Exploring ways to retain wisdom and knowledge for future generations
‘Good content is the great currency in teaching today,’ enthuses Patricia Reynolds, Professor of Innovations in Education at King’s. ‘That’s what students want.’ Providing and managing that currency is the goal of an innovative pilot project called Donates All, which neatly stands for Digital Online Assets to Enhance Study: A Living Legacy. In essence, it aims to capture the teaching materials and methods of donor professors, and to create a secure social media network on which to share it – and more. The idea stemmed from a desire to preserve historical dental slides, which have been widely used in dental education and across the medical curriculum over the past 50 years. ‘All too often, when professors retire or die, their slides are just binned,’ says Professor Reynolds, who switched from a career in dentistry, maxillofacial surgery and teaching to focus on the future of education itself, particularly e-learning. Preserving professors
legacy as a matter of course’
‘Some of these slides are irreplaceable,’ she says. ‘And when they are thrown away, so too are the rich stories and the teaching methods that brought them to life. Hence the notion of a living legacy, which aims to ‘preserve’ professors and bring them into the digital fold.’ The project involves shooting videos of donors in a structured interview with Professor Nairn Wilson, President of KCLA, which charts their life and times in the Dental Institute. To date, four have been recorded: Professor AHR ‘Jack’ Rowe, past Dean of UMDS Dental School; Professor John Langdon, previous Head of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, KCSMD and GKT Dental Institute; and Professors Graham Roberts, previous Head of Paediatric Dentistry, and Stephen Challacombe, Martin Rushton Professor
Nick Ballon
A different form of immortality
of Oral Medicine. Meanwhile, the slides have been cleaned, digitised, catalogued and ‘tagged’ with relevant key words to aid retrieval by a team of postgraduate volunteers: Drs Tarik Shembesh, Scott Rice, Sami Stagnell, Sarah Kaddour, Miriam Bouchiba, Suzie Zhang and Yavar Khan. Handle with care
For now, while there are plenty of other keen donors, the first four are the limit of what is currently only a pilot project, made possible through a grant funded by alumni. To preserve slides from the late John McLean collection, Dental Circle gifts have kindly supported the project. Professor Reynolds says the project must be handled with care. ‘There are lots of issues here, such as quality assurance, patient confidentiality, privacy and copyright.’ That leads on to the second part of the project: creating a safe digital area to store and provide access to the material. ‘Initially this was a heritage project, but it has evolved to create a social network that allows students to build up a Flickr-like collection of teaching materials,’ says Professor Reynolds. ‘It means students don’t have to manage a load of hard disks or cloud storage.’ The pilot focuses on dentistry, but the idea could be applied to any image or video that aids learning, she says. ‘We want to do it right, so that when we start scaling up, we don’t have to backtrack.’ The team is now in the process of developing an open source content management system to make the project accessible online. ‘This could become part of everyday College life,’ says Professor Reynolds. ‘Academic staff could create their legacy as a matter of course, for example, making a video when they start and when they leave. That has the advantage of helping the College learn from their feedback. Cost would then be minimal. Imagine if we had access to an archive like this of such famous King’s people as James Clerk Maxwell, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin.’ Autumn 2013 IN TOUCH
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