“List top 5 worrisome diagnoses for chest pain” – we’ve all asked this question to junior learners and medical students, and one answer that should always come up is aortic dissection (AD). As emergency physicians we are well versed in the entity, workup and management of AD, but as a fairly challenging diagnosis, I have often found it difficult to decide who needs to be worked up for dissection. During my training I …
The Social Media Index (SM-Index): A Pilot Project
As promised last week, I have put together a pilot Social Media Index (SM-Index) for free open-access medical education (FOAM) websites. There were 25 sites included within this analysis. They were selected from the sites that I frequent as well as anyone that volunteered their site when I asked on twitter. This article discusses the thinking behind the creation of the SM-Index and the methods used to calculate it. The index itself is …
Educational Scholarship: Measuring the Impact of FOAM
I recently asked a prominent EM researcher “Does FOAM (Free Open Access Meducation) have academic value?” I don’t need to paraphrase his answer as it was quite concise: “No.” While he was elegant in his bluntness, you will probably not be surprised to hear that I disagree. This response led thinking and discussion that culminated at CAEP13 after I attended the Consensus Conference on Educational Scholarship. What is Educational Scholarship? The Consensus Conference was …
New authors at BoringEM
BoringEM is excited to announce the addition of two new authors! Please help to welcome them by following them on twitter and distributing their first posts. Joel D’Eath is a Canadian paramedic that has previously been active in the world of FOAM through his twitter account @cmedik and website Post 88. He has committed to compiling the Canadian FOAM of the Week on an ongoing basis and writing some posts on Boring Pre-hospital …
A Commitment to Pre-publication Peer Review
Many keys have been tapped relating the merits and problems with various mechanisms of peer review for FOAM (Free Open-Access Meducation). It has been discussed on this site in multiple forms (Crowdsourced Instantaneous Review, FOAM: A Market of Ideas, Arguments for a Journal of FOAM, FOAM + Curriculum = FOAM-U?) by Aaron Sparshott at IVLine (Capturing the Great FOAM), by Damian Rolond at The Rolobot Rambles (Peer Review: Pointless, Perfunctionary or Practical) as well as on twitter (thanks …
FOAM + Curriculum = FOAM-U?
With the first SMACC conference a wild success, I think it is becoming obvious, at least to the early adopters, that FOAM is here to stay. Some of the recent discussion on the future of FOAM has centered upon building a structure for the FOAM “tree of knowledge.” The tree of knowledge reference and a very eloquent summary of this topic is available from a new member of the FOAM-o-sphere, the Mid Med …
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