Medical Education at the ICRE Social Media Summit

In Uncategorized by Teresa Chan2 Comments

On October 22, 2014, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC) hosted the world’s first Social Media (SoMe) Summit in Health Professional Education in Toronto, ON, Canada.  This conference preceded the annual International Conference on Residency Education (ICRE).

Eve Purdy, Heather Murray, Brent Thoma and I were very excited to take part in this event, especially since our online #FOAMed and #MedEd heroes were all participating:

  1. Michelle Lin (@M_Lin) – The mastermind behind ALiEM.com (COI: Brent & I are both Associate editors for her blog). See her plenary speech here.
  2. Anne Marie Cunningham (@amcunningham) – The Welsh social media guru herself, whom is behind the blog Wishful Thinking in Medical Education. See her plenary speech here.

Many of the top educators from Canada were present as well, including the likes of: Jason Frank, Jonathan Sherbino, Felix Ankel, Fiona Moss, Leslie Flynn, Elaine van Melle.

Of course, the #FOAMed masses also did come out to this event, and it was very exciting for me to discuss issues around online education with the likes of Seth Trueger, Heather Murray, Anton Helman, Stella Yiu, Ian Pereira, Ali Jalali, Eve Purdy, Jeff Hill, Rob Cooney… and so many more! (I apologize if I left you off, but I’m going off of my photos from my phone, so if I’ve left you off the list it’ll be because I don’t have your photo is all!)

Four concurrent sessions were held:

  • Concurrent session #1 –Ethical and professional  use of Social Media for health professional education – which explored ethical and professional issues using an appreciative inquiry model to guide the discussion.
  • Concurrent session #2 –Best practices for Social Media platforms – which used a modified Delphi technique to speedily rate 151 quality indicators for blogs and podcasts, based on previous work done by Brent Thoma et al. (DOI: I did help with this session!)
  • Concurrent session #3 – Defining and evaluating Social Media education scholarship
    – which utilized a more traditional format for consensus building, where the discussants (lead by J. Sherbino) proposed statements and opened up the discussion to the floor for commentary.
  • Concurrent session #4 –How education theory should inform Social Media – which explored interactions between educational theory and its intersection with modern social-media teaching and learning.

All in all, I know that I will be excited to see what comes out of the consensus conference proceedings papers (which will be published in the Postgraduate Medical Journal), and we will keep you up to date as we go forward about other new exciting news in the area of Social Media Scholarship. Rumour has it that there may be interest in holding yet another #SoMeSummit.  If there is, would you attend?  (Drop you answers below!)

 

Teresa Chan

Teresa Chan

Senior Editor at CanadiEM
Emergency Physician. Medical Educator. #FOAMed Supporter, Producer and Researcher. Chief Strategy Officer of CanadiEM. Associate Professor, Division of Emergency Medicine, Department of Medicine, McMaster University.