Twitter and Medical Education
One of my followers on twitter is a librarian, and also a blogger: Emerging Technologies Librarian. While scanning the blog stumbled upon this great slide show. Seems like fun to me to use twitter for medical education. Do you know of more initiatives or examples of the use of twitter in (medical) education, please let me know in the comments?
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Twitter and Medical Education: Slideshow « ScienceRoll
January 14, 2009 @ 10:04 pm
[…] 2009 Posted by Bertalan Meskó in Education, Web 2.0, twitter. Tags: twitter, Education trackback Dr. Shock posted a more than interesting slideshow about the educational implications of Twitter created by Befitt […]
January 14, 2009 @ 10:43 pm
Hello
Actually the feedback was quite negative here. We need to make sure that we are bot allowing tools to drive our teaching and aspirations for medical education courses.
Why is the feedback negative? We need to understand this before we go further.
I blogged about this today.
http://wishfulthinkinginmedicaleducation.blogspot.com/2009/01/ples-and-medical-students.html
AM
January 14, 2009 @ 11:11 pm
Like most technology, you need to be very clear about why you are using the tool. Twitter has been a great tool for me to quickly get and share links on medical news, articles etc.Throw in the occasional discussion of an article and I think students would see the benefits.
January 15, 2009 @ 9:50 am
Hi Deirdre
But the purposes we have for using these tools are different to those that most students and doctors have. Most of my twitter talk and social bookmarks would not be interesting to my GP colleagues. Maybe none of it!
We need to establish that this can be useful for doctors before progressing with evangelising.
January 15, 2009 @ 10:50 am
I was thinking about it’s use in medical education. Students might be more interested in new technology.Physicians and twitter is a different ball game. You have to be critical about how to use twitter for medical students and only use it if it has benefits over more usual forms of education. We tried creating wikis for collaboration as one of the competences of professionalism. Tried it for 3 years but didn’t work out. They kept assigning tasks to one and another, very efficacious but no collaboration so we left it.
January 15, 2009 @ 6:38 pm
Both Drs. Shock and Cunningham have elaborated the most important consideration of introducing new technology to students. “What benefit do they get from using it?” Facebook took off with college students because it was a way of connecting to family and friends who were scattered around the world post high school. Later it became a planning tool for events. I use Facebook very differently.
We have been quite successful in using a wiki in one of our classes where the instructor posts a question supposedly from the Minister of Health and students respond. The first question was individual responses, that everyone could read. The second and third were team written and marked.
My experience with the process of collaboration is it starts with assigning tasks, then moves very slowly to editing each others work. True collaborative work is rare at the student level unless they are in a non-competitive environment.
January 16, 2009 @ 4:31 pm
On Wednesday in your blog post titled “Twitter and Medical Education” you asked fellow readers to provide supporting arguments on how Twitter can be used to enhance Medical Education.
As a account manager for http://www.Doctor.com, I have observed that the doctors who contact us are becoming increasingly tech savvy and are asking us more questions about online services. This is especially apparent with younger doctors who are just starting to practice. Today’s recent med school graduates are the first generation to have likely used using social websites like myspace, facebook, twitter during their college years.
There are many reasons to tweet and when used properly it can broaden your knowledge and open doors to new avenues you never dreamed of. Twitter I think the real-time nature of Twitter will make the service especially appealing to this new generation of doctors, particularly because of its mobile features. I could see a group of doctor friends regularly tweeting questions and observations to one another from their phones throughout the day. Being able to have interesting ongoing discussions with one’s peers about daily encounters, could be a powerful way for doctors to pool knowledge and arrive at solutions faster.
Beyond networking with friends, I also see value in following leaders in the field via Twitter. Getting regular updates from leading scientists, physicians, and medical technologists, would surely be “indirectly” educational and would likely keep one more in tune with the “cutting edge” than less tech-savvy peers.
Last but certainly not least, I think there’s some psychological value to be found in giving over-stressed doctors an outlet to vent, share humorous anecdotes, and generally connect socially with their professional peers. Perhaps that’s why there are so many doctor blogs!
Many of our ongoing efforts at Doctor.com have been similarly aligned with giving doctors options to connect socially with their peers and remain informed. We are working on a forum system designed for more serious ongoing conversations as well as tools for doctors to aggregate twitter feeds, RSS from blogs, and other online content into a centralized area. I’d be happy to tell you more about it if you’re interested.
Thanks again for the great post. I am enjoying following your blog.
Best,
Colleen Joyce
January 16, 2009 @ 9:39 pm
@colleen Doctors also are getting more critical about the use of new developments on the Internet for education and work, do you have some experience with these options?
Kind regards Dr Shock
January 19, 2009 @ 5:19 pm
I think it’s natural for physicians to be getting more critical about any web-based services or communities, with so many new ones popping up and vying for their attention. As I’m sure you’re well aware, doctors have limited time to spend away from clinical work. I imagine it would be virtually impossible for a practicing physician to actively participate on all the various medical community sites while simultaneously keeping track of his/her reputation and profile details on the various directory/rating sites.
A similar situation exists in the online real estate space, where countless very similar startup sites are all vying for the attention of real estate brokers. The smarter players are cognizant of this problem and seek to solve it by aggregating content from as many sources as possible while simultaneously making their own features as “portable” as possible. For example, one site allows brokers who’ve built up a reputation score on the site to embed a dynamic image (branded of course) of that score on any other sites where they post listings. Their gamble is that by allowing a valuable feature they innovated to spread beyond the “borders” of their site, that they can establish and maintain a standard for the marketplace (which is generally a favorable business position).
At doctor.com, we are thinking in a similar vein and plan to combine aggregation of useful information with “feature portability”. In our view, the age of the website as a walled garden is dying and the innovators of tomorrow will be coming up with creative and financially viable ways to extend the features they offer across the web. You see the early signs of this movement in the countless “widgets” on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. I am not at liberty to reveal many specifics about what we’re currently working on at Doctor.com but I can say that it gels closely with this philosophy.
To answer your question about doctors adopting new services, I will say that generally new feature/service we offer is initially met with skepticism. Our service usually relate more to practice marketing and improving office efficiency than to education, but I imagine the challenges we face are universal in the space.
Half the battle for us is just getting someone’s ear long enough to fully explain what we do and how it could be beneficial to them. Usually, when given the time to make our case, doctors show enough interest to at least test out our services (and those that sign up rarely cancel). The takeaway from this is that anyone offering something which might be outside of a doctor’s usual comfort zone (i.e. an online profile or web-based training program) needs a way to (a) reach physicians and (b) explain in a very personalized way why their product or service is worthy of the doctor’s time.
At the end of the day, I think doctors are not so different from other educated consumers. They will participate in sites/programs which offer them value, be it time-saving features, compelling career or financial opportunities, efficient ways to continue their education or even entertainment. I believe the web can deliver all of these with great success and that so far we’ve just scratched the surface of what is possible.
January 21, 2009 @ 6:00 pm
Just had a great conversation with a young doctor who is in charge of planning resident training at 5 hospitals scattered over 800km. As a result, he is implementing weekly Elluminate rounds and a wiki for planning activities with the 5 site directors. They are also discussing which online podcast/vidcasts to encourage residents to use.
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November 4, 2009 @ 7:47 pm
Some of these tools are new to me, maybe you could add them to my site for review.
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