The tide is turning; free at last, free at last, glory hallelujah, we are almost free at last.

There has been a constancy to the blog entries of late. The focus to a greater or lesser degree has been on the need for transparency in all things; governance, industry relations and professional/collegial education. If you have been around long enough, regardless of whether you choose to live in the moment or not, you have a certain perspective that only time and transition can create. You’ve seen enough to recognize that pendulum swings are part of life, as Dickens pointed out so very long ago; it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The one inexorable, unique, idiosyncratic and singular difference between “then” and “now” is the Internet. For those who see it as a place to download entertainment, play games, learn about which of your schoolmates made out or made off, you’re missing the bigger picture. For those who failed to understand that dipping a toe in social media/networking with whatever tool was accessible at the time was simply going to give them a leg up on evolutionary change, they weren’t as smart as their smartphones would have made them.

The two articles cited below are for your interest’s sake only. They don’t represent a massive tectonic shift in the conduct of affairs in the world of science or education, but they are a seminal phase. The push in this blogmeister’s opinion will be towards expansive knowledge networks. The tools are pervasive; we’re beyond static workstations, we’re a hyper-connected mobile world and the genie simply can’t be kept in the bottle any longer…………..shared experience clinical and otherwise on a global scale is the sine qua non of learning in today’s world. Gurus are yesterday’s news, blues and hues; they have had their orchestrated fifteen minutes of relevance. The new gurus are unsung, unknown and unpaid, but they are superb clinicians and they are passionate and committed in a way that only non-aligned folks can be in a zero fiduciary relationship with their belief systems. So read on McDentist, join the trickle, the tide is indeed turning and the tsunami about to occur will clear the debris of the past and open the gates to a future where knowledge is immediately accessible and you can walk into rooms of tomorrow with little more than an IP address. John Okeefe – this ‘un’s for you laddiebuck!!!  You are the Michael Collins of the mind.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blogpost-boycott-scientific-journals?CMP=twt_gu

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

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