CEDC – Week One – Clinical Education and Digital Culture

Well, the course has started – in a week that sees the UK begin to slip out of the reach of the GDPR.

GDPR is the robust framework of data protection legislation that seeks to protect personal data used online.

In the last 24 hours, UK users of Google will have received a notification about updated and ‘improved’ terms of service. The 4th bullet point concerns all personal data being removed from the current data centre in Ireland (A European data hub) to be placed into the hands of “Google LLC”. This effectively means that all personal data, currently protected under GDPR, is being transferred to the USA, where there is comparatively little legislation to protect individual data.

Here is a snippet from the email:

“Because the UK is leaving the EU, we’ve updated our Terms so that a United States-based company, Google LLC, is now your service provider instead of Google Ireland Limited”

Here is a piece that The Guardian newspaper lifted from a Reuters announcement:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/20/uk-google-users-to-lose-eu-gdpr-data-protections-brexit

So, this is the climate in which we embark on our 10 week (ish) exploration of the impact of digital culture on clinical education.

A small, but perfectly formed, group gathered for our first online tutorial on Tuesday evening. It was encouraging to see such awareness and critical discussion so early in the course. I scribbled notes as the free flow of discussion bobbed around in the pool of digital concerns…

Time – the digital has accelerated time, and “speed is stressful” / A digital presence erodes the traditional partitioning of the day into work and personal territories (you know this has happened when a student calls you at 10.30 on a Sunday evening looking for advice) / The acceleration of the process of research, review and publication leads to fears of diminished quality / Conversely, students increasingly wish to see ‘just in time’ electronic resources to assist in their training as much as their professional practice.

We spoke also of the balance between trust and transparency, wherein the degree of transparency afforded by the digital sphere can be held accountable, in some degree, to the diminished trust that traditionally formed the bedrock of the patient / healthcare professional relationship. We shall pick this up again during our discussions on digital professionalism.

We also touched – lightly – on matters of unity in the learning, teaching and working environment. Individuals are increasingly making use of technology to capture aspects of their work that can be re-purposed in their teaching activity. This is a positive engagement by most measures – but what are the potential consequences of this activity not being directly supported by the employer. How well does the individual agency accorded us by our personal technology map across to institutional policy and provision? What are the dangers, or, more mildly, how might we wish to index all available tools and resources and align them – constructively and positively in a federated digital landscape?