Happy Birthday to Sesame Street which this week celebrates its 40th season on PBS! Here’s a video by beatboxing flutist Greg Pattillo playing the theme song:
Video Credit: Courtesy of YouTube.com and Greg Patillo – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
____________________________________
Sesame Street is full of interesting characters. The Yip Yips (Martian visitors) are two of my favorites. Here’s a classic segment as they discover what a Radio does:
Video Credit: Courtesy of Sesame Street – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
____________________________________
Finally… with multiple exams looming for the first-year medical students, it seems an apt moment to link to a classic medical student video called “Pancakes Every Day“:
One aspect of participating in problem-based learning is that by the end of the semester, every student in the group has taken their turn at the group tasks involved, which are:
The Reader narrates the case as it is made available online. The written case with any supporting visual materials such as radiology or histology about the patient are posted on Blackboard and are no longer distributed in paper handouts.
The Scribe is the person with the marker who listens to the groups’ discussion and synthesis of the pertinent data about the patient such as chief complaint, presentation, past medical history, current labs values, medications, tests to be ordered, treatments to begin, etc. They are writing down the data, hypotheses, learning issues as they become available.
Before every student in the room brought a computer to class — which sounds like the olden days but it was less than 6 years ago — the Scribe may or may not have been the one creating hand-drawn concept maps of that week’s PBL work. Nowadays, concept maps are created not by drawing on the whiteboard but by using CMap, a free software program from IHMC (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition). This brings on a new role in the group: Concept Mapper.
The Facilitators mostly listen, occasionally asking clinically-oriented questions or providing a bit of background or narrative about a patient, a procedure or a disease without being “teacherly”.
Each week, one person bakes and brings in goodies for 9 people. That is an important function, too.
On a basic science or biomolecular level, concept mapscan get pretty complicated.
Recently I wrote down some of the medical terms, processes or conclusions which were heard during PBL, and made a Wordle map out of them. Here is what it looks like:
” The goals of this study were to describe reported incidents of medical students posting unprofessional content online at U.S. medical schools, describe current policies and views of medical school leaders regarding Web 2.0 use by medical students, and assess the relationship between unprofessional incidents and presence of policies. “
Excerpt from an article published Sept 23/30, 2009 in JAMA (Vol. 302, No. 12: 1309-1315) written by Katherine Chretien, S. Ryan Greysen, Jean-Paul Chretien and Terry Kind
.
Medical Education is the theme of this week’s issue of JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association*. Published in this issue is a seven-page article entitled “Online Posting of Unprofessional Behavior by Medical Students” written by four physicians affiliated with George Washington University and the Washington VA.
The questionnaire was sent out in March and April of 2009 to medical school deans or student affairs administrators at 130 allopathic schools of medicine accredited by the Association of American Medical Colleges. The data was designed to be collected anonymously. Staff from 78 medical schools chose to participate, with a return rate of 60%.
The questions in the survey focused on four principal areas: “School & respondent characteristics, incidents of student-posted unprofessional online content, level of concern among student affairs deans or proxies and institutional policies and resources“.
About one-half of the deans or student affairs personnel who returned the survey reported that documented unprofessional behaviors by medical students were observed.
Following is a paragraph from the Commentary section of this article:
” There are a number of actions that medical schools could take that might address some of the concerns raised by these findings. The formal professionalism curriculum should include a digital media component, which could include instruction on managing the “digital footprint,” such as electing privacy settings on social networking sites and performing periodic Web searches of oneself. This is important given that residency program directors, future employers, and patients may access this information. “
Excerpt from the above-referenced article published in JAMA (Vol. 302, No. 12: 1314).
.
The article will likely be read by many medical school administrators in the U.S. and abroad. The literature is small but growing about what long-term effects one’s digital footprint (or captured misbehaviors) may have on a career in medicine. (As an example, two articles on this topic are linked here and here.) There were no social networking sites to capture a person’s online presence twenty years ago; the story is being told in the Now.
The JAMA article may serve as a wake-up call for those institutions of higher education who have yet to set up – or enforce existing – policies addressing online student profiles and conduct.
This week’s press coverage and subsequent discussions might also serve as a wake-up call to American medical students: When is a good time to review your online profile? Answer: Quite likely, now.
_____________________________________________
Following are two related links. First: click here for a collection of news stories or blog postings about this article, medical students and online behaviors compiled from Google.
Next: A different aspect of online identity and personal privacy issues was described by Carolyn Y. Johnson, who wrote an article published in The Boston Globe on Sept 20 2009. Her report describes a 2007 research project conducted by two students at MIT enrolled in an ethics and law class. Their software program, named “Gaydar“, was used to import data from individual males’ Facebook pages, analyzing the relationships between stated “interests”, “gender” and “groups of friends” in order to make a statistical prediction about whether those men were gay.
_____________________________________________
.* JAMA is a subscription journal; if off-campus, use your proxy account number to connect in order to read full-text articles.
Source/Credit: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1126 – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
_______________________________________
Next: Professors may see you as a brain on a stick, but how does the Internet see you?
Personas, a specialized data-mining/visualization software program from designers at MIT, attempts to answer that question by scouring the web to collect groups of information on specific named person and then builds it into a graphical “fabric” constructed of the parts of that person’s online presence.
How does it work? Following is an excerpt from the PersonasAbout page:
It is fascinating to watch Personas work to build this collection of an individual’s online presence. It takes a few minutes. The timeline is beautifully-rendered.
However, having said that it’s beautiful to watch it work, I ask you to consider how the technology should alert one’s “caution” button. Meaning, lend some consideration about the depth of pertinent as well as random facts that Google and other search engines have collected about “you” over the years. If that information available in public domains about “you” is incorrect, or God forbid, you share the identical name with a notorius or criminal person, what recourse would “you” have to delete or rewrite that data? There is a long, long trail of information connected to “you”… one tool to evaluate that information is Personas.
Here’s a small question: How is the name of the site pronounced — as personas or Person As?
_______________________________________
Next: a Favorite Medical Student Video
Yes, I have posted about this before, but I enjoy seeing it from time to time. Bravo to a group of medical students (Class of 2010) from the University of Alberta who filmed Diagnosis Wenckebach:
_______________________________________
And that’s the Friday Post for Sept 18, 2009, folks. Enjoy your weekend!
Congratulations to Dan Henderson, third year medical student at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, who was the national finalist in the first “Reach MD’s Next Top Doc” competition, held Aug 17 2009 in Washington, DC. Mr. Henderson competed with a group of medical students from across the U.S. in this quiz show-style contest, held over the last 15 weeks.
The other final competitor was Nina Resetkova, third year medical student and MBA candidate from Texas Tech University Health Sciences School of Medicine. As the winner, Dan was awarded a $5,000 educational scholarship, sponsored by ReachMD. He is currently spending the 2009-2010 school year at AMSA headquarters in Reston, VA, serving as an AMSA Health Justice Fellow and will return to Farmington in May 2010 to complete his fourth year of medical school.
The game-show style competition was created in 2009 by American Medical Student Association (AMSA) andReachMD, a satellite radio channel for health-care education and information. Next Top Doc was introduced at the March 2009 AMSA annual conference. ReachMD has broadcast each round of competition live.
Today is a great day to highlight the recent posts of two fellow medical bloggers: the first is from Laika’s MedLibLog, written by a Dutch research-scientist/medical-librarian; the second post is from Life in the Fast Lane, a blog written collectively by a group of Australian physicians.
Each author has written definitive posts about the mechanics – and utility – of searching the medical literature, and evaluating what has been found.
These posts should be seen as instant classics – and required reading for new graduate students in medicine, dental medicine or biomedical research or just about anyone with an interest in finding more-pertinent clinical information (in less time).
Their descriptive clarity in explaining what to search, and how to search is pitch-perfect.
Thank you – Laika and SandNSurf – for writing them!
Next: Following are several quite different compilations of medical information resources written by librarians.
Elena Giglia, a medical librarian from Central Library of Medicine, University of Turin, Italy, wrote in 2007 an excellent overview of the medical literature entitled “Beyond PubMed: Other Free Biomedical Databases“. This 11-page article was published in the European Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (Europa Medicophysica) – Vol. 43(4):563-9 (Dec 2007). It is available online for anyone to read.
Finally: Librarians working in academic health science libraries offer a variety of digital training tutorials or subject lists for orienting their students, residents and faculty to the technical aspects of searching the literature of medicine.
First: A funny collection of One Hundred 404 Error Screens from the blog of Francesco Mugnai. I especially liked the guy with the long ponytail in the red cowboy bikini and the thigh-high leather boots (you know, the one holding the .357 magnum). In fact I think it may be Sean Connery.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of BoingBoing.com – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009
_________________________________
Do Not Sulk or Cry
” Students who answer incorrectly shouldnot become overly discouraged. Attendings rarely remember studentswho give wrong answers (especially to difficult questions);they often remember those who lose their composure. “
Excerpt from “The Art of Pimping” by Alan Detsky, MD – published in JAMA, Vol. 301 – issue 13, p. 1379-1381 (April 1 2009)
DB’s MedRants - and many other physician-bloggers – have already blogged about this article. Life in the Fast Lane wrote a multi-part post about pimping. Funny and cruel.
_______________________________________
Exams are finally wrapped up for awhile (after ten difficult days for the students), so get jiggy with Will Smith for a minute because 3.7 million views on YouTube can’t be wrong, and besides, those Egyptians are very handsome :
” MedEdPORTAL is a free online publication service… designed to promote educational collaboration by facilitating the open exchange of teaching resources such as clinical tutorials, virtual patients, simulation cases, tutorials, lab guides, videos, podcasts, assessment tools, etc. While MedEdPORTAL’s primary audiences include health educators and learners around the globe, it is open and available for free to the general public. Users can access quality, peer-reviewed teaching material and assessment tools in both the basic and clinical sciences in medicine and in oral health “.
An upgrade to the content and searchability of the page was announced on Apr 7 2009 by AAMC, and the name is now MedEdPORTAL 2.0.
This is an important archive of peer-reviewed teaching and training tools for students, residents (and librarians). The architecture of the site has been made more functional, with the addition of subject/content links like this one:
An example of featured content, added Mar 4 2009 by a faculty in Emergency Medicine from University of Minnesota, is entitled “Stab to Neck” (two screenshots from this video/tutorial):
I like this site – it is created by physicians – for physicians (and students) in all disciplines. The brainpower and clinical experience of manyare shared on MedEdPORTAL.
AAMC and ADEA have created a fine, free example of the power of cooperative resource-sharing distributed on an open-access platform. It should be on your list of teaching-and-training bookmarks.
Today – Thursday, Mar 19 2009 – is Match Day 2009! Good luck and God speed to every medical student in the Class of 2009!
At 1:00pm (ET), fourth-year medical students will find out – simultaneously – where in the U.S. they will be spending the next year of their life as residents. This is a nervous phase of medical education, as these near-doctors wait to learn if they must make plans to move across the country (or across the street). Match Day is a day to look forward to for faculty and staff at UConn Health Center, as we stand by and witness our graduating seniors as they stand at the crux of a new life. This is their day of celebration, exhilaration, profound relief… and possibly for those few who didn’t get their first choices, some tears.
A blog for medical students, faculty, researchers and librarians about their use of clinical literature, Web 2.0, evidence-based medicine sources, search strategies.
