Things 7 & 8

Neurological Examination

View more presentations from Richard Brown

I found the above presentation freely available on SlideShare and thought it would be of interest to the postgraduate students who use our library. I am always asked for books on performing neurological examination so this seems like a good alternative to suggest when all of our books are on loan.

Thoughts on SlideShare...
I am new to SlideShare but it seems intuitive and very easy to use. I particularly like how it recommends other presentations that are relevant to your original search. There are also a lot of useful extras e.g. the number of views, options to follow the author of the presentation, ability to leave a comment, option to 'like' in facebook etc. Students will love SlideShare; it is easy to use and presentations can easily be linked to and shared using other web 2.0 tools that there are likely to already be using. It seems that presentations on nearly all subjects are available. Even if the presentations aren't from the student's home university, it is still a great resource for wider reading and for finding out extra information. It can also be used to share presentations from conferences, which is great for distributing information internationally or for people who can't attend.

The elephant in the room however is confidentially and plagiariasm. If somebody is uploading slides to SlideShare it is their responsibility to check that they are not breaching copyright. I checked the terms and conditions of SlideShare and it does go into some detail about copyright, explicitly stating that individuals must not post copyrighted material on to SlideShare. It also emphasises that by posting material on SlideShare users must accept that their slides are likely to be re-used by others. The danger of course is that people may not be aware that information on their slides is copyrighted (this is particularly true for images and logos that have been downloaded from the web and then incorporated in to a presentation). However, SlideShare does take some steps to try and prevent copyright infringement. Amongst other things, it asks users to use their real name/real trademark when uploading slides, and for users to report any breaches of copyright that they notice. However, these steps do seem rather 'woolly'. Another danger is that people may upload slides that they themselves don't actually own. An example would be university students uploading their lecturers' presentations to SlideShare, in the good faith that they are making them accessible to their peers who could not attend the original lecture (in our university many handouts are available to students on VLEs).

Overall, the overwhelming benefit of SlideShare is its ability to immediately distribute academic information and research to relevant global communities. However, as with most things web-related, the law has yet to catch up with how to effectively govern this.