Practice cases now available on education page

Hi all,

After several requests I have uploaded the practice cases for the various lectures to the education page (the same place you can get the lectures). Please remember to download the files to make full use of them, as the animations don’t work over slideshare.

There will be some errors in the presentations, I keep forgetting to note down what the mistakes I notice during the lectures, so please remind me if you spot anything. My email is lukeoakdenrayner at gmail dot com.

I just thought I would say something about this decision to publish these cases, because it was a good learning moment for me. Historically in radiology each consultant gathers a set of unique and interesting cases across their work lifetime, which they use for teaching. There is some strange sort of status and value that comes from having interesting cases, and certainly all of the ‘best’ radiologists have incredible personal film libraries.

But in the modern era with electronic cases and case libraries, this seems much less important now. I personally have no attachment to these sort of ideas anyway, being something of an idealist about the free and open availability of learning resources. Education should be for everyone, in my mind, with the learner in control.

My ‘decision’ to keep the cases locked away until the lectures is even more surprising because my only goal is to teach students. There is no reason I should limit that teaching to when they are in a room with me, but instead they should be able to learn when it is convenient and review the material at any time. It is in fact counter-productive for me to restrict access to the cases if my goal is for other to learn.

But for some reason, my default position was still the traditional one. It certainly wasn’t a conscious decision – I just didn’t think about it at all. It just goes to show that culture is such a strong force, biasing us to take decisions even when they are directly opposed to our conscious positions.

Anyway, thanks to the students who asked the question and gave my brain the kick it needed to realise that my position was silly. Hope the resources are useful, and feel free to pass the links around to whoever might want them.