Pearl Session: Do or do not: Activity
in Health Education Technology
Rachel Ellaway PhD
Northern Ontario School of Medicine
Helterskelter
• What’s the most
important part?
Helterskelter
• What’s the most
important part?
• Design?
• Structural integrity?
• Cost?
• Decoration?
• Business case?
Activity is
• The things we do
• Active and deliberate behaviour
• In philosophy: agents with beliefs,
desires, intentions engaging in
behaviours
• Complex, contested, useful,
apparent?
Paying attention
• As health professional educators we
tend to be concerned with outcomes,
competence and expertise and the
business of running complex
educational programs
• Activity abstracted, disregarded
Black boxes
outcome
cognition
intervention
theory
practice
Where is activity in ed-tech?
• Teachers often don’t think about what
they and their learners do
• There is often little regard in med-ed
as a whole given to what learners and
teachers actually do
can do (affordance)
vs
should do (instruction)
Encoded, constructed, symbolic
encoded activities
multimedia design
digital artifacts
how artifacts are used
teaching and learning
constructed activities
what the artifacts represent
the educational system
symbolic activities
Educational
technology
• Actions – click,
select
• Infrastructure
• Information
management
• Beyond these
aspects?
• Are we only
engineers who leave
once it’s built?
Activity and MedBiq
• What is the role of activity in the work
of the MedBiquitous community?
• Activity Report: compile and
exchange CE/MoC data
• Medical Education Metrics:
messaging of CE data
• Virtual Patient: online simulation
activity triggers
Questions for you
• What aspects of your work involve
designing or supporting activities?
• What are your main challenges in
working with activity and technology?
• What role should activity design play
in standards development?
Questions for you
• What aspects of your work involve
designing or supporting activities?
• What are your main challenges in
working with activity and technology?
• What role should activity design play
in standards development?
Questions for you
• What aspects of your work involve
designing or supporting activities?
• What are your main challenges in
working with activity and technology?
• What role should activity design play
in standards development?
Pearl Session: Do or do not: Activity
in Health Education Technology
Rachel Ellaway PhD
Northern Ontario School of Medicine