I wish I had all the modern technology available when I was a medical student 40 years ago. Studying was so much different. Modern students have access to information through the internet, open access publications, wikis and open libraries. They also have access to instruction. If you want to know more about anything in healthcare it is easy to find an online presentation, lecture or animated video for free. Modern students can be part of many online study groups, they can communicate with people from all over the world for practically free. They can create the most beautiful artefacts for their learning, their own podcasts, videos, animations, AI-powered mind maps. And all that can be done through a single device. So, it is easy to think that modern students have it so much easier than I had it 40 years ago.
But I don't think that is true at all.
When I was a student I could trust the information I was given. I could trust that my lectures had content that was true and up-to-date, that the books I used were quality assured, that the papers I read were from reputable journals. That is no longer the case. Online lectures may be appealing but may contain incorrect information, social media posts may give false information, predatory journals may put our publications that are dodgy and many more sources of misinformation exist. Modern students, therefore, have to be more critical than ever. I think that modern technology does not dumb down the students, but requires them to be even more critical thinkers than I ever had to be.
While I could simply follow the course and the lectures, modern students need to construct their own learning more actively. This requires them to be self-directed and self-regulated, which is not always easy. That is why this website contains posts about how to learn efficiently and effectively and how to use HPE-bot for this. But we would love to hear from all users about how they are learning with the bot. It would be exciting to have a community of learners and learn from each other. As George Bernard Shaw one said: if you have an apple and I have one and we exchange apples, we will still each have only one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange ideas, we will both have two ideas.