Integrating Medical Education with Medical Practice

Abstract

Education is essentially a social phenomenon. As such, a social constructivist approach to teaching and learning is highly applicable to all disciplines and especially medicine where most graduates are required to deeply engage with society and need to communicate with a diverse array of people as part of their professional responsibilities. While traditional models of medical education are predicated on the establishment of face-to-face interactions, particularly within teaching hospital settings and residencies, there may be some opportunities to utilize current developments in online social networking technologies to enhance students’ and instructors’ experiences {references}. A review of social networking in the professional preparation of medical students and their subsequent practices would be helpful in determining the viability of such an approach. In this chapter, we provide a review of two key concepts of online social learning (social presence and media richness), explore how they can be implemented in the current wave of web based collaboration tools, and indicate their place in medical education. We provide a few examplars of how educators are incorporating web based or online social tools in student learning in the context of medical education and indicate some ways to extend this approach further.