Digital natives in education and work (Part 2)

We'll continue discussion of hardware since there are a lot of gadgets in the market worldwide today. The world today is a mobile world, so gadgets are made for people on the move (roving, if you please). Some of the interesting gadgets available at the time of this writing include the following:

Apple products: iPhone, iPad, iPod, MacBook Air
BlackBerry products: BlackBerry smartphones, BlackBerry PlayBook tablet
Sony products: VAIO laptops, Sony tablet, digital cameras, camcorders, TV, home theatres
Acer products: notebooks, tablet 
Hewlett-Packard products: laptop-tablet

If you own or use any of the above, then you must be IT-savvy and a digital native/migrant.

Lately, I have seen the tablets made their in-roads into academia and the health care. The light-weight laptops (notebooks) now compete with the thin wafer-like tablets. The tablet is preferred by new students who are starting out in studying medicine. The tablet is preferred by IT-savvy doctors in the hospital setting especially in the orthopedic and neuro wards. The tablet is preferred by medical specialists who are also lecturing, especially on radio-imaging techniques in Radiology. It therefore looks like the tablet is here to stay for quite some time. What is the tablet good for? Please write in if you are using your tablet for something or something else. Let's share that knowledge about using the tablet.

Are other gadgets useful for education? Yes, definitely - the digital camera. What is the digital camera good for? Depends on what the objects of photography are. Photographic objects can be patients or their body parts, normal or diseased. Remember, there is an ethical code that guides us in taking photographs of patients and their body parts. Then what can we do about this restriction? Can we simply take photos of patients and their body parts? Certainly no! But there's a leeway if you are working in the photography department, still the photographs have a purpose - for teaching, research or archive. Patients' rights and privacy are guarded at each hospital. In fact, cameras (camera-fitted phones or smartphones) may not be brought into hospitals, clinics and treatment centres. Even if they are brought to hospital, they must be switched off. As such the digital camera (and camcorder, camera-fitted phones or smartphones) are useless in the true setting where everything must remain private (ideally). What's the point of learning then? The restrictions should mean that one needs prior permission in order to photograph a patient or a patient's body parts. Students are reminded that they need permission from their lecturers/superiors before they can photograph patients/body parts while in the clinics and wards. Violation of the ethical code and hospital rules is common as our students and society do not know that it is wrong to take photographs of patients/body parts and worse still, to make them public - to post them on the Internet and elsewhere. Even though rules and regulations are in place, they are broken more often than not. It's human to err.