Tutorial 2 – e-learning
Sadly I couldn’t attend this week’s tutorials due to a set of nights on call , but here are my musings having watched Tuesday’s discussions.
The conversations on experiential vs evidence based learning got me thinking about how we are taught ‘evidence based medicine’ at medical school. For me, it was painstakingly dissecting primary research papers, looking at the populations, interventions, control groups and outcomes, deciding whether the study design was robust, looking at whether the researchers were looking at the right outcomes, could the results be extrapolated to whatever situation you found yourself looking at… these literature reviews could take hours to do. I still think critical analysis is an invaluable tool for learning, and certainly something I’m still doing 10 years post-graduation. However, the environment and situation in which I can do this (for example, after a thought-provoking patient, in my admin time etc), is totally different to when I’m on the wards.
If I’m looking something up on my phone whilst I’m on call, what can fit on a smartphone screen needs to be quick to access, succinct, and easy to read and digest. I don’t necessarily need to know the papers the information is based on, the reasoning etc. However, what I do need to be happy with is that it’s come from a reputable source, and I think that’s where current sources of digital medical information are lacking. It’s still a knee-jerk reaction to ‘google’ rather than go say directly to Cochrane, RCP, British Thoracic Society guidelines etc., and it’s where a lot of my more junior colleagues (and indeed me, if it’s something not in my area of expertise) could trip up on, as Gustav was saying during the tutorial.
I use Evernote to try and save useful papers, guidelines and websites, but using it on my phone I still find clunky. It’s also quite a labour-intensive exercise to add and tag everything… If someone has other suggestions, I’m all ears!
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Hi Ellie. This is a bit of a tricky issue. I used Evernote for a while and liked it but didn’t end up sticking with it. I’ve also used social bookmarking (remember diigo, anyone?) and various kinds of makeshift portfolios of useful information, but the systems shift beneath your feet, you have to keep updating software and then the devices that run the software. In the end, I am basically just using a file system with Word documents and DropBox because I know that I will be able to access them wherever I go and if DropBox goes out of business I can move the files to another system. But I’d be interested to hear other people’s takes.