Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Riding the wave.

In this overstimulated modern age, it may seem that there is a plethora of ways to learn medicine and build up your EM Armamentarium. Blogs! Podcasts! Tweets! Videos! Not to mention the massive textbooks still on the shelf. Lately, Free Open Access Medical Education (FOAM for short) has taken off as a new and rapidly growing method of learning, with tweets flying on everything from ultrasounding abscesses to glucose control in the ICU.

That's all well and good, but what's a doc to do with all this stuff? It's challenging to devise a system to ride the wave.


As an Emergency Medicine resident just starting my second year, I'm still developing my own learning system. I recently started a twitter account for my residency program, and am still figuring out the best ways to use it.  

There are some big, unanswered FOAM related questions looming in my mind:

  • How can resident physicians realistically and practically use FOAM resources to augment traditional textbook learning?
  • How can a residency program use social media to catalyze that process?

I don't know the answers, but I aim to have fun trying to figure it out and documenting that process on this blog. 

My specific goals here are to:

  • On a practical level, document my own learning process as an EM resident using new and traditional learning methods, from Rosen's to following #FOAMed posts on Twitter.
  • Reflect on how using social media augments my learning process.
  • Explore the evolving role of technology in medical education.

Hopefully this can serve as a helpful model for other EM learners and spark discussion about EM education. I look forward to your feedback and to having some fun with this project!


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