louised@bcm.tmc.edu (Louise Deretchin)

Louise Deretchin (louised@bcm.tmc.edu)
Wed, 13 Sep 1995 13:16:14 -0500

I am the director of the Medical Informatics Education Center at
Baylor College of Medicine and a doctoral student in Educational Psychology
at the University of Houston. This creates an interesting pairing of two
worlds.
At BCM, I work directly with the faculty and students developing use
of information technology within the curriculum. The ever-expanding volume
of medical knowledge, the need for collaborative forms of medical practice,
the dispersion of resources, and the increasing amount and availability of
technological resources all point to changes within the medical
culture--i.e., how one learns and how one practices medicine. The growth
resulting from the interaction of external societal changes with the
internal cultural changes and the contribution of technology to these
changes is of great interest to me. Vygotsky is the theorist who most
inspires my interest in this area.