The Journey Begins

My current "journey" is to find a project in a digital research class. Several suggestions mentioned in class were interesting to me. I am interested in exploring how my students use technologies but I’m stuck with this thought. I can’t figure out how to digitally get this information other than some type of survey which I could do with my 40 students this semester. I know there is a wealth of researched information (articles) that I could use for the annotated bib. The one thought I had was to assess the number of times students access Blackboard or even look at the spring semester’s students and run some numbers.

I am also interested in focusing on a project that involved some prior research I've done with hospitalists. Right now it is more general, but I have done a short research project (with a IRB approval) and interviewed hospitalists and hospital personnel last fall. I am very interested in the communication practices between hospitalists and patients and also interested in the technologies that ensure that patient information is accessible to hospitalists and then to the primary care physicians once the patient has been dismissed.

So, in searching for a project for this class, I found hospitalist blogs. See these two links. I could select several blog entries or follow the thread of conversation and then find research that pertains to these entries – research that supports, disputes, or a combination of the blog entry. The overall goal would be to summarize the information currently being posted by hospitalists and about hospitalist and then summarize research.

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/01/02/the-hospitalist-versus-the-family-doctor/

http://www.hospitalistblog.com/

I welcome any comments.