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Interactive visual tools as triggers of collaborative reasoning in entry-level pathology

  • Markus Nivala
  • Hans Rystedt
  • Roger Säljö
  • Pauliina Kronqvist
  • Erno Lehtinen
Article
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Abstract

The growing importance of medical imaging in everyday diagnostic practices poses challenges for medical education. While the emergence of novel imaging technologies offers new opportunities, many pedagogical questions remain. In the present study, we explore the use of a new tool, a virtual microscope, for the instruction and the collaborative learning of pathology. Fifteen pairs of medical students were asked to solve diagnostic tasks in a virtual microscopy learning environment. The students’ collaborative efforts were analysed on the basis of approximately 20 hours of video recordings. Our analyses show how students use the technology as a mediating tool to organize, manipulate and construct a shared visual field, and later, shared understanding of the problem and solutions. Organization of the visual field is done through multimodal referential practices: gestures, three dimensional manipulation of the image and paced inspection of the specimen. Furthermore, we analyse and describe how the aforementioned practices coincide with students’ medical reasoning in this particular learning context. The analysis of medical students’ diagnostic work illustrates the collaborative potential of the virtual microscopy environment and how such interactive tools render the traditional distinction between collaborating around or through computers irrelevant, as even face to face collaboration becomes enacted through technology. Finally, we argue that as technologies develop, understanding the technical side of image production, or any representation, becomes an integral part of the interpretative process. How this knowledge is communicated to the students may play a substantive role in how students learn to interpret medical images.

Keywords

Medical education Collaboration Virtual microscopy Referential practices 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the developers and administrators of WebMicroscope, Dr. Johan Lundin and Dr. Mikael Lundin, for the technical support during our research. We also thank Dr. Raymond Bertram for his extensive comments on draft version of this paper. Finally, we are grateful to nurse Hannele Nysten whose practical assistance in organising the data collections has been invaluable to us.

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Copyright information

© International Society of the Learning Sciences, Inc.; Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  • Markus Nivala
    • 1
  • Hans Rystedt
    • 2
  • Roger Säljö
    • 2
  • Pauliina Kronqvist
    • 3
  • Erno Lehtinen
    • 1
  1. 1.Centre for Learning ResearchUniversity of TurkuTurkuFinland
  2. 2.Department of Education, Communication and LearningUniversity of GothenburgGothenburgSweden
  3. 3.Department of PathologyUniversity of TurkuTurkuFinland

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