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.

1. Using the web to empower
agents of change
Michael Rowe
University of the Western Cape, South Africa

2. “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)

3. “Promotion of interprofessional...education that
breaks down professional silos while enhancing
collaborative and non-hierarchical relationships
in effective teams.” Frenk, et al.
(2010)

4. “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)

5. Illustration from a 13th century manuscript
showing a lecture being delivered to students in
Bologna, Italy, in 1233.

6. Lectures are not as effective as discussion for
promoting thought, they are generally ineffective
for changing attitudes and for teaching
behavioural skills
Bligh (2000)

7. “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)

8. “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)

9. Dominant design: an emergent core design
principle that arises from competing
alternatives
Wilson et al. (2008)

10. “Education has misrepresented itself as
objective, quantifiable, and apolitical.”
Pete Rorabaugh (2014)

11. “There is no such thing as a neutral
educational process.”
Paulo Freire (1968)

12. 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)

13. “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

14. Digital tools offer the opportunity to refocus how
power works in the classroom.
Pete Rorabaugh (2014)

15. 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)

16. “If you're not paying for the product,
you are the product.”

17. “Knowledge emerges only...through the restless,
impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human
beings pursue in the world...and with each
other.”
Paulo Freire (1968)

18. The key principles of an open
networked learning environment are
autonomy, diversity, openness and
interaction.
Stephen Downes

19. “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)

20. MOOCs are falling short of “democratising”
education & may be doing more to increase
gaps in access to education
Hollands & Tirthali (2014)

21. How do we prepare students for
a world we can't predict?

22. “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)

23. Why is thinking more
important than knowing?

24. Information explosion, faster & more
powerful chips at increasingly lower
costs, machine learning...

25. Article count: 4.2 million
Compressed, no images): 9.7 GB
Uncompressed, no images): 42 GB
With thumbnail images): 100 GB
Download entire text of the English Wikipedia
http://bit.ly/14XvMCs

26. Storage with nanolasers and glass
360TB = 3686 copies of Wikipedia
Zhang et al (2013)
http://ht.ly/no9Wm

27. 90 servers taking up 10 full racks
2,880 CPU cores and 15TB of RAM
Processed 500 GB of data per second
The size of a large bedroom

28. 600 000 discrete pieces of evidence
2 000 000 pages from medical journals
1.5 million patient records & 25 000 case studies
14 700 hours of clinician fine tuning
Outperforms doctors at diagnosing
cancer

29. IBM licensing Watson to hospitals where
doctors integrate into decision-making using
mobile apps

30. How is this...

31. Preparing graduates for this...

32. When we’re looking for solutions, what
we most need to change is our thinking
and not our tools.

33. Thank you
@michael_rowe
mrowe.co.za/blog
mrowe@uwc.ac.za