Tools of Change for Publishing Conference - TOCCON 2010

I will be presenting four stories about how the rules in publishing have changed and will continue to change. We will give you four real examples, four real stories to show you how studying medicine in Europe is evolving fast. 

Changing the Way Medical Students Learn: 4 Stories from Europe

(This presentation will take place in Tools of Change for Publishing 2010 conference in New York, 02/24/2010)

Healthcare change is on everyone’s agenda nowadays as the role of medicine in society changes. The focus has shifted from the occasional care of individuals in hospitals to promoting health in the community. These changes place new demands on doctors and have forced a rethink on how students are taught in medical school. Medical training is becoming more student-centered. There is an emphasis on active learning rather than on the passive absorption of knowledge. Rigid curricula are giving way to more adaptable and flexible ones.

Publishers of medical textbooks, like Elsevier, must take account of these changes. They must be equally adaptable and flexible in the way they deliver the information. They must understand how teachers teach and how students learn. We believe there is a tremendous opportunity to drive sustained innovation in medical education.
This presentation is based on our experiences in Europe. We will highlight four stories of medical students from the UK, Spain, France and Germany that illustrate how publishers are responding to the changing needs in medical education.

The stories will cover the following topics:

• How students collect information today in order to pass exams
• New exam testing tools
• Case-study exams
• Wiki-like collaborative lesson creation
• Dealing with piracy when moving from print to electronic delivery
• Sources of content: e-libraries & e-Books
• Delivering knowledge in small chunks

Products and services that will be covered:
UK: International Virtual Dental School
Spain: ArenaMIR
France: Université Médicale Virtuelle Francophone
Germany: Mediscript

This presentation is for anyone interested in how self-directed education changes the rules of the game for publishers. No medical knowledge required!

Google Wave: teaching online made easy?

I'm one of the persons who received a Google Wave account with eight invitations available in it. I was very interested -and excited- in discovering this new territory in the net. 

It was announced as a new collaborative tool, something between email, twitter and chat. But I didn't have a clear idea in my mind of what was his potential.

Now I've been playing with Google Wave, creating new waves, sharing contents, maps and files, making simple polls, chatting in real time and locating all his secrets.

While chatting with a colleague I realized the potential Google Wave has to teach. I was giving him some information in text format: a short paragraph of a new concept I am working on. He asked me some questions (more text) and then I sent them some images with comments so he could fully understand me idea. He then proposed minor changes and asked some more questions (more text). A YouTube video came to my mind, something from a parallel world that could help me to communicate better my project to him (movie). After the movie I decided to share with him a presentation I made to introduce my thoughts to other colleagues from other countries (PowerPoint). Finally I presented to him different sources (links to different sites), which inspired me to build the concept.

So that’s what we shared: text – questions – images + text – conversation – questions – video – slideshow – links

And another very key issue in that moment was my full control of the message and contents I was using to make him understand an idea. Just adding a test at the end of this path and I would have an online teaching object (and I could share it also with others).

So now, I would like Google Wave to fully deploy its potential (some areas are not ready to use yet) so I can discover more interesting usages for this new tool.

Collecting information and learning

I had a very nice talk with one of my colleagues from Amsterdam. We were talking about how students, and other people, collect information to learn. The issue we were discussing was how medicine students build their papers and learn.

A few years ago, when I was in the Faculty of Law, I bought 4 or 5 really heavy books to read and learn. My teachers at the University told me the information needed to pass the exam was in those books. I didn’t have the internet at that time so no chance to google nor wiki.

A few weeks ago, faculty students ended their annual course and started summer holidays, after passing the final exams. I had a good opportunity to chat with a group of medicine students. I asked them about their books, how big and heavy are they? The answer was: we don’t know, we don’t use very much books now. We use the papers writen by our professors, plus some reference materials, plus google and some internet sources, like xtorrent and rapidshare.

I, then , asked about how did they organise all these informations from the different sources. They answered they all shared a usb flash memory stick and a gMail account to organise their info. They had a group and every person was responsible for creating some lessons. All lessons were then shared via Gmail or the USB stick. But the most interesting thing is that they were collecting information from different books, selecting the small pieces that were important to pass the exams, aggregating papers from the professors and related documents downloaded from differents websites.

A specific comment attracted my attention: they were trying to reduce the lessons to small pieces of information. Each of the lessons was a constructions of small pieces of information, coming from different sources, and aggregated by one of the members. All were working in the same way. The reason for that is they could retain more easily the information if they visualized each lesson with each small guide and a few contents in it.

The system they have created to learn is so different from the one I used 20 years ago…..but, at the same time, I do use the same system when browsing the web for new insigths, new ideas, new projects and new updates on me every day work. I collect small pieces of information, organize them in different “lessons” I have to read, and share them with my network.

If it’s working for them and it’s working for me, why are we still publishing heavy text books?

Color e-paper update - May 2009

An article published in Nature Photonics (read the summary of the article at http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v3/n5/abs/nphoton.2009.68.html) about a week ago informs about two prototypes of color e-paper displays. It is very interesting to see that the techonology they are using comes from the past. In fact, both developments are focused on using pigments in an aqueous solution inside the pixel. Then, by manipulating the voltage on each device the liquid with the pigment draws out from the reservoir into the freee space of the pixel (in the second prototype, there are two pigments in each reservoir but with different charge properties so that the voltage controls which of them is shown in the display). 

The potential of colorized e-ink for the health sciences publishing industry is huge. It opens a vast universe of possibilities and new developments on e-books and, also, new instructional models for education, e-libraries, multiformat services and more other interesting gadgets.

Fujitsu has started to sell his first color e-reader (FLEPia) on march this year, with an 8-inch screen display and up to 260,000 colors in high-definition. Even if it's a very good start for this new market, the re-draw speed is still low and the weight (385g) and specially the price is too high if compared to the Sony e-Reader or the Kindle. 

Value added lost

We can develop the best product and services in the world. But, among many other issues, we must be aware of two critical things:

1) Online products and services change fast because of their environment;
2) People who create product and services are not the ones communicating its existence to the market.

The consequences of these two facts are:

1) Flexibility and adaptation are required more than ever;
2) People who create must be involved in the communication of the product and services to the audience.

So, for the first subject, we need people who learn fast, who understand perfectly what they are working with, who can assess the needs of the users and are able to match them in seconds. But if they don’t match, then they should be prepared to offer a solution based on our know how and skills. And latest, they should be capable of giving the correct feedback so we can adapt fast to changes.

And for the second concern, we should involve developers and managers in building, and continuously adapting, the correct messages about our products and services. We should all become story tellers of our products because stories can be, just by themselves, a hundred times more fascinating than a flyer.

Medical images databases

I’m currently working with my team on browsing the images contained inside an ebook in a 3D environment. Tho objective is have a better navigation of the images and access the clinical cases from them. Doctors are used to see lots of images during their daily work, so it is important to navigate medical content databases the same way.

See this video I just made for better understand what we are doing:



Any comments and ideas are always welcome.