The potential and challenges of Web 2.0 in the education of healthcare professionals.

Medicine 2.0

Web 2.0 technologies have the potential to change the education of healthcare professionals, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, from a didactic one way process, in which information is transferred from the "expert" to the student, to a collaborative and participative process, empowering the student to be an equal participant in the learning process. However there are significant challenges and hurdles which need to be considered. The potential for elearning to enable and empower healthcare students within educational programmes has been discussed for many years, [1] however this has been challenged with calls for moves from instructivist to constructivist learning approaches, built around "Communities of Practice", which potentially provide the greatest scope for learning through interaction and discussion [2]. Web 2.0 technologies are emerging as platforms to enable or encourage students to be collaboratively creating and sharing their own insights into current and emerging themes within their education. This "architecture of participation" has been described as "emphasising the pre-eminence of content creation over content consumption", [3] and the use of Web 2.0 applications as "mind tools to stimulate reflection and actively involve learners in their own construction of knowledge" which have been proposed as a way to yield powerful learning experiences [4]. It may also be important for healthcare professionals to be aware of the emerging technologies, and their potential development in the future as their patients and clients may well be using them. Where software such as blogs, wikis, podcasts and social networking tools are provided by formal education providers they can by made public or restricted to particular groups of students and are often "moderated" by a member of staff. Many students are taking greater control and setting up their own mechanisms, sometimes via platforms such as Facebook, for both structured and "just in time" learning, to enable them to collaborate, and academic staff may be explicitly excluded by the students from these applications. These developments bring challenges to existing structures and power relationships, in which academic staff or experts have control over the learning process, and may shift the power towards the students hands, either individually or in groups. This may be challenging for many, both academics and students, and will require different perceptions of role, and possibly demand a rethinking of existing pedagogy. The emergence of new forms of knowledge generation and distribution such as Wikipedia, brings issues with the assessment of the reliability or accuracy of resources [5] and may challenge the role of academic journals, which are already having to change their production and financial models in the light of open access and eprints initiatives. Additional issues arise in the detection of plagiarism and the identification of clear mechanisms for assessment of group work in credit bearing courses. The potential offered by Web 2.0 technologies in the education of healthcare professionals, is potentially significant, however these developments need to be balanced with the inherent risks and challenges. References 1. Salmon, G. 2002 E-tivities The Key to Active Online Learning. Routledge, UK 2. Moule, P. 2007 Challenging the five-stage model for e-learning: a new approach. ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology. 15(1). 37-50 3. Boulos, M.N. and Wheeler, S. 2007 The emerging Web 2.0 social software: an enabling suite of sociable technologies in health and health care education. Health Information and Libraries Journal 24 2-23 4. McLean, R., Richards, B.H. & Wardman, J.I. 2007 The effect of Web 2.0 on the future of medical practice and education: Darwikinian evolution or folksonomic revolution? eMJA The Medical Journal of Australia. 187 (3): 174-177...