The first speaker is Panos Bamidis talking about using Web 2.0 for teaching medical informatics courses with postgraduate medical students. He explained the development/use of SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) learning objects, which does not seem to be being used as an educational standard within medical informatics education. He discussed how they had used a range of Web 2.0 tools within a problem/case-based learning approach.  Coursework based in use of Web 2.0 tools, including participation in discussion forums,  and use of personal blogs and contributions of material to wikis, is assessed as part of overall course marks. Evaluations show general positive results; many students admitting to looking at what other students had input to the systems before putting their own answers in.

Dierdre Bonnycastle, from Saskatchewan, talked about ‘Medicine 2.0 and Medical Faculty Development’ in a setting where 800 community faculty members are scattered in an area of over 250,000 square miles. She started off by using professionally-developed podcasts, which did not work as planned because of the expense of the technologies. In addition, people were not familiar enough at that time with the technology. She moved on to using wikis; she developed a post-workshop wiki, to be used following face-to-face workshops. From this, she developed a medical education blog, that was moderately successful. From this, she developed ‘committee wikis’, which bring together a store of documents relating to a committee and its work, and from this, to research wikis for research collaboration.

Another development tested was ‘post-conference wiki’, using wetpaint wikis as they also allow inclusion of photo galleries. She is now working on collaboratory wikis, for inter-university collaboration. The aim is to share ‘favourite teaching techniques’. She is trying to get both a broader audience and more people contributing.

Dierdre also introduced the use of Elluminate and its mixture of facilities.

Bertalan Mesko talked about ‘Medical education and building an online reputation in the world of Web 2.0′. He said that he gets much of his inspiration from use of Second Life for medical education. He discussed the use Second Life for simulations, case presentations and exercises. He illustrated uploading of slideshows for education purposes in Second Life.

He went on to talk about reputation, the problems of people putting materials onto Facebook that may come back to haunt them later in their professional lives. Berci is using microblogging services such as Twitter, and showed many other professionals using it; he also mentioned Friendfeed and what can be shared there. (I have put a few tweets on Twitter about berci and Rod’s sessions, but not sure how well these things link across and how easy it would be for people to follow).

Rod Ward was the last speaker, on ‘The potential and challenges of Web 2.0 in the education of healthcare professionals’. Rod started by talking about his experiences and biases; publishing web pages since 1992, using Web 2.0, and being in favour of open access. He noted that he ‘likes to challenge’ and prefers ‘eclectic’ models of education. He went on to talk about potential and challenges in ‘architecture of participation’; the potential of Web 2.0 is for focus being on content creation over content consumption, but focus in many institutions is the other way around.

Rod also explored issues of control, with tensions between moving control to students versus institutions wanting to keep control, and the tension between shared knowledge creation and levels of moderation and quality control. On technologies, he discussed the tensions between innovative/collaborative technologies, including mashups, versus students often being ahead of staff  in use of technologies.

In concluding, he sees Web 2.0 and beyond have potential for use with healthcare professionals, although it needs balancing with challenges and how we might help institutions and individuals to take best advantage. Some students will use these applications whether institutions like it or not, and they need to be aware of changes, and more research is needed into whether the potential outweighs the challenges. ‘Rods presenation was following by a prolonged period of animated discussion that went on well past the scheduled finish time.

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