From Wikipedia: Thomas Aikenhead (c. March 1676 – 8 January 1697)[1] was a Scottish student from Edinburgh, who was prosecuted and executed at the age of 20[2] on a charge of blasphemy. (Please note the year, not jus the date…)

Great comment in the Guardian from as ever the irrepressible Ross Anderson  on an article by Athene Donald. Reality is in the first sentence. [link for this post]7

The point of a lecture isn’t to teach. It’s to reify, rehearse, assemble and celebrate.

Stephen Downes

 

“Despite my lofty dreams and expectations, practicing primary care pediatrics was nothing like I hoped it would be.  My days were filled with opportunities to meet and grow with patients and families, but my tidbits of time were sliced into 15-minute increments.  As my practice size increased, I was persistently pressured to add extra patients over my lunch hours before the day started, and into time slots already booked with other patients.  The need to move increasingly efficiently sparked anxiety within me  — I was halfway through greeting one patient before I was also surreptitiously listening for the opening and closing of the next exam room door to signal that another patient was waiting.

The physical and emotional work of completing a visit every 15 minutes repeatedly refreshing my smile before I burst into the next room began to make me feel like a machine.  As a robot in the factory of medicine.” Via Kevin MD.

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The REFormation and all that, Derek Sayer.

Thomas Piketty and Rejecting Honours.

Learning is effortful, and other sound advice by Daniel Lemire.

MOOCs redux. Audrey Watters dissects.

“In a blog post this year, Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira insisted that learning styles exist because “to me, it’s pretty obvious.” This is a perfect example of how buzzwords dovetail so neatly with believability. Even though there is no evidence that learning styles are real, the phrase is repeated so often, some people are certain that they must. So much of education technology works this way. Blended learning, personalized learning, learning styles – they must be good because, after all, “to me, it’s pretty obvious.” A company releases a number, wraps it in a PR message, and as long as it fits the story we want to tell, it becomes the truth, widely repeated but never widely challenged.” Audrey Watters

‘At medical school I was taught by Dr. Nimmo, an elderly Edinburgh physician who wore a pinstripe suit, carried a heavy gold watch, and whose combed white hair was held in place with pomade. If he realized that a patient was hard of hearing he’d take his stethoscope from his jacket pocket and ceremoniously place the earpieces into their ears. Taking the other end in his hands, he’d speak slowly and clearly into it as if into a microphone. The focus and amplification of the stethoscope meant that he didn’t have to shout loudly, and the privacy of the patient on the open ward was preserved. For the most part his patients found the role reversal hilarious; occasionally the medical students did too. I remember him turning to one student who was sniggering a little too conspicuously. “There’s nothing funny about trying to communicate properly,” he said. “Use whatever means you can to understand and be understood.”’

From a review by Gavin Francis in the NYRB of  ‘I can hear you whisper: an intimate journey through the science of sound and language’, by Lydia Denworth.

Learning management systems are, indeed, the undead of education technology,

Audrey Watters.

I like this, and agree with most of it. The issue that needs answering is what bits of learning require a teacher and what bits don’t [via Stephen Downes, and see his comments). But I also agree with Rich DeMillo: “While technology is not the only enabler of change in higher education, it is on the critical path to all foreseeable change.”

This has to be one of my favourites examples of real medical innovation. All the hallmarks of one type of scientific and technological revolution are there. I have forgotten who first told me this story many years ago, not my brother the dentist I think, but an old school friend now in dental practice more likely, Dave Hudson. I was embarrassed not to have already heard of it, since I had already published a couple of papers related to how medical innovation works. This ranks up there at the top. Branemark, was a medic and professor of anatomy who, whilst researching healing and the microcirdulation, ‘noticed’ that titanium was not rejected by the body and integrated into bone, so much so that he could not remove it the end of his experiments into healing. The act of imagination, was to realise this provided a way to anchor artificial teeth. So, many of the key ingredients were there for a revolutionary discovery: he was an outsider, who the establishment rejected; the work was based on an original unplanned for observation (no project plan, or GANTT chart in sight); he did the experiments with his hands, so was in a position to make original observations; and the dogma of the day said it wouldn’t work (the arrogance of incomplete basic science strangling credible observations); and of course, his grants were rejected, so advance was delayed. Some quotes from the NYT flesh this out:

“To make sure that titanium would not be rejected by the body, Dr. Branemark enlisted about 20 students working in his lab to have titanium instruments inserted into their upper arms…..You have to understand, every male in the lab was considered a volunteer, including my older brother…
“Even after years of experimentation, though, it was difficult to convince the medical and dental establishment that titanium could be integrated into living issue. The conventional wisdom was that the introduction of any foreign material into the body would inevitably lead to inflammation and, ultimately, rejection.
“For years, Dr. Branemark’s applications for grants to study implants anchored in bone tissue were rejected…..
“Still, Dr. Branemark’s innovation was poorly received. After Dr. Branemark gave a lecture on his work in 1969, Dr. Albrektsson recalled, one of the senior academics of Swedish dentistry rose and referred to an article in Reader’s Digest describing Dr. Branemark’s research, adding, “This may prove to be a popular article, but I simply do not trust people who publish themselves in Reader’s Digest.” As it happened, that senior academic was well known to the Swedish public for recommending a particular brand of toothpick. So Dr. Branemark immediately rose and struck back, saying, “And I don’t trust people who advertise themselves on the back of boxes of toothpicks.”

Now, of course, implants have found many other medical uses, and Branemark worked on these ideas too: great ideas are generative. Surgical innovation is, in my opinion, harder than in many other areas of medicine, so it needs nurturing even more carefully. As Goldstein and Brown have said, the danger is that medics move into apparently fast moving areas of biology, the ones where you can buy the kits to do the ‘necessary’ bench work. Revolutions are harder, and require ever greater nurturing. Thank God he didn’t work at Imperial or Warwick medical schools.

[image  CC BY-SA 3.0 David Shankbone
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_teeth#mediaviewer/File:Teeth_by_David_Shankbone.jpg]