A Personal Learning Network becomes a Print Journal Issue: Why Academics Really use Twitter

Social Media allows a motivated and engaged learner to build connections that can enhance lifelong learning.  The connections become a learners Personal Learning Network or PLN.  The ability of social media to help a learner find and connect with the right people that might be otherwise impossible to "meet" in real life is one of its huge potential advantages.

This can be a difficult concept to convey to someone who may have a very negative attitude of Twitter.  One can hardly blame them for thinking that Twitter is a time waster, that there is a huge noise to signal ratio with very little tangible benefit.

A famous Nature study showed that very few academics use Twitter compared to sites like Google Scholar.  This led to a spoof by PhD Comics on "Why Academics Really use Twitter".  This is quite funny maybe because it has an element of truth for those who use Twitter.  At the same time infographics like this might unintentionally dissuade people from trying out Twitter as it may reinforce their beliefs about its lack of usefulness.

Now we have a great example of how a PLN created on Twitter led to an entire issue of a print journal.  The credit goes to Margaret Chisholm who was the editor of the special issue of "International Review of Psychiatry" and put together the issue with the help of a group of authors who mostly got to know each other first on Twitter and are part of a large PLN of health care social media users.

Granted, the special issue was regarding the use of Social Media but it could well have been any other topic in biomedical sciences where the scientists engage in social media.  This special issue of a print journal may be an excellent showpiece of the huge potential benefit of social media for academics - to create a PLN for lifelong learning.

Hidden Curriculum in Medical Schools - Are we teaching what we want students to learn?

We all know that

• The amount of information is increasing rapidly
• The 1/2 life of knowledge is shrinking - what we knew few years back does not hold true anymore.

As Alvin Toffler said, 

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ” 

Once our students leave the formal education settings of medical school, they will have to learn how to keep up with literature and new advances on their own.  Thus medical educators want to teach students how to become self-motivated self-directed lifelong learners.  

The hidden curriculum is the unintended lesson/s, usually about norms, values, beliefs or behaviors, learned during a learning experience.  Thus in medical schools students are taught a particular way to communicate with patients.  When students see health care practitioners interact with their patients differently, they get a different message.

One of the biggest hidden curricula is the way students are expected to learn in medical schools.  Traditionally, they are expected to attend lectures and seminar, show up in clinical rotations and have information delivered to them, drilled into their heads.  [A number of medical schools are trying to break out of this mold]. These students get the unintended message that someone else is taking the responsibility for their learning.   This hidden message is more powerful than the intended message for their need to be self-directed learners.  

To truly help students become the independent, self-directed learners we want them to be, schools need to reform the way they educate.  Instead of large lecture halls, early in the training the students need to learn how to look up and find information to solve problems.  Students can learn individually or in small groups (e.g. Problem based learning and Team based learning).Passive learning should be avoided.  This  will create a hidden curriculum that will help our students learn the only useful lesson we can teach!