Academe, anarchy and digital anatomy

摘要

Last summer, I attended the 20th and last meeting of "Slice of Life", a collection of individuals interested in e-learning and all its ramifications. Slice of Life was originally the name of a videodisc project begun by its official den mother, Suzanne Stensaas, financed for the first few years by the University of Utah and then funded by an hourly charge to the individual contributors from over 80 schools. As it evolved the goal was to have on one disc all the images you would need to teach the first 2 years of medical school. The last edition (7th) was in 1996 and by then the videodisc was beginning to vanish and sources of higher quality digital images were becoming available. Of course, nowadays, all this could be put on about 1% of an iPod, which, as it turns out, is part of the problem.