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Welcome to the final In beta newsletter for 2021. It's been a challenging year, not only because of what's been going on around the world but also for each of us in our personal capacity, which is why we've been a bit quiet over the last few months. Considering the relative paucity of activity in 2021 we thought it'd be a good idea to briefly share some of our plans for 2022, some of which we talk about in more detail in the podcast.
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We launched the In beta website in 2017 after a conversation at ER-WCPT where we shared our dissatisfaction with conventional conferences and our belief that there were better alternatives. We knew that we wanted to talk about the kind of professional development we thought was missing in physiotherapy education but didn't really have a concrete plan for what we wanted to do. At the time we simply thought that we enjoyed talking to each other and wondered if others would find any of that useful.
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So we set up the current website on a server and subdomain at the University of the Western Cape, a setup that hasn't changed in the last 4 years. But for various reasons we've decided to move our website to something that have a bit more control over, which is going to have some implications for anyone interested in In beta.
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One of these implications is that the existing links from all over the web - social media, blog posts, podcast episodes where we've mentioned the URL - are all going to break. The links on the site itself have been updated with the migration, so all internal links work just fine. But the podcast feed will stop working at some point, although we're in the process of moving all of the services that share the feed to the new URL. Hopefully this will be a seamless transition for everyone subscribed to the podcast and at this point, there's nothing that you need to do. And the newsletter seems to have been moved without any problems.
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Anyone who has the old site bookmarked will need to update those links to this new URL:
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- New URL: www.inbetaphysio.com
- Existing URL: www.inbeta.uwc.ac.za (assume that this link will no longer work after 31 December 2021, although the exact date it stops working depends on when UWC turns it off)
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We're both excited about the potential for the new site and hope that we can finish the rest of the migration with as little disruption as possible. We're still in the process of moving some of the content and making other changes, so please bear with us during this transitional period. If you notice anything that doesn't work as expected, please do let us know.
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In what was probably the biggest news of 2021 we decided to skip the Unconference (I know, we can still feel the shockwaves). There were several reasons for this but ultimately we decided that trying to coordinate an unconference with everything else going on - personally and globally - was too much to take on.
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So we're excited to announce that Unconference 2022 will take place on 8-9 September. If you've heard about the In beta unconferences - and to be honest, who hasn't - you might be interested in our latest podcast where we share some ideas on how we might run things a little differently next year.
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If you'd like to stay updated with news about the 2022 Unconference you can sign up here.
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The 2020 student Twitter conference worked really well and we're happy to announce that we're going to run a second student conference in 2022. The Twitter conference has physiotherapy students from around the world presenting their undergraduate research projects through a thread of 10 tweets. You'll be able to follow the conference on Twitter by using the hashtag #PTTC22.
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If you're a physio educator and would like to find out more about the structure and rational for a Twitter conference, you can learn more here. And if you'd like your institution to be part of the student Twitter conference in 2022, please register your interest here.
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Environmental and sustainability education is often conspicuous in its absence from public health and healthcare professional programmes around the world. Yet to respond to the diverse and complex social, ecological and health challenges we are facing everywhere today it will have to be firmly integrated to support the development of many different visions for new physiotherapies. These visions will have to be conjured, thought about and communicated collaboratively, in many different places and many different languages.
Today’s diverse social, ecological and health challenges require the development of many different visions for new physiotherapies. Physiopunk integrates concepts from planetary health with speculative fiction genres in a new approach to how we think about physiotherapy education. Emerging from an introductory public health module for 1st year physiotherapy students, Physiopunk aims to foster compelling narratives for future healthcare and society in general.
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While this project that was published in the OpenPhysio journal isn't directly linked to In beta, I thought that there was enough overlap (both in content, style, and participants) to give it a shout out in the newsletter. Filip Maric and his colleagues have initiated an amazing project with first-year students that we hope will be the first of many volumes. The team have already started thinking about a second volume of Physiopunk, this time opening up submissions to physiotherapy students from around the world. If you thought that the first volume of the project was exciting, you may want to keep an eye on it so that you can let your own students know.
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After a rough 2021 where we've had to put the In beta project on the backburner, Ben and I are both excited to pick things up again in 2022, hopefully with increased collaboration and interaction from our community members.
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Wishing you all a peaceful and safe holiday period, and a wonderful new year.
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Design with care. Imagine activities that your students will enjoy. Build trust where you can. Be present, even in your assignments. Do longer term-style assignments where your formative feedback applies to their work. Talk to them about why you love what you know. Try to encourage them to care about what you know. Hold on. - Dave Cormier
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