The sociologist Anthony Giddens has commented that in the future, the 'normal' body may only be the most basic form of embodiment available to us, and that bodily enhancements like eyes that can zoom, ears with extended hearing range, and designer prosthetic limbs to supplement today's spectacles and hearing aids will vastly extend the bodies of those who can afford them. Some of these innovations sound farfetched, but there's no doubt that the ability to shape and enhance our bodies will be attractive to many people, and will have a big impact on physiotherapy work. If it's possible in the future to have a fully autonomous transport network, it's likely to put an end to most head … [Read more...] about Second skin
XIII International Workshop Science, Technology and Gender (English/Spanish)
Health, public involvement, and gender: new voices, knowledges and practices Madrid, 21-23rd October 2019 The project Multiple voices, plural knowledges and biomedical technologies (MINECO:FFI2015-65947-C2 -1-P) invites contributions for the XIII International Workshop on Science, Technology and Gender to debate how public involvement (PPI) and gender are important to improvehealth and wellbeing and reduce health inequalities. The synergy between PPI and gender can make a difference to key issues in the fields of healthcare and research such as naming andframing of health problems; design of policy, services and governance plans; provision of health and social care; improving the … [Read more...] about XIII International Workshop Science, Technology and Gender (English/Spanish)
Innovation
We're coming to the end of a long academic year in New Zealand, so that means lots of examination and assessment of nervous students. This time last year I took over a postgraduate paper called Health Professional Practice with a view to 'reshaping' it. For years it had been delivered in a standard fashion: block study, lots of lectures and tutorials - mostly directed at students rather than engaging them, boring assessments. I decided to shake things up a bit. The paper needed to be much more about what made the students 'tick' as health professionals; their experiences, ideas and issues. But it also needed to get them to critically examine their professions in ways they hadn't … [Read more...] about Innovation
The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
It's often tempting to think that it's the big changes, the grand gestures, that do the most damage to a profession, but it's really the small acts of violence that really do the damage. The daily drip, drip, drip, that slowly erodes the foundations until, one day, the house falls down. 'Threats to democracy come one dollar at a time', goes the old American political aphorism, and so it is with professions like physiotherapy, which can suffer death from a thousand cuts if they are too distracted to notice. Foucault would say that the most powerful and dangerous ideas are those that arrive under the cover of common sense, where it seems almost impossible to dispute the reason and logic … [Read more...] about The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Will next year’s WCPT Congress break new ground?
The scientific programme at WCPT Congress provides a good barometer of physiotherapists' interests and the things that it thinks are current or 'coming' in the profession. But when people pay their registration fee, they're signing up for everything, so it's not until after the event that we get to see what people attended and what they didn't. On the other hand, the pre- and post-congress courses can really show what physiotherapists are prepared to invest their money in, and so give us a very good indication of physiotherapists' interests. So with the call going out this week for pre- and post-congress course proposals, there's an opportunity to gauge whether radical shifts are … [Read more...] about Will next year’s WCPT Congress break new ground?
We are all midwives
A few days into the new year, CPN member Roger Kerry was recognised by JISC as one of the UK’s most social media savvy academics. The award acknowledged Roger's longstanding contribution to innovation in education, including the Tweed project which uses social media to formulate reading lists based on people's favourite texts (see Twitter #physiosomereadinglist). It would be nice to think that in the future, our new book Manipulating practices: A critical physiotherapy reader will make that list, and given the fact that it's been downloaded nearly 4,500 times since it was released last week, it should stand a chance. (Remember, you can download the book in full, for free, from … [Read more...] about We are all midwives
Pushing at open doors
I have had the good fortune to spend time this last week with one of the world's foremost digital education specialists. Steve Wheeler is someone who has been at the forefront of educational innovation for over a decade now, and he spent last week and this week at AUT working with colleagues in my school. The highlight of his visit so far, for me at least, was a study day that we held over the weekend to look at 21st first century education. We spent the morning at a new school that has embraced the idea flexible learning environments (FLEs). Teaching at my university is often anything but flexible, and classrooms, curricula, and teaching and learning practices often look more rigid the … [Read more...] about Pushing at open doors