How to collect and order info from the Web
Everything is miscellaneous / Elogio del disordine - David Weinberger 2007
How to use the Web to teach: An example
Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw, a January course taught by Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Elizabeth Stark, co-hosted by Stanford Law School and Harvard Law SchooI.
January 25th, 2010
Want to see one way to use the Web to teach? Berkman’s Jonathan Zittrain and Stanford Law’s Elizabeth Stark are teaching a course called Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw. It looks like they have students creating wiki pages for the various topics being discussed. The one on “The Future of Wikipedia” is a terrific resource for exploring the issues Wikipedia is facing.
Among the many things I like about this approach: It implicitly makes the process of learning — which we have traditionally taken as an inward process — a social, outbound process. By learning this way. we are not only enriching ourselves, but enriching our world.
Fabio Casati
My only criticism: I wish the pages had prominent pointers to a main page that explains that the pages are part of a course.
Verghese believes in the curative power of literature for physicians. Writing is a way to explore what they see every day and can’t share. Reading is a way for students to revive the empathy that gets lost in the process of medical training. Modern training “takes lovely people and converts them into bottom-line, somewhat cynical, disease-oriented people,” Verghese insists. “We teach them to convert into our language, which we need for diagnosis. We rob the story of everything human about it.” After a while: “Imagining suffering is a struggle. The danger is we begin to talk about the diabetic in bed three.” Literature, on the other hand, is full of suffering. He likes to teach his students Chekhov, and is apt to recite a poem off the top of his head by William Carlos Williams—two other writer/physicians.
My comment: the patient feelings may be much more sensitive to body failures than any of our diagnostic techniques. Asking the right question is what physician should learn to do.