Drs. Tyson Pillow, Stacey Poznanski, Robert Tubbs, and I will be teaming up to deliver a Presentation Design Bootcamp talk for medical educators at the 2014 Council for EM Residency Directors (CORD). The session is on April 2, 2014 at 1:30-2:20p in New Orleans, LA. Because it is a short 1-hour intensive workshop, we want to offer participants the opportunity to prepare themselves by reviewing the slide set ahead of time.
The folks at SUNY Downstate Emergency Medicine program have been hard at work contributing to the field of #FOAMed over the last few years (ClinicalMonster.com). Dr. Mark Silverberg, the program’s Associate Residency Director, has also been busy with an EKG website featuring 100 interpreted EKGs. And now he’s busy at it again, introducing the newest contribution to EM – an online visual atlas: www.kchemimage.wordpress.com. While the website is still in development, I wanted to discuss further with Dr. Silverberg the nuances of obtaining images and creating an EM website with it.
As educational content, which was traditionally published in the form of textbooks, get repurposed into blog posts, podcasts, and videos, iBooks have been a bit slower to take hold. They can replace print textbooks, if done from a thoughtful design-based approach such as by Drs. Matthew Dawson and Mike Mallin in their Introduction to EM Ultrasound (volume 1 and 2) iBooks. Here’s another iBook entitled “EM Clinical Decision Rules” involving pulmonary embolism (PE) and minor head trauma by Drs. Shannon McNamara, Christine Knettel, and David Wald.
According to Paul Levinson, a Marshall McLuhan scholar, “The medium is the message” in the digital age means that the way we use the medium to consume and produce information is much more important than the content itself. This phrase originated from a book authored by Marshall McLuhan in 1964 called Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McLuhan talked about the electronic age as a catalyst for creating a global village. These were some of McLuhan’s viewpoints even before the Internet had been invented. If the ultimate purpose of publishing is to communicate with each other, we should explore how we are carrying on this endeavor, its effects on our thinking process and practices via current medium.
In line with our prior two months of voting, we are back again to ask for your help in choosing which two articles from the June Annals of EM issue will be open access. Take a look at the article abstracts accepted for publication in June’s issue. Vote on your top two choices over the next 4 days, and the top two will be made open after the June issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine goes online.
We make decisions every day, all day long. Sometimes we are aware of it and sometimes we are not. Our decision process is affected by many factors. Some are under our conscious control while others are not. In order to sharpen our decision process, we gain knowledge, practice, and then reflect. We are selective and gain knowledge from different sources, practice in the appropriate setting, and reflect alone or with others for feedback. It is important to explore all possible clinical reasoning pathways as we don’t know which process will get us in the right path.
As you are aware there has been lots of discussion going on about the concept of flipping the classroom in education these days. ALiEM recently hosted a book club where Salman Khan’s book (The One World School House: Education Reimagined) was featured in a Google Hangout. Khan, an ex-hedge fund manager, started making videos to help his niece with her math homework years ago. These videos ended up on YouTube and became quite popular. It wasn’t until later with the help of Bill Gates that he formed The Khan Academy and popularized the concept of the flipped classroom.