Human Books: Social Media, Unplugged

Objectives Purpose: Enable health sciences students and staff to engage in dialogue to challenge common prejudices in a positive manner and to promote empathy for the patients and families they encounter. Methods Setting/Participants: Academic Health Sciences library serving students and staff in an urban hospital and university. The ‘reader’ participants included students, staff, and faculty from the academic medical center. The ‘book’ participants included volunteers from both inside and outside the institution. Results Brief Description: Adapting an international program, The Human Library, the library recruited ‘books’ who had experienced discrimination based on aspects of their lives such as race, sexual orientation, or disability. Two events were held, one in the spring, 2014 and one in the fall, 2014. During the day-long events ‘readers’ borrowed ‘books’ for 1:1 private half-hour conversations. All participants were invited to a concluding reception to discuss their experiences. Library staff monitored the event and gathered evaluations from books and readers. Conclusions Outcome: The spring event hosted 6 books with 20 readers and the fall event had 7 books with 25 readers. The response from all participants was overwhelmingly positive. The institution featured the event in a campus newsletter. Plans are underway for hosting an annual Human Library

Replacement for the 10 page paper? A pilot project using blogs and wikis for a collaborative EBM assignment in a 3rd year internal medical clerkship

Objective Pilot a group assignment using blogs and wikis to develop evidence-based medicine skills in third year medical students on an internal medicine clerkship. Instead of the clerkship’s previous individual ten-page paper assignment, the students were divided into four groups of sixteen. During the clerkship, students are on geographically dispersed rotations. The earlier ten-page paper had required the students to complete a patient history and physical write-up. With the pilot project, each group was assigned a librarian and a physician faculty mentor. Each student recorded on the blog a clinical scenario and question they encountered. They were encouraged to communicate with the librarian to construct a well formed clinical question. Each student group then came to consensus on which question to pursue and collaborated on a wiki including a list of citations to the best available evidence, a critique of the studies, and implications for the patient

Authors, Monitor Your Publications and Their Impact with Scopus and ORCID

Poster presented at 8th annual Faculty Days at Thomas Jefferson University

Electronic Notebooks to Facilitate Student Learning Within and Beyond the Classroom

Introduction Electronic Research Notebooks (ERN), also called Electronic Lab Notebooks, are becoming standard in many industries and academic labs where documentation, reproducibility, online access, and collaboration tools are important (1,2, 3). Jefferson launched cloud-based LabArchives in 2018 as its ERN. The product includes a Classroom Edition for use with students. It offers instructors options to embed course readings, documents, assignments, images, videos, audio files and links to other online resources. Students can type and save notes in their electronic notebook, complete and submit assignments, draw and annotate images and illustrations. Instructors can update the students’ notebooks anytime, grade assignments, comment on student work, and more. At conclusion of course, students can retain an offline copy of their lab notebook in a portable format, suitable for inclusion in an electronic portfolio. Here we present two examples—one from undergraduate biology and one from graduate occupational therapy—to illustrate how LabArchives was used this academic year for individual and group work, both synchronous and asynchronous. Faculty and student perspectives are shared, along with Quick-Start Guide and tips for implementation. Decide whether your course or your students could benefit from LabArchives