Additionally, technology is used in medical practice management applications with increasing confidence. The more democratic and humanist online education models, which support exploratory and student- centred approaches, are generally avoided. An oral tradition of medical training places emphasis on verbal skills and auditory memory. It uses scientific models of deductive reasoning to challenge positivist analyses of medical practice. Alternatively, online education reinforces the egalitarianism of print as something accessible and retrievable.
Online education places emphasis on written communication skills and inquisitive searches for ideas.
It aims to heighten student consciousness by encouraging an ability to identify and critically reflect upon knowledge relationships and by encouraging personal opinions. These are facilitated through the manipulation, exploration and reconstruction of text and ideas. Written curricula are a current phenomenon. Accordingly, online education with its conceptual basis in distance education, and its emphasis on text and ongoing written assessment activities, conflicts with the oral teaching style of vocational medical training. Students who learn in an oral mode are subject to the disempowering vagaries of the spoken word that is reinforced in the power relationship of master and apprentice.