A vision of dental education in the third millennium

This paper is the last in a series of 16 which have explored current uses of information communications technology (ICT) in all areas of dentistry in general, and in dental education in particular. In this paper the authors explore current developments, referring back to the previous 15 papers, and speculate on how ICT should increasingly contribute to dental education in the future. After describing a vision of dental education in the next 50 years, the paper considers how ICT can help to fulfil the vision. It then takes a brief look at three aspects of the use of ICT in the world in general and speculates how dentistry can learn from other areas of human endeavour. Barriers to the use of ICT in dental education are then discussed. The final section of the paper outlines new developments in haptics, immersive environments, the semantic web, the IVIDENT project, nanotechnology and ergonometrics. The paper concludes that ICT will offer great opportunities to dental education but questions whether or not human limitations will allow it to be used to maximum effect.