Academe, anarchy and digital anatomy

Abstract

Last summer, I attended the 20th and last meeting of ‘‘Slice of Life’’, a collection of individuals interested in e-learning and all its ramifications. Slice of Life was originally the name of a videodisc project begun by its official den mother, Suzanne Stensaas, financed for the first few years by the University of Utah and then funded by an hourly charge to the individual contributors from over 80 schools. As it evolved the goal was to have on one disc all the images you would need to teach the first 2 years of medical school. The last edition (7th) was in 1996 and by then the videodisc was beginning to vanish and sources of higher quality digital images were becoming available. Of course, nowadays, all this could be put on about 1% of an iPod, which, as it turns out, is part of the problem. The fact that it was the last meeting is not an indication of its vitality; ‘‘Slice’’, as it is known to its adherents, is joining forces with the International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE), next year as the use of technology and computers is now incorporated in most medical schools. The array of innovations was truly impressive, from anatomy slides with clever annotations (Bob Ogilvie, South Carolina) to video segments with experts directed at teaching communication skills (Christof Daetwyler, Drexel University) on the Web, laptops, even iPods (Richard Witham, Cambrian College and Northern Ontario School of Medicine). I even got my first glimpse of the new iPhone (three of them, in fact) 15 h after they hit the AT&T stores. Despite all that, part of me was fighting an overwhelming sense of deja vu. Despite the existence of formalized repositories like MedEdPORTAL and HEAL, many of the projects appeared to be labors of love, developed by individuals without university sanction, rarely