I embarked on the digital sea in the early 90’s, with email, and exclusively on a professional basis (cancer research). I don´t remember exactly when the next steps happened, but they involved the switch from the Current Contents paper catalogs to the Silver Platter CD’s and then to the amazing PubMed online searches for scientific publications. In 2010, I became involved with the medical school at Karolinska Institutet, and have since then had increasing use of two LMS (pingpong and Canvas) and other invaluable online tools like EndNote. And for about a year now, there is Zoom – which we now, out of viral necessity, are introducing for all seminars and lectures. 

All in all, my digital footprint resides firmly within the professional section of David White´s diagram, but I do have some very small private fingerprints in gmail, whatsapp, pinterest, and instagram. This is enough for keeping me in frequent digital touch with family and closest friends, and for looking at interesting pictures from museums, travel and the outdoors. So, in the sphere of private social media, I´m definitely just a visitor.

Then there is the entire body-and-mind print “out there” – the fact that Google, Amazon and the rest know exactly which specific antibodies I need for my research, and which books I might like, and which YouTube clips, and violin strings and cleaning gadgets and political jokes and computer games and insurance companies and…

Contrary to what White says in one of the clips, there is simply no such thing as “leaving no trace”. I think I have come to some uneasy terms with this, but not enough to start a Facebook account. The same unease was probably also what kept me from really embracing the digital possibilities twenty years ago, although nowadays I´m all for it, in education – where these possibilities can be wonderful tools. 

Tools don´t have to be physical or concrete entities, like scissors or Excel. You need mental tools to play the violin as well as to understand your pet dog or the effects of the corona virus on society. But sometimes we hope for too much from tools, or are too dazzled by them to ask why should I use this tool, and what can I do with this tool? Medical science students are a good example: they are often overexcited and eager to learn novel methods – “wow, you can sequence genes with this machine! I want to sequence genes now!” – but it sometimes takes them very long to understand that they need to understand why anybody would want to know gene sequences. In turn, this indicates they haven´t understood where scientific knowledge comes from, and how it develops.

Thus, in my area of research it´s probably better to ask the students “what do we need to find out in order to understand how cancer develops”? – rather than saying that “in cancer research, we have such-and-such machines for gene sequencing, protein analysis, tumor imaging etc, and we invite you to learn to use these tools.” Indeed, I believe that in most fields and areas of human activity, it´s a good idea to first define the problem and then ask what the proffered tool can do to solve that problem, rather than the other way round.

Same thing with this course. I regard the course as a possible source of tools for (a) handling the issues I have in my work, and (b) identifying new issues I might have. I´m also thinking that in the PBL assignments we´d do well to first define the problems the scenarios represent before we start thinking about tools that might solve the problems.