So I have now embarked on this ONL journey, which has proven a lot more intense and interesting than I had ever imagined. As a clinical doctor working full time with patients in a busy hospital but also with teaching both students and collegues, there has been little time over for new forms of education practices such as online learning. My occasional tweets about paediatric infectious diseases research and my homepage for the Swedish Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseaese www.blf.net/inf has not led to a more in-depth knowledge in the field. Clearly, my digital literacy is minimal. I have however, worked quite a lot with problem-based learning in the courses I teach for consultant paediatricians in the field of infectious diseases. In these, we present the participants with limited information about a clinical case and a group of about 5-6 people must think systematically about their action plan. The concept has been published in J Med Libr Assoc. 2017 Jul;105(3):262-267). I find this concept very rewarding and would like to do similar things with online technology. ONL would certainly be a push forward for me in my pedagogical development.
In our ONL course, I find it interesting to see that a fair number of participants really work with or at least have an experience with ONL already and might have loads of good stuff to share with us “illiterates”. Starting with topic 1, I got quite fascinated by the concept of credibility and authority introduced by David White (Visitors and residents – Credibility https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO569eknM6U&feature=youtu.be). I tried to apply the concept of credibility and authority to online learning and soon came across Howard Rheingold and his Crap Detection 101 that is a must read or listening for anyone who is about to enter the world of web-based learning or web-ased information sources. I found his theory simple yet very helpful: The responsibility to decide if the information we find is correct or not has been transferred from the writer or publisher to the consumer. Fortunatly, he also gives us some straightforward advice which I will not list here but simply recommend his video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHVvGELuEqM
As I
hope you can note, I’m trying not to be the old-fashioned critic of new
technology but at the same time I´m a defender of deep knowledge. This will be
a specific interest for me to see how we can build up ways of using web-based
data in an easier way and with tools to more conveniently test their
credibility and authority. There must be a way for deep knowledge and web-based
information and learning to go hand in hand. I hope the rest of the course will
prove this is the case.
I believe the best way to finish this blog post
is to cite David White: For me the digital is much more than a set of tools or
a chaotic library, it’s a place where we can learn and live.
If I
can even get slightly closer to his view on the digital universe during this
course I would be more than happy. Looking forward to the rest!
