Back in my day...

I do get so say the words of today's title sometimes, and for effect, I deliver them with the old man voice. Though we won't be talking about the ailments of the elderly today. No, quite the opposite, we'll take a look at the technology available to a student these days.

First off is the indispensable Facebook. The first semester it was really all the rage (this phrase was used back in my day), although things cooled off by now a bit. It's especially funny to see an almost complete loss of activity the day before any major exam. Which brings us to email, which seems to be always used, even before exams, for various distractions. At least one or two posts to the class distribution list will be about this or that "study break," usually something someone found on YouTube, usually related to medicine.

OK, so internet is mostly for wasting time, but we do have lectures available there. Since the material is so dense, it's nearly impossible to take good notes, unless the official class notes are well done, which varies from professor to professor. This has been pretty much taken care of by lecture notes, and now lecture videos, available within a few hours after the actual event takes place. So if you want to sleep in, crash your car on the way to school, or just plain feel like reviewing that dense professor's lecture one time, there they are. Which makes me feel spoiled rotten, since when my friends were attending medical schools in the last century, they only had a note-taking service.

A writeup on technology in medical school wouldn't be complete without some kudos to the network and PC guys who make the wireless infrastructure, computer labs, and the basic internet access possible in a nearly flawless manner. I left that world ages ago, it seems, but I do appreciate all the work that goes into making that flawless appearance.

Onto things more medical. While we may have been still using real cadavers, all this in the days of virtual frog dissections for the squeamish 8-th grader, some of the more classical material has already been delivered virtually. A complete histology course, developed by one of the professors at the university, was done on a computer. No microscopes, no slides, just images on a PC screen with cursor-sensitive areas. Going over portions of a cell with a mouse would highlight various organelles, etc. Endoscopies of all sorts will also be done virtually. Apparently we'll be able to perform colonoscopies through a computer program. There is also a virtual patient that we were shown during the orientation. I forget what he's for, though I do remember that he can be made into a she with appropriate attachments.

One final technology note is that I have yet to see one Tablet PC, which was heralded a few years ago as a revolution in higher education. Now that everyone's got their Powerpoint notes printed out, it looks like the TPC is a technology that came too late. A bit like Blu-Ray, which might not matter to anyone in the days of downloadable music and movies.