Network-Based Continuing Medical Education: Social Media and Professional Development

The traditional types of educational paths will in future increasingly be seen as just the starting-points of a long-term learning process which will be directly managed by the individual learner him/herself. This is all the more true for those professions where professional knowledge undergoes constant renewal, and it certainly applies to the medical profession where, as well as basic university training and professional development based on personal experience, a continuous updating process is required, regarding both the results of scientific research and the best professional practices directly worked out by colleagues in the workplace. Medical training in fact needs to be understood as a continuous process, where professional knowhow is an ever-changing synthesis of different types of knowledge, integrating experience, practice and rigorous scientific studies. And it is because of this need that specific national programmes of continuing medical education (CME) have been institutionalised already for several decades now. In these programmes too, the progressive diffusion of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs), particularly the mobile ones, has had and is still having its effects; indeed training schemes based on e-learning and more generally on Technology-Enhanced Learning are more and more widespread. However, although the technology being used is last-generation, most of the actual approaches adopted are still based on an old conception of e-learning (the phrase "old wine in new barrels" has been coined). This is the so-called "content-driven" e-learning, i.e. e-learning based on extensive distribution of educational materials and administration of progress tests, albeit issued online in an automatic form. These are formal learning processes where vertical flows of knowledge are generally created between the possessors of that knowledge and those who have to acquire it. This process is mediated by electronic (e-) content and sometimes avails itself of the support of online facilitators. The social dimension of learning is almost wholly neglected. As mentioned earlier however, there is another fundamental kind of dynamics governing continuing training processes, and that is peer professional knowledge sharing. This often uses various, decidedly more informal, channels which are nowadays hugely potentiated by the networks and mobile technologies (NMTs). But just because they are informal and often based on social networks managed in a restricted group, the experience and methods of these networked communities of professionals often remain unknown within the general CME context. By gathering together important contributions from leading international experts in the field, this book will try to show: (1) how NMTs foster and potentiate formal and informal learning processes in the CME context; b) what the possible role of professional social networks in the CME context is; c) how informal learning processes characterised by horizontal (peer-to-peer) knowledge flows can be integrated with more formal ones centred on vertical knowledge flows (i.e. flows from authoritative sources to potential users); d) how the learning achieved by informal processes can be assessed in order that credits can be awarded to it within the national CME framework.