I’m spending a week in Fortaleza, Brazil as part of the FAIMER-Brazil programme for 2014. FAIMER is an international programme aimed at developing capacity in medical education and research, especially in developing countries. There are regional institutes in South Africa, Brazil, India and China, and the main organisation in Philadelphia. I was here in 2013 and found the experience both professionally and personally rewarding. I’m not by nature a very sociable person or emotionally expressive…so being in Brazil is definitely an “opportunity for growth” for me, because they are SOCIAL! and EXPRESSIVE!
As part of my time here in Fortaleza, I’ll be assisting with a session on distance and technology-mediated teaching and learning, as well as helping the programme participants with their research projects. During that session I’ll be sharing the results of the open online module on professional ethics that we ran last year, using that project as an example to illustrate some general principles of distance and online learning.
On a side note, a few days ago one of the other faculty members approached me and started chatting. I’d realised that he looked familiar but couldn’t place him until he introduced himself as Roberto Esteves. I immediately recognised him as a physician and teacher who I’d become aware of through his posts on Google+, and who blogs at Educação Médica.
We ended up having a great conversation about medical education in general, as well as the possibilities for collaborative research projects between our institutions. For me, this was a wonderful example of how connecting with people online can strengthen the interactions and relationships you experience in the “real world”. This hasn’t happened to me very often (I don’t travel enough) but when it does it’s really powerful.