DVD or video-enabled MP3 player. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.
• Scrapblog – http://www.scrapblog.com – Scrapblog enables everyday people to express themselves online in a creative way. This service allows for combining photos, videos, audio and text to create multimedia scrapbooks.

Another Multimedia option that I’ve seen used quite a bit.

• One True Media – http://www.onetruemedia.com – One True Media an easy-to-use online service that makes consumers both producer and director of their own video creations. We offer an innovative and painless way to transform video and photos into polished video montages that can be shared with friends and family.

A Look at Other Ways to Comment in a Blog

I took a look at the suggested resources for discovering different ways to comment in a blog.

• Seesmic – http://www.seesmic.com- allows you to create video comments that can be uploaded to blogs using WordPress. According to their wiki you can also

Record one or more Seesmic video’s to a post.

Accept authenticated or anonymous video comments.

Moderate video comments exactly like text comments.

• Snapvine – http://www.snapvine.com – Using the snapvine Voice Player, users are able to safely communicate, in their own voices, with their online community with snapvine’s easy-to-use products that work on any cell phone, with any carrier.

Thoughts on Multimedia Commenting

I filed these under the Reflections & Revelations for Day 26
Continue reading Exploring Other Ways to Comment for Day 26…

Meet the Physician Professor Teaching in CyberSpace

I have been involved with providing health education over the internet for more than a decade only then we termed it “Web Education” with the Journey of Hearts website, teaching online, presenting scientific papers about our online experiences and taking a variety of online classes.

Since having my second daughter, my focus has shifted to health education and teaching and away from clinical practice. I currently teach an online graduate course and will be teaching another online college course in the fall.

I am doubly certified to be teaching Online. I am a certified Online Teaching Instructor through Cerro Coso College and also through Madonna University.

In addition I have been an online student for nearly 10 years taking online Continuing Medical Education Courses as well as online Graduate Courses in a variety of settings and different styles of teaching.

For more (including a photograph) see the About Dr. Dyer Page.

Welcome to Ruminations of an Online Instructor!

Welcome to the “Ruminations of an Online Instructor” Education Blog where you will discover my ruminations as a Physician – Professor (ProfessorDoc) and sometimes student on teaching, blogging and learning in CyberSpace.

By reading my Edublog you will find the answer to the intriguing question,

“What is a Physician doing teaching in CyberSpace?”

Take a look around my Edublog and subscribe to the RSS feed for the Ruminations Blog. The primary purpose of this Edublog is to share my thoughts, observations, reflections and resources about online education, online teaching, distance education, e-learning and web education from the perspective of a Physician – Professor – Health Educator and life-long Online Student.