The last two weeks have been an interesting delve into the world of Digital Culture in Medical and Clinical Education #clinedDC, to say the least.

As someone who has always been interested in innovation in teaching & learning and the role of multi and social media in #MedEd the clinedDC course has forced me to reconsider my ideas about digital literacy and my ability to embrace the rapid growth and advancing landscape of digital culture in higher and medical education.

WEEK ONE, provided some interesting discussions on what we consider as digital culture and examine our ability to engage with the ever-growing platforms available to us. An array of topics were briefly looked at including; 

• AI in medical diagnosis and how it has the potential to play a vital role in radiology and pathology by accurately identifying nomalies in CT, MRI and Plain Film XRay imaging. This led me to also discover some other areas where AI is being used. Including identifying rare objects in body fluid samples (blood/urine), tissues (histology) using computer vision and machine learning.

• Information overload in medicine and how the emergence of Dr Google slows down junior doctors’ productivity and application of knowledge in practice. How it also impacts their ability to make timely decisions. They feel confused, stressed out, frustrated, and naturally start making mistakes. Simply put, information overload shuts our brains down! Does it impact patient outcomes?

An Interesting blog on ‘why not just use Dr Google’ by a neuropath

WEEK TWO, We started to think about some of the tools and resources out there and how we might apply them to our own areas. This was a fruitful discussion where we traversed the horizon. Considering issues such as digital literacy, the sustainability and survivability of the material we create (I will touch on my opinion below) as well as our presence online potentially raising issues of professionalism.

There was a strong feeling that institutes and organisations are pushing the move to a more active digital footprint in all areas of healthcare but only a few silos providing the support and training needed to ensure that what we are creating meets the needs of our service users.

In the words of our esteemed Tsar @timbocop …….. Here comes the Rant!!!

My experience is that the powers that be at many institutions and organisations have the misconception that ‘content designers’ AKA ‘Us foot soldiers or educators‘ just ‘do the words’.

If they are at a stage in planning their online content where they are talking about content designers doing ‘just words – it’s far too late.

We design, structure and create one some level, rather than write and edit. So please ‘you with the purse strings, don’t call us wordsmiths, don’t force us to use outdated ‘clunky platforms, don’t create a complex approval process to allow us to put the material we worked hard to create out there for our students/trainees.

Putting content out allows feedback from users that leads to improvment that leads to refinement that leads to a quality learning resource that is sustainable across cohorts for the medium term (al least)

We make sure the content:

• meets user need
• is shown in the right place
• is structured properly in the right format
• delivers policy intent

End of Rant……

Personal Reflections on Weeks 1&2 / Clinical Education and Digital Culture by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0

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