Brevity’s burden The executive summary trap in global health

Brevity’s burden: The executive summary trap in global health

Reda SadkiGlobal health, Learning strategy

It was James Gleick who noted in his book “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything” the societal shift towards valuing speed over depth: “We have become a quick-reflexed, multitasking, channel-flipping, fast-forwarding species. We don’t completely understand it, and we’re not altogether happy about it.” In global health, there’s a growing tendency to demand ever-shorter summaries of complex information. “Can you condense this into four pages?” “Is there an executive summary?” These requests, while stemming from real time constraints, reveal fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of knowledge and learning. Worse, they contribute to perpetuating existing global health inequities. Here is why – and a few ideas of what we can do about it. We lose more than time in the race to brevity The push for shortened summaries is understandable on the surface. Some clinical researchers, for example, undeniably face increasing time pressures. Many are swamped due to underlying structural issues, …

George Siemens at TEDxNYED (3 June 2010)

A few of my favorite excerpts from George Siemens’s Knowing Knowledge (2006)

Reda SadkiTheory

My own practice (and no doubt yours) has been shaped by many different learning theorists. George Siemens, for me, stands out articulating what I felt but did not know how to express about the changing nature of knowledge in the Digital Age. Below I’ve compiled a few of my favorite excerpts from his book Knowing Knowledge, published in 2006, two years before he taught the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) with Alec Couros and Stephen Downes. Learning has many dimensions. No one model or definition will fit every situation. CONTEXT IS CENTRAL. Learning is a peer to knowledge. To learn is to come to know. To know is to have learned. We seek knowledge so that we can make sense. Knowledge today requires a shift from cognitive processing to pattern recognition. Construction, while a useful metaphor, fails to align with our growing understanding that our mind is a connection-creating structure. We do not always …