Gurmit Singh
I am a healthcare and HIV digital activist, educator and researcher. I am the co-founder and co-facilitator of The HIVe (http://www.hiv-e.org), a global community of gay, MSM and transgender researchers, practitioners and activists to fight HIV with digital technologies. I am also the co-convener and facilitator of We Decide, an e-democracy learnscape for equity and social justice. I am an ESRC Scholar at The University of Leeds UK and conducting critical social sciences research to improve the impact on practice and patient care of Web 2.0 healthcare professional development. Previously, I worked as Education & Professional Development Coordinator at the International AIDS Society, Geneva. This worked resulted in a prize-winning online mentoring innovation for use in distance education and online healthcare professional development to improve practice, focusing on widening access to global collaborative learning for health care professionals and researchers from developing countries.
Supervisors: Maggie McPherson
Supervisors: Maggie McPherson
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Papers by Gurmit Singh
This paper critically evaluates a 3-year practitioner research study to implement an e-mentoring programme with a new digital tool to support healthcare professionals from developing countries. As compared to a conventional top-down project planning and management approach to execute programmes, I argue that implementing a practitioner research approach is more effective in producing change to educational practice. This is because it built an ‘intensional network’ of practice to link peers, mentors and experts strategically to disrupt reified practices, drive collaboration and knowledge sharing across time and distance.
As global health confronts the reality of a networked sociality, I urge curriculum designers to activate intensional networks to address the practical problems of implementing new digital technologies into distance education for health care professionals that result in dynamic changes to practice.
The purpose of editorial to this special issue is this to introduce “We Decide”, a grassroots e-democracy learnscape. This timely collaborative initiative was conceptualized to promote the deployment of internet communication technologies (ICTs) for advancing social justice and equity in an increasingly digitized era. The special issue presents six individually selected papers delivered at the IADIS International Conference e-democracy, Equity and Social Justice held in Rome, Italy, 20-22 July 2011. These papers provide examples of unique innovations that highlight new possibilities and directions for e-democracy that are grounded in an ethos of greater equity and social justice.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors outline the mission and approach of “We Decide” and how it can be understood in the evolution of e-democracy.
Findings
The authors discuss how the six papers in this special issue suggest ways to transform e-democracy towards equity and social justice.
Research limitations/implications – These papers help researchers and practitioners extend the concept of e-democracy from a variety of perspectives, and show the importance of thinking about e-democracy as access to resources for all citizens.
Originality/value
Given the increasing policy demands for effective e-democracy and active citizenship online through new and emerging social networking technologies, the knowledge produced by “We Decide” brings together researchers, practitioners and activists from across the world. It provides a robust platform to share innovations that challenge us to rethink and re-research the core concepts and approaches necessary to transform e-democracy to realize equity and social justice.
Keywords Access, E-democracy, Equity, Social justice, Resources, Reflexivity, Innovation, We Decide
Drawing broadly on sociocultural perspectives of Lave and Wenger and Vygotskian models of cognitive apprenticeship, it considers how to design the course room as a learning environment.
It begins with a critique of technical-rational discourses of teacher education, one of the implications of which has been to assert the primacy of the social construction of teacher identity.
We present the case for the course room as a community of practice where teachers learn through engaging in activities and discourses, mediated through cultural artifacts.
A community of practice is also shaped by larger systems of power, which are reproduced in the micro-context of the course room. Teacher learning is a site of struggle over activities, discourses, tools and identity because of its situated nature within institutional, historical and cultural contexts.
A revised role for teacher educators in shaping an emerging course room culture is presented, acknowledging the realities of power and ideology that influence the daily practices in the course room.
This article describes how early career researchers and abstract submitters in resource-limited developing countries, particularly in Africa, received online help from experienced volunteer mentors in the Abstract Mentor Programme (AMP), enabling them to share their work at international conferences on the issues of preventing and managing HIV and AIDS.
Design - An evaluation study was conducted on the impact of this programme over two conferences. Survey questionnaires also gathered data on the perceptions of users and mentors on the value of online mentoring.
Findings - Results from the evaluation show that online mentoring increased the motivation and acceptance rate of early career and less experienced researchers, especially from low- and middle-income countries.
Practical implications - With a situated and constructivist view of online teaching and learning, I consider the implications for redesigning future global conferences as collaborative capacity-building spaces, via the use of Web 2.0 technologies.
Research implications - This study shows that the use of online mentoring at a distance can make access to desirable literacy practices for researchers’ professional development more equitable, and enhance the added value of informal learning in today’s lifelong learning context. It also shows a cost-effective way to use technology to widen participation of early career researchers from resource-limited settings, and improve their understanding of the practice of writing up and publishing research for competitive international conferences or journals.
Originality/value – This study provides research capacity builders with insights into the use of online mentoring to not only build writing skills, but to enhance the induction of novices into a global learning community. It aims to inform decision makers of issues in effective online mentoring design to consider for impact and quality.
Talks by Gurmit Singh
Studies have found that online healthcare continuing professional development (CPD) is not successful at improving practice and patient care outcomes. To improve impact, researchers have argued that it is important to identify the key features of online CPD that can support healthcare professionals improve practice.
Methods:
A critical interdisciplinary review of the literature from 1970-2011 was conducted to identify the key features of online CPD that educators should implement in order to improve practice.
Firstly, a search of 3 healthcare databases identified articles that evaluated impact on practice and patient care outcomes. Studies were excluded only if they were formal courses.
A wider search of educational and business databases was then performed, including grey literature to identify approaches on professional development, online education, computer-supported work, and information systems, and perspectives from editorials, position papers, and policy documents on CPD.
Results:
250 relevant articles were found and used in the review.
Ten key features of online CPD that are most likely to support healthcare professionals improve practice were identified:
• Supporting healthcare professionals through the implementation of new evidence,
• Facilitating social interaction and collaboration in small groups,
• Situating professional learning in practice
• Providing safe networked spaces for critical reflection and action research,
• Integrating new knowledge and questioning of personal theories to reframe practices,
• Designing social networks as a flexible online support structure to
complement self-directed learning,
• Providing access to trusted others to exchange information, opinion and advice
• Mobilizing strategic networks to deliver programmes to solve patient care problems, and produce knowledge
• Facilitating short-term, time-bound, synchronous discussions of dispersed learners and tutors with Web 2.0 networking technologies, and
• Affecting the agency and resources of healthcare professionals to empower them to make changes
Discussion
The 10 key features identified point to a more complicated picture of the relationship between online CPD and improvements in practice and patient care, and a need for grounding this relationship within a radically different theory than those that currently underpin the design of online CPD to improve impact.
Conclusion:
Given the increasing use of online CPD worldwide, further critical interdisciplinary research is required to evaluate how these 10 key features can be integrated into effective models to design, deliver and evaluate online CPD programmes that improve impact on practice and patient care.
This paper critically evaluates a 3-year practitioner research study to implement an e-mentoring programme with a new digital tool to support healthcare professionals from developing countries. As compared to a conventional top-down project planning and management approach to execute programmes, I argue that implementing a practitioner research approach is more effective in producing change to educational practice. This is because it built an ‘intensional network’ of practice to link peers, mentors and experts strategically to disrupt reified practices, drive collaboration and knowledge sharing across time and distance.
As global health confronts the reality of a networked sociality, I urge curriculum designers to activate intensional networks to address the practical problems of implementing new digital technologies into distance education for health care professionals that result in dynamic changes to practice.
The purpose of editorial to this special issue is this to introduce “We Decide”, a grassroots e-democracy learnscape. This timely collaborative initiative was conceptualized to promote the deployment of internet communication technologies (ICTs) for advancing social justice and equity in an increasingly digitized era. The special issue presents six individually selected papers delivered at the IADIS International Conference e-democracy, Equity and Social Justice held in Rome, Italy, 20-22 July 2011. These papers provide examples of unique innovations that highlight new possibilities and directions for e-democracy that are grounded in an ethos of greater equity and social justice.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors outline the mission and approach of “We Decide” and how it can be understood in the evolution of e-democracy.
Findings
The authors discuss how the six papers in this special issue suggest ways to transform e-democracy towards equity and social justice.
Research limitations/implications – These papers help researchers and practitioners extend the concept of e-democracy from a variety of perspectives, and show the importance of thinking about e-democracy as access to resources for all citizens.
Originality/value
Given the increasing policy demands for effective e-democracy and active citizenship online through new and emerging social networking technologies, the knowledge produced by “We Decide” brings together researchers, practitioners and activists from across the world. It provides a robust platform to share innovations that challenge us to rethink and re-research the core concepts and approaches necessary to transform e-democracy to realize equity and social justice.
Keywords Access, E-democracy, Equity, Social justice, Resources, Reflexivity, Innovation, We Decide
Drawing broadly on sociocultural perspectives of Lave and Wenger and Vygotskian models of cognitive apprenticeship, it considers how to design the course room as a learning environment.
It begins with a critique of technical-rational discourses of teacher education, one of the implications of which has been to assert the primacy of the social construction of teacher identity.
We present the case for the course room as a community of practice where teachers learn through engaging in activities and discourses, mediated through cultural artifacts.
A community of practice is also shaped by larger systems of power, which are reproduced in the micro-context of the course room. Teacher learning is a site of struggle over activities, discourses, tools and identity because of its situated nature within institutional, historical and cultural contexts.
A revised role for teacher educators in shaping an emerging course room culture is presented, acknowledging the realities of power and ideology that influence the daily practices in the course room.
This article describes how early career researchers and abstract submitters in resource-limited developing countries, particularly in Africa, received online help from experienced volunteer mentors in the Abstract Mentor Programme (AMP), enabling them to share their work at international conferences on the issues of preventing and managing HIV and AIDS.
Design - An evaluation study was conducted on the impact of this programme over two conferences. Survey questionnaires also gathered data on the perceptions of users and mentors on the value of online mentoring.
Findings - Results from the evaluation show that online mentoring increased the motivation and acceptance rate of early career and less experienced researchers, especially from low- and middle-income countries.
Practical implications - With a situated and constructivist view of online teaching and learning, I consider the implications for redesigning future global conferences as collaborative capacity-building spaces, via the use of Web 2.0 technologies.
Research implications - This study shows that the use of online mentoring at a distance can make access to desirable literacy practices for researchers’ professional development more equitable, and enhance the added value of informal learning in today’s lifelong learning context. It also shows a cost-effective way to use technology to widen participation of early career researchers from resource-limited settings, and improve their understanding of the practice of writing up and publishing research for competitive international conferences or journals.
Originality/value – This study provides research capacity builders with insights into the use of online mentoring to not only build writing skills, but to enhance the induction of novices into a global learning community. It aims to inform decision makers of issues in effective online mentoring design to consider for impact and quality.
Studies have found that online healthcare continuing professional development (CPD) is not successful at improving practice and patient care outcomes. To improve impact, researchers have argued that it is important to identify the key features of online CPD that can support healthcare professionals improve practice.
Methods:
A critical interdisciplinary review of the literature from 1970-2011 was conducted to identify the key features of online CPD that educators should implement in order to improve practice.
Firstly, a search of 3 healthcare databases identified articles that evaluated impact on practice and patient care outcomes. Studies were excluded only if they were formal courses.
A wider search of educational and business databases was then performed, including grey literature to identify approaches on professional development, online education, computer-supported work, and information systems, and perspectives from editorials, position papers, and policy documents on CPD.
Results:
250 relevant articles were found and used in the review.
Ten key features of online CPD that are most likely to support healthcare professionals improve practice were identified:
• Supporting healthcare professionals through the implementation of new evidence,
• Facilitating social interaction and collaboration in small groups,
• Situating professional learning in practice
• Providing safe networked spaces for critical reflection and action research,
• Integrating new knowledge and questioning of personal theories to reframe practices,
• Designing social networks as a flexible online support structure to
complement self-directed learning,
• Providing access to trusted others to exchange information, opinion and advice
• Mobilizing strategic networks to deliver programmes to solve patient care problems, and produce knowledge
• Facilitating short-term, time-bound, synchronous discussions of dispersed learners and tutors with Web 2.0 networking technologies, and
• Affecting the agency and resources of healthcare professionals to empower them to make changes
Discussion
The 10 key features identified point to a more complicated picture of the relationship between online CPD and improvements in practice and patient care, and a need for grounding this relationship within a radically different theory than those that currently underpin the design of online CPD to improve impact.
Conclusion:
Given the increasing use of online CPD worldwide, further critical interdisciplinary research is required to evaluate how these 10 key features can be integrated into effective models to design, deliver and evaluate online CPD programmes that improve impact on practice and patient care.