using the web to empower agents of change
DESCRIPTION
These are the slides from the presentation I gave at The Network: Towards Unity for Health conference in Fortaleza, Brazil (2014). The talk looked at how we're trying to prepare health professional students for an increasingly complex health system, but we're still using teaching methods that originated centuries ago. I ask questions about how we can change teaching practices to take into account the characteristics we expect of our graduates. I discussed the importance of taking a critical stance towards the implementation of technological solutions, and to be careful of making assumptions about the use of technology to solve all problems.TRANSCRIPT
Using the web to empower agents of change
Michael RoweUniversity of the Western Cape, South Africa
“all health professionals...should be educated to mobilise knowledge and to engage in critical reasoning...as members of locally responsive and globally connected teams” Frenk, et
al. (2010)
“Promotion of interprofessional...education that breaks down professional silos while enhancing collaborative and non-hierarchical relationships in effective teams.” Frenk, et al.
(2010)
“Exploitation of the power of IT for learning through development of evidence, capacity for data collection and analysis, simulation and testing, distance learning, collaborative connectivity, and management of the increase in knowledge.” Frenk, et al. (2010)
Illustration from a 13th century manuscript showing a lecture being delivered to students in Bologna, Italy, in 1233.
Lectures are not as effective as discussion for promoting thought, they are generally ineffective for changing attitudes and for teaching behavioural skills
Bligh (2000)
“I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken…when all can read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary.”
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
“If students live in a culture that digitizes and educates them through a screen, they require an education that empowers them in that sphere...and offers new opportunities of human connectivity.”
Pete Rorabaugh (2014)
Dominant design: an emergent core design principle that arises from competingalternatives
Wilson et al. (2008)
“Education has misrepresented itself as objective, quantifiable, and apolitical.”
Pete Rorabaugh (2014)
“There is no such thing as a neutral educational process.”
Paulo Freire (1968)
1. No central ownership or control. No institution decides what the network could be used for.2. Not optimised for any particular application. It takes in data packets at one end and delivers them to their destinations, regardless of the content.
John Naughton (2010)
“a new communication paradigm is being constructed through community interaction and participation, which enables the formation of loosely connected groups with relative ease”
Wesch (2009)http://bit.ly/8ZaA6g
Digital tools offer the opportunity to refocus how power works in the classroom.
Pete Rorabaugh (2014)
To what extent can social media function as a space of democratic participation? Most digital technology...does not have values coded into it.
Jesse Stommel (2014)
“If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.”
“Knowledge emerges only...through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world...and with each other.”
Paulo Freire (1968)
The key principles of an open networked learning environment are autonomy, diversity, openness and interaction.
Stephen Downes
“open and networked educational environments must not be merely repositories of content. They must be platforms for engaging students and teachers as full, empowered agents of their own learning.”
Jenny Mackness (2014)
MOOCs are falling short of “democratising” education & may be doing more to increase gaps in access to education
Hollands & Tirthali (2014)
How do we prepare students for a world we can't predict?
“Content should be the tool we use to teach the skills of learning. What we learn should take a back seat to how we learn. Once we know how to learn, the content will come to us, as we need it.”
Tom Whitby (2014)
Why is thinking more important than knowing?
Information explosion, faster & more powerful chips at increasingly lower costs, machine learning...
Article count: 4.2 millionCompressed, no images): 9.7 GBUncompressed, no images): 42 GBWith thumbnail images): 100 GB
Download entire text of the English Wikipediahttp://bit.ly/14XvMCs
Storage with nanolasers and glass 360TB = 3686 copies of Wikipedia
Zhang et al (2013)http://ht.ly/no9Wm
90 servers taking up 10 full racks2,880 CPU cores and 15TB of RAMProcessed 500 GB of data per secondThe size of a large bedroom
600 000 discrete pieces of evidence2 000 000 pages from medical journals1.5 million patient records & 25 000 case studies14 700 hours of clinician fine tuning
Outperforms doctors at diagnosing cancer
http://ht.ly/noctl
IBM licensing Watson to hospitals wheredoctors integrate into decision-making usingmobile apps
How is this...
Preparing graduates for this...
When we’re looking for solutions, whatwe most need to change is our thinkingand not our tools.
