Thank you.
It's my real pleasure to be invited as an individual to speak before you today on a topic that has been near and dear to my heart.
I was talking with Craig and Mary beforehand, and I realized that it's been about 20 years I've been doing this work, which, if you know much about the web, basically means I started doing this stuff when the World Wide Web was just starting.
In fact, my initial foray into this was as an undergraduate at the University of Regina. I was fascinated by how people were finding solutions to problems globally using Usenet groups, and then eventually this World Wide Web. At that point, truly, it was almost like “www” was the “wild, wild west” of everything.
Somewhat surprisingly, given that this is about technology and innovation, and innovation being as disruptive often as it is, I'm going to do something a little disruptive and actually use no technology—outside of something to make sure I'm on time. I'll do something that you might even say is more primitive: use simple stories.
I'll do that because ultimately that is what these technologies, these information technologies, which is what I'll be speaking about, are really good at. I'll share a few of the insights I've had as a student, a professor, a consultant, a teacher, a learner, and of course, a user of all of these technologies.
To give you a bit of background, I've been doing work as a researcher for many years. This initial project started out in the 1990s. I was fascinated by this new thing. I'd never billed myself as a techie beforehand, and I'd never really thought of myself as technology focused, but I was fascinated by that. It carried over to some graduate work I was doing at Wilfrid Laurier University. I became a special education assistant with the Waterloo Region District School Board in a program that was designed for kids with special needs, mostly behavioural problems and conditions.
As I was preparing for today, I actually thought of two stories that happened simultaneously, that really illustrate the potential power of information technology, and that maybe will provide some guidance. Even though they happened almost 20 years ago, I think the lessons learned then are still as relevant, if not more so, today.
The first story is about someone I'll call Jonathan, just to protect his name. We had a very small program of only 25 students. It was a multi-sectoral partnership. At the time, we had one computer connected to the Internet. It was a dial-up, and every student had at least an hour a week with it. If any student wanted to do additional time, they had to do it before school or after school.
Now, most kids don't like school, but this particular group of kids hated school more than most. The idea of their spending anything more than a minute longer there was just about unbelievable to them.
Nonetheless, Jonathan was so fascinated by the fact that he could connect to other teens, particularly ones who had the same kinds of experiences he had—which were not particularly pleasant and the reason he was there—that he came early and he stayed late to do this, so much so that we would come to school at 6:30 in the morning and he'd be on the steps waiting for us.
The interesting thing is that back then the web was not yet very graphical. Most of it was text. You had to read. This particular student was five grades lower than he should have been. He was in his early teens. What happened as a result of his fascination—or obsession, which we might have thought of as problematic today—with the Internet was that he spent every hour he could on the Internet at school, under supervision. Within about two to three months, he had raised his reading level by two grade points. Actually, within a year he was almost up to his developmental stage. It was fascinating. I was blown away by it.
At the same time, when he wasn't able to come to school early, his peers would fill the vacuum. They would get online and they'd be searching for all kinds of things, such as where to live. These were kids who often could not live at home, were chased out of their home, didn't feel safe, and were looking for new places, or places where they could crash for the night.
This was before Google. This was before Facebook. This was before Twitter. It was hard to find things. I don't know if you even remember back then, but it was hard to find stuff. These kids were finding stuff. I found that fascinating.
As a result of this, I started to do a lot of research on that particular area, looking at how it could benefit. One of the things it taught me was that there was a lot of power in the social connectability of the World Wide Web and its technologies.
Fast-forward 20 years and there's more computing power in these hand-held devices than in powered spaceships in the 1960s. It's fascinating. Yet, the same kind of things that made the Internet powerful 20 years ago still make it powerful today, for health reasons.
These young people are able to find things. It got me interested in how they find things, not just for young people, but the fact is that they are innovators. I’d like to think about some of the lessons that have extended from that original time to today, having spent six years as a full-time professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, where I'm still a part-time professor and a consultant, and a student looking at innovation.
Really, it comes down to what I think are three fundamentals: a toolset, a skill set, and a mindset.
The toolsets keep evolving. We keep getting new devices, new technologies, high definition, social media, and those kinds of things. Those things are going to change quite rapidly.
The skills to be able to use those things change a little less so. I think the ability to use social media, generally speaking, you can use Facebook, Twitter and that sort of thing relatively easily, with the same set of skills.
Fundamentally, what I would like to impress upon the committee is the idea that mindsets may be the area we need to spend a little more time looking at, and what mindsets around the technology are, because the technologies themselves will change. Yet, I can look back 20 years and think that we're still wrestling with the same things. I don't know if we'll solve them, but they're things that we can benefit from.
One of the key things about mindsets I learned from these kids is that they weren't afraid to fail. That's one of the things we do in the health system too much. We are very risk averse to the detriment of the health system. To follow on from the previous testimony, there is an inability to want to try new things. I'm not talking about risking people's lives in the ER. I'm talking about very small things, making subtle decisions about how, as an organization, we treat technology.
These kids were trying absolutely everything, and a lot of it was failing, and yet they were able to proceed. One of the things we do in the health system is that we're not willing to, and I don't like the term “fail”, but hypothetically fail a little bit, and continue to work through that.
The other thing they were really interested in was networks. They knew they didn't have all the answers, but they didn't have to. They knew places where they could go to get the answers. They knew people who even knew other people who could get the answers. I think the idea of network thinking is part of a mindset that makes a lot a sense for what we need to be doing.
The other thing is they had organizational support. We wouldn't have thought about it quite like that, but the fact is that the school was supportive of their spending time online. We might not have done that today, but they were under supervision. They had a chance to go online and they had the support to do that, but we made sure that they weren't accessing inappropriate content. One of the things we do in the health system, whether it's public health or health care, is we often expect people to just do it on their own without organizational support. I train health professionals in the use of social media and other technologies, and they consistently say that they don't have the support of their organizations, whether they're doing policy work, research, or other things.
Something else that made these young people so effective at finding solutions was that they were curious. I do think the idea is not knowing what they're going to find but being excited about wanting to find new things. We need to be mindful of how we engender curiosity in our organizations and as a health system, to know that it's not something we need to fear, that it's something we can have a lot of discovery about. We very often think that we're going to find the right answer.
Part of this comes back to an overall climate we have now in Canada. We need to think about what that curiosity means in terms of our science policy and technology, making sure that we keep pace with that.
Thank you very much.
