New-Found Technologies and My Career

Over the past few weeks, thanks to one of my masters courses, I have been exposed to new technologies easily found on the web. These sites and applications have been interesting and fun. In my career, however, I would not use these technologies. My career is based on confidentiality for the athletes I work with. I would not use twitter, facebook, flickr, or blogger for my professional use. These are inappropriate and risky when dealing with sensitive issues, and I see no place for them in my current position and field. I could definitely use these socially, to keep in touch with friends and family, but would never post anything related to my work. I could, however, use Bloglines and GoogleDocs. Bloglines would make it much easier for me to stay connected with the outside world and the latest news on my favorite sports teams as well as the other athletic teams at my university. When I am on the road with track & field I can easily find out how the baseball team did at USC, or how tennis dominated at NCAAs. With GoogleDocs I could create daily treatment logs while on the road or create educational documents and updates and send them to student interns. I can manage presentations and create inventory spreadsheets to stay on top of what we need to order. I definitely think that all of these technologies have their place in the world, just maybe not in the field of Sports Medicine.

Web2.0 & TeamSnap

Web2.0 is constantly making life easier and more fun. Having all of my favorite sites and local and national news brought to me at the click of button, all in one area, is incredible. As I was searching the Web2.0 awards list of sites, I stumbled upon one site called TeamSnap that really caught me by surprise. This website offers a unique way to manage a sports team that you coach or manage. When I was playing soccer in college, some of my teammates and I would coach a youth soccer team during our off-season as a part of community involvement as well as a hobby we thoroughly enjoyed! It was always so difficult keeping track of our players stats and monthly payments. We had game and tournament schedules posted all over our refrigerators, a pictures of our players saved in folders on our computers. This TeamSnap site would have been a life saver and really neat for the players. It would have allowed us to keep track of our schedule, players fees and payments, track and post our players stats, post messages and email our team and their parents, post photos for the team to look at and their parents to print, and even allow us to make a schedule of who is bringing refreshments for the end of the game. This would have made the behind-the-scenes part of our jobs as coaches much easier, more fun and interactive for the players and parents. If I ever find the time to get back to coaching I will DEFINITELY use this site on my team!

The simplicity of GoogleDocs

Google has really taken the web to the next level. As an athletic trainer who is constantly on the road, it can be tedious getting all of the injury reports, daily treatment logs, student intern educational documents, inventory checklists, etc. done and sent to the correct recipients, or saved for future reference. Google docs creates a "one stop shop" in which I can create my documents, spreadsheets, or electronic presentations and have them saved in one place and be able to easily send them to co-workers or students. This is a rather easy web-based application to navigate through and is very user friendly. I can see myself using this often especially on the road, so that I don't have to worry about attachments and having information saved in different areas on my computer. I can log-in and have it sitting right there in front of me, without having to search for it!

RSS Feeds and Bloglines

The world of technology is getting out of hand. It is remarkable how far we have come in just the past decade. Bloglines is one of the coolest and easiest things I have ever subscribed to. There are days where I sit at work and want to check up on some news real fast: find the latest celebrity dirt, see what the news on the Braves is, what's going on in the english premier league, etc. I am never successful and fully caught up on whats going on outside of my world because it takes too long to navigate and open up new windows and find the "news" icon. Let alone I never have enough time to even read one article before being pulled away and back to work. Setting up a bloglines reader may be one of the greatest things I have ever done! Now I have all of my favorite news and the stuff I want to read all at the touch of my fingertips, on one site! It was extremely easy to set up, and now I am already addicted and have wasted so much time getting caught up on my favorite topics! Thank you Bloglines for setting up such a user friendly read, and Scott for introducing this to me! Very excited!

Twitteration

So I cannot believe I am microblogging on Twitter. When Twitter first came into the world of technology, I was probably the BIGGEST critic! I am very personal and when it comes to someone knowing what I am doing ALL OF THE TIME, I'm just not having that! The issue with twitter, like many web-based social networking sites, it is what you make of it. somebody can tweet before every event they do in a day, while others can do it here and there. I have the attitude that if you want to know what I am doing, then call me! And If I feel like it's your business, I will tell you! The only social networking I have done is MySpace, and it has been to keep in touch with old friends and family.
I am a critic of Twitter and facebook and sometimes myspace, but we have the technology so we might as well have fun with it. I am only Twittering and Blogging and creating a Facebook and photo sharing with Flickr because I have to for one of my Masters courses. I will have to say that this is making my family extremely happy. Being an Athletic Trainer I do not have much personal time. I do not get to call my family often and fill them in on life like they can each other on a daily basis. I think that microblogging can be very useful and fun as a social hobby. My family seems to enjoy the different ways that they can communicate with each other and friends, and they are enjoying having this unusual contact with me as well. Microblogging can also be useful in many professional arenas as well, however I would not use it in my career. As an Athletic Trainer we uphold a level of confidentiality for the sake of the athletes, university (or place of work), and ourselves. If I were to microblog about professional issues it would be very vague if anything at all. We are held to certain standards by HIPPA and such where everything we say and do should not be in ear shot of anyone outside of our sports medicine team. Even text messages, emails, and memos need to keep personal information regarding athletes and cases out of the radar. The only time I personally use a name or exact information is in conversation straight from my mouth. Emails and text messages always have the name abbreviated and the issue in "code language". Microblogging could be useful in some professional settings, but I see it more as a social event than actually useful in business. Welcome to the world of microblogging! I will see if my feelings change over the next 5 weeks!

Just Flickr-ing Around

In the past, showing my youth a little here, I have used photo sharing sites. You would think that I would be a pro at these sites, but I am no where near it! This week has been rough for me: having found out that I had a large fracture of the anterolateral tibial plateau of my left knee (on Monday) and that I needed to have surgery ASAP (on Tuesday). I did not have much time to prepare myself. As I am maximizing my time off of my pain killers to get some work done I decided it would be a fun day to explore Flickr. As I am sitting here with my leg elevated creating my profile, my two little boys (Christian and Talon) are creating havoc around me. They seem to have a new project each day, which revolves around either socks, toys, the back patio, or destroying anything and everything that I doing. I found it quite perfect to turn my computer around and capture an "innocent" image that was going on around me. I posted this image on my Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kristin_wood/) and added a description that said "Yo brother, what is the metal contraption that Kristin uses to have 4 legs like us?" When the boys constant attempts of trying to crawl on my post-op brace and sniff my knee continuously fails, they chose a new goal... to try to climb up my crutches that are strategically placed near me for convenience and easy access. In watching this go on around me I only wish that my life was so simple that I could find ways, like them, to create complex games and play "how can I destroy this?"! Must be nice to be so cute that it is hard for somebody to yell at you!

Never been a Blogger

My name is Kristin, and I never thought I would be blogging. I am a very simple person, however when it comes to talking about myself or my life, I can never find the words. The complexity of my thoughts would baffle you. I seem to be the queen of "when it rains, it storms." Or in my case, it's a hurricane. Things are either good, or very bad. I have learned to accept that life will never go my way, so that when it finally does, I am pleasantly surprised. I may sound pessimistic, however I am the exact opposite. I believe in fate, I have hope and I dream, but I also believe that you can create your own destiny. Once you can accept the things that you have no control of, then evaluate those you do. All I know is what I can control. There will always be things that are out of your hands, but I just try not to focus on those things. At one point in my life I thought I had everything planned out, all I needed to do was follow the plan and live each day, happily. When Hurricane Reality hit, I was left with tiny pieces of debris to pick up, sort through, and try to put back together. The hard part is finding that some pieces don't seem to fit the same anymore. It's like the puzzle has mutated into a different shape than it used to be, so some pieces just had to be thrown out. I was left with holes and nothing to fill them with. Through a lot of pain, suffering, and struggle, I had to create a glue that would hold the puzzle together, just long enough to find the pieces to fill the empty spaces. Some shapes I have found fairly quickly, and the structure of my puzzle is holding stronger with them in place. There are still some empty spaces and sometimes it seems like the glue is drying up, however, I have faith that in due time the holes will be filled, and I will soon again be on my path to happiness and completeness.