What does the changing nature of knowledge mean for global health?

Reda SadkiGlobal health, Learning strategy

Charlotte Mbuh and I will be welcoming Julie Jacobson, one of the founders of Bridges to Development, for our 15-minute Global Health Symposium about neglected needs of women’s health, and specifically the upcoming Female Genital Schistosomiasis (FGS) workshop being organized by the FAST package, a group of international and country partners. Join the Symposium on Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn. (If you miss the live stream, the recording is immediately available afterward, via these same links.)

During the Ebola crisis response of 2014-2015, I sweet-talked Panu Saaristo into doing the first “15-minute global health symposium”, giving him just 6 minutes for an update about the complex work he was leading. (You can read about it here.) I still remember every point of his presentation and the emotion associated with it, as he described how Red Cross volunteers were risking their own lives to help families bury their dead safely.

It turns out that the 60-minute webinar is both boring and ineffective for a reason: in a world of knowledge abundance, we are wasting the precious moments when we are connected to each other if we only use that time to present information. “Zoom fatigue” is due not so much to the technology as it is to missing the point about what has changed about the nature of knowledge in the Digital Age.

Featured image: Figure 23. Knowledge as a river, not reservoir, found in Siemens, G., 2006. Knowing knowledge.