Network-Based Continuing Medical Education Social Media and Professional Development

Medical Education needs to be understood as a continuous process, where professional know-how 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, 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, non-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 (ie: 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. This book is a valuable tool and source of knowledge for all those directly and indirectly interested in CME processes and in particular in the informal ones centred on the use of social media and mobile technology. Principal audiences for this book are researchers in continuing education and lifelong learning, health institutions, educational institutions, educational managers, policy-makers, CME national agencies.