Trying to get better at getting better.
I work at the intersection of education, technology, and healthcare, asking how we teach, assess, and develop health professionals at a time when AI is reshaping what it means to be a healthcare professional. I’m an Associate Professor and Director of Teaching and Learning at the University of Lincoln, and most of what I do asks how professional education should change — and what’s worth protecting — as AI becomes part of everyday practice.
My work is shaped by a few commitments. I believe in working in public: open scholarship, open source software, developing ideas in the open, and sharing in the hope that it might be useful to others. My thinking about education owes a lot to critical pedagogy and a broadly anarchist suspicion of hierarchy; who holds power, who gets to decide what counts as knowledge, and how both might be shared more fairly (think, Rage Against the Machine, but for academics).
Projects
The projects I’m working on right now, mostly focused on professional development, quality assurance, and learning support.
A place to start
If you’re new here, these are representative of the work:
- A post on building AI personas for professional practice, and why the real leverage with AI isn’t prompt engineering but knowing your professional commitments well enough to turn them into context an AI can work within.
- A course I built on developing AI literacy for academics, across six dimensions from basic competence to transformation.
- A one-page guide explaining the design principles of my theoretical framework for integrating AI into health professions education.
- An essay on problem-based learning and AI, arguing that the features that make PBL work — collaborative inquiry, facilitation, and metacognition — are the same conditions that make AI integration educationally productive.
- My latest monthly newsletter, with a few reads I think might be worth your time, some quotes, a debate on AI assessment scales and traffic light systems, and something from my outputs.
Presentations
I’m often invited to share my thoughts on AI in health professions education; here are some of my favourite presentations from the past couple of years.
Physiotherapy Research Society keynote (2026)
Royal College of Nursing Education keynote (2026)
Lincolnshire Local Medical Committee (2025)
ADAPT International Conference keynote (2023)
ENPHE conference keynote (2023) — I loved working on this one
Beyond the talks, I’m co-authoring a book on AI for doctoral researchers with Springer Nature and leading a chapter in a Springer reference volume on AI in medical education.
Testimonials
Michael brings the content across with real passion. My students aren’t native English speakers, but they understood it through his clearly formulated examples — one told me afterwards, “this session made me look at AI in a completely different way.” — Erwin Van de Put, Thomas More University of Applied Sciences, Belgium
As a member of our AI and Emerging Technology expert panel, Michael played a pivotal role in shaping our proposals for the review of the Standards of Education and Training — strengthening the standards on technology use and our commitment to fairness and accessibility. — Madeleine Connor, Chair, HCPC Standards of Education and Training review
Explore
Browse by format or topic, or see what’s recently added.
Previous writing
My earlier work lives at mrowe.co.za (AI and technology-enhanced scholarship) and Head Space (calm productivity and sustainable scholarship). Those are now legacy archives; all new work is published here.
If something here is useful, use it. If you spot a gap, an error, or something worth adding, open an issue on GitHub. If you want to respond to any of it, get in touch.