Dear Program Directors,

I understand how tough it can be to come up with quality resident education to fulfill educational requirements on a weekly basis all year around. For most programs that is approximately 5 hours of conference material, once a week, pretty much every week of the year. That equals 260 hours of educational material that needs to be high yield, engaging, and entertaining enough to hold the attention of the millennial generation. This is an especially daunting task if tackled alone. So don’t do this alone! Start a program-wide Twitter account!

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At the 2013 International EM Teaching Course yesterday, Dr. Stacey Poznanski and I gave a workshop on “Powerpoint Resuscitation” to address all the widespread pitfalls which cause “death by powerpoint”. Here are the winners from the workshop competition, illustrating great examples of the coherence, redundancy, and multimedia principles that we reviewed. The slide examples are in pairs in a before-workshop and after-workshop format. Amazing what star educators can get done in a 60 minute workshop!

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Blogs, podcasts, and other social media platforms in medical education, known collectively as Free Open Access Meducation (FOAM), are becoming increasingly popular and integrated into daily learning habits. Through various push technologies, these resources come to you in the form of RSS feeds, podcast tools, and other apps. Do you have a mental checklist to help you determine whether the content is trustworthy and accurate? How do you process the information from FOAM sites?

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What if a resident-physician attempted a technique she read on a blog or listened to on a podcast, but the procedure didn’t go as planned and the patient was harmed? Is Free Open Access Meducation (FOAM) to blame for medical errors? What about the blog site? If the site has a disclaimer (like most medical databases), is it enough to limit liability?

These are challenging questions, but ones that deserve discussion, especially in light of the recent post on St. Emlyn’s blog about a theoretical scenario just like this.

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