A big thank you to everyone who came along to our workshop on networks and social media in medical education at ASME last Friday.  It was great to meet some of the regulars on our weekly #meded chats face to face at the workshop along with all the other participants who came along. It was great to people from the UK, the US, Gaza and Singapore!

We’ve captured the tweets from the workshop so that you can browse and reflect on some of topics that were discussed during the session, it makes quite interesting reading.  There were 43 contributors to the twitter conversation including many who weren’t at the workshop but who shared why they find twitter useful with the workshop audience.  You can also take a look at the tweets on the official conference hashtag #asmeasm11, not all the tweets are there but you’ll get a good flavour of the conversation being shared.

During the session we mentioned a number of sites, web events and tools and if you didn’t catch them all we’ve got links to them here.

Google map – As we mentioned at the workshop we’re keen to use to social media to network with others involved in medical education.  It would be great if you’d like to add yourself to Anne Marie’s google map of medical education around the world.

#MedEd chat – We also have weekly meded chats on Twitter at 21.00hrs (UK time) on Thursdays and you’re more than welcome to take part or lurk in the wings.  You can catch up with previous chats here and be in touch with me or Anne Marie if you’d like to suggest topics for future chats.

#TwitJC –  There are also the weekly Twitter journal club chats that run on Sunday evenings at 20.00hrs. You can find out more about these on the twitjc blog and read the transcripts of previous sessions.  Follow them on Twitter to find out which papers are being discussed.

Scoop.it – We used Scoop.it a content curation tool to present some of the topics we covered in the workshop.  Take a look at Anne Marie’s scoop.it on social media and networks in medical education to recap on some of the sites we looked at.  I’ve got a small number of Scoop.it invites so tweet me if you’d like one or leave a comment on this post.

Sceenr – A free web tool that allows you to record a sceencast of up to 5 minutes.  It’s a great tool for creating quick learning resources.

TILT – Today I Learnt that has been developed by Trip database as a place to record and share clinical learning.

We’re keen to continue the discussion going beyond the #asme11 workshop and it would be great to continue connecting via this blog, twitter and our #meded chats.  We’d be pleased to have you do a guest post here on Meded Connect so leave a comment or be in touch with us if you’d like to post something here.  You can also post any follow-up questions you might have about the workshop too.

We’ll also be looking at the various comments each of the groups recorded on the post-its at the workshop and hopefully we can follow up on those here too to continue the conversation.  We hope you keep in touch and that we can build an online network of  medical educators. To finish off here’s the video we ended the workshop off with.

Next Friday, 15th July I (Anne Marie), Natalie and Annalisa will be leading a workshop on social media and networks in medical education at ASME 11. The workshop filled up quickly and we already know that some people are making a lot of effort to come and join us. You might be planning your trip now but if you have time it would be great if you could introduce yourself before we meet together on Friday because our main aim for this workshop is to help develop a community and what better time to start than now.

So how can you introduce yourself? You could record a video message or write a blog post on your own blog. If you don’t have your own blog yet then it is easy to set one up using tools such as Blogger (soon to be Google blogs), WordPress or Posterous. If you put a link to this blog post in your post then we well be able to see the ‘track back’. Or you could join this blog as an author- we’d love to have you. Just get in touch! Or you can simply leave a comment here.

What would we like to know? Well, you can say anything but it would be nice to know why you have decided to come to our workshop and what you would like to get out of it. We’re really looking forward to meeting you in Edinburgh!

You can catch up with the discussion in the transcript embedded below and leave a comment if you want to put in your tuppence worth into the mix.  We haven’t decided on next week’s #meded chat topic yet, if you’ve got any suggestions tweet me @nlafferty or @amcunningham with your suggestions.

• Can the most important learning be codified? Do text based reflections miss out on some of the learning that takes place in face-to-face discussions and feedback, therefore diminishing their authenticity? Not everyone wants to share their innermost thoughts. Are we obliged to be open?
• Is the main function of a portfolio to act as aid to learning or to demonstrate competency in what has been learned already? Many report that it feels more like the latter and that this leads to resentment that time is being spent documenting rather than learning. Two US students have given wonderful accounts of the impact of their portfolios on their learning. Yes, it has taken a lot of effort on their part and that of their mentors but it has been worth it. They now feel in control of their education, but are keen to point out that ticking of a list of competencies is not part of the process.
• Some doctors do feel that progress and skills achieved should be documented. Why? But they are also concerned that a tick-box approach may not reflect real-world competency. (In a time-based, apprenticeship model it would not be assumed that you would stop performing a task because you had mastered it. You might perform it more often, honing the skill.)
• One student reflects on the painfulness of having to get feedback on how the simplest of tasks could be performed better. Is this a too reductionist concept of a skill? What about considering why the test is needed in the first place and how the results will be interpreted? How can we use portfolios to develop the situational understanding which is so essential to being a capable professional?
• What is the place of global assessment in assessing competency? Is there any evidence that breaking down competence into checklists is any more reliable or valid than the global assessment of a skilled colleague who has had many hours contact with the student or doctor? Have we introduced checklists because we are not sure that these mentoring relationships still exist?
• There are mentions of ‘clunky’ interfaces too. Improving the front-end of portfolio tools may help, but it will not resolve deeper issues around engagement and belief in the underlying constructs.
• How can we ensure that portfolios are truly about aspiring to excellence and development?

@DrPlumEu has provided some helpful links on IPE which you might find interesting:

A literature review on IPE  by Jill Thistethwaite & Monica Moran,Learning outcomes for interprofessional education (IPE): Literature review and synthesis

The University of Western Ontario Office of Interprofessional Health Education & Research

Two Australian sites - ACT Health Values Exchange and ACT Government Health Information

London Deanery – resources on IPE and medical education generally

Thanks to everyone for contributing to the chat.  Next week we’ll be chatting about portfolios and competency.

You can catch up with all of this week’s chat in the transcript below.

The topic for next week’s chat is interprofessional education.

Why then am I proposing that the medical education hashtag (#MedEd) be divided up by location, will this not exclude a potentially wide range of people and ideas?

I suggest that we adopt location based hashtags such as #MedEdUK or #MedEdEU and #MedEdUS. This would allow more focussed and relevant discussion to occur. Take for example the recent UK/EU #MedEd chat on clinical placements, the participants of which were almost all European. There was confusion with discussion of a different topic in the US, the next morning I searched for #MedEd only to discover hundreds of tweets on a topic that had been discussed overnight, largely by a US audience. Early, accurate
archiving could be one solution to this but it becomes very difficult to separate tweets from different discussions, particularly when there are increasing numbers of participants. Not only would separate hashtags make discussions easier to follow in real-time but it would make archiving much easier and more useful.

I would argue that there is a significant difference between how medical education is delivered in different countries, and that the sharing of these ideas, whilst interesting, is not realistically useful when considering local practice. Where there is a topic that is potentially relevant to all, we could go back to the all-inclusive #MedEd or even #MedEdGlobal.

What about using two hashtags per post? Another possible solution but with an already restricted number of characters, it would limit discussion even more.

Whilst separate hashtags might mean losing some of the inclusivity that twitter provides, it would make discussions much clearer, easier to follow, more focused and potentially more useful.

Some of the themes that came through the conversation were

• the need to make students feel more involved in the health care team and introduce them to team members
• provide information on the team, key staff, telephone extensions and bleeps etc
• doctors need to be more aware of the curriculum and what students have already covered in teaching
• patient contact and whether it was appropriate for students to break bad news to patients.

There were suggestions of how to improve placements but it was also great to see students sharing some positive experiences too and enthusiastically taking advantage of some great learning opportunities that others haven’t been interested in.

You can read the full transcript of this week’s chat below. If you’d like to contribute to the conversation on clinical placements please join in and leave a comment.

Next week’s chat will look at communication skills teaching and we hope you can join us at the usual time 9pm for some more lively #meded chat!

Here’s the transcript of the first of the meded chats which ran between 21.00 and 22.00 hrs BST.  We weren’t sure how much interest there would be and we thought given the time we would largely attract tweeters from Europe.  In the event we had a great turn out for the first chat and whilst there was a large UK contingent we also had the Netherlands and Spain represented and a fair number from the US.  It was also great to see a good number of medical students engaging in the chat and expressing their views on lectures.

The main themes running through the chat session were

• the use of Twitter in lectures for asking questions
• do many students use laptops in lectures for note taking
• do students use the discussion boards in Blackboard
• what makes a good lecture.