Don't existing journals and web sites already do what you are doing with this blog?
There are many worthy, MEDLINE-indexed journals for reporting research in medical education and for presenting thoughtful opinions. There are also interesting, helpful online discussions of a wide range of issues related to the teaching and learning of medicine and the other health professions. I'm trying to ensure that this site provides a supplement to, not a replacement for, any of these valuable resources. In the sidebar, in the widget, "Related Journals/Information," you will find links to many of those resources and I invite your recommendations of others you think should be added to that list.
I hope you find that this blog offers something not readily available elsewhere. Journals offer a somewhat unpredictable array of topics, being dependent in large part on the initiative of those who submit papers, and on the vagaries of the peer review process. Online discussions tend to be even less predictable. The quality of the contributed writing, thinking and information in online forums can be highly variable, which can demand a lot of reading to find nuggets of personal interest and value.
In this blog I try to offer a consistent writing style, a demarcated array of topics, a fairly robust organizational and searching mechanism, and a focus on the big-picture implications of accumulated research and thinking, not the original reports themselves. Also, for better or worse, you get the coordinating influence of one person's vision and sensibility. Here, you also have hot-links that make it easy to jump among related topics, enabling you to pursue a fairly complex path of your own design. (The possibilities will become richer over time as posts and comments accumulate.) In addition, you have the opportunity to react at any time, and the possible joy of observing the impact of many people's collaboration in the evolution of some ideas that may come closer to the leading edge (and, possibly, the future) than tends to characterize the intellectual evolution observable in other sources. Your contributions to the ongoing discussions can help these goals be reached.
I hope you understand and support this rationale. I invite your thoughts about the appeal and viability of this proposition.
Thanks,
Hill Jason
Hilliard Jason, MD, EdD
First posted on 9/17/08
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