Just a quick post today to invite anyone/everyone to participate in our CMEpalooza Warm-Up on October 7 at 11 AM ET. It will be very informal — just Scott and I chatting about CMEpalooza via a Google Hangout. We’ll give a brief overview & demo of how things will work the day of the palooza and have a little time for Q&A with the “audience”. The Warm-Up will stream live from the LIVE page (duh) on the website, so you can watch and ask questions live or watch the archived versionlater on. I hope that some of you can join us!

I woke up this morning and my first thought is now the title of this post (Blogging Rule #154: anytime one can work a Tommy Boy reference into the title of a blog post, one is required to do so). But, to be perfectly honest, everything is coming together quite nicely and we could do it today if need be (fortunately, need does not be, so we’ll stay with the planned date). There have been a few little A/V bumps during our training Hangout sessions with the panelists, but we have always been able to work out a solution and we should be good to go on the 15th.

In our final newsletter before CMEpalooza Fall (which you can read here), we cover what to expect during the program, answer a few common questions we have received over the past few months, and welcome our three newest sponsors – MedPageToday (a silver-level sponsor), along with Educational Measures and Mededicus (bronze-level sponsors). Give it a read if you haven’t had a chance to do so, yet.

One question we didn’t cover is when the archive of all the sessions will be available. In an ideal world, we will have the archive posted within 60 minutes of the session ending. That’s our ultimate goal. However, we do not live in an ideal world (as evidence, I submit to you that no one has yet merged Cool Ranch Doritos with Cheetos to create Cool Ranch Cheetos. That would only happen in an ideal world. But I digress…),  so the best I can say is that we hope to have up an archive within an hour of the session, but acknowledge that it might not happen that quickly if things get too chaotic. At most, they will be up within 24 hours, probably in a similar fashion as to how we did in March with the original CMEpalooza.

As always, feel free to contact Scott or I with any questions. Hope to see you all in two weeks!

Several weeks ago I participated in a panel session on the topic of Breaking the Mold–Forward Thinking Teaching Models and Technology Advances at the CBI Independent Medical Education and Grants Breakthrough Summit. In preparation for that session, I conducted a poll on my The CME Guy Facebook page, asking individuals to share their preferred means of rapid, one-on-one communication. I got approximately 30 responses — and some folks went into extensive detail, even though it was supposed to be a simple multiple-choice selection — but it was quite clear that texting was far and away the most commonly preferred option (you can read the responses here).

As I read through all the responses, the gears in my brain shook off all the rust that had started to gather and slowly began to creak into action. They turned…and turned…and turned…and turned…and turned…and then...light bulb!: We should figure out a way for participants to text in questions to CMEpalooza!

The biggest issue I had with the first iteration of CMEpalooza was the lack of interaction between participants and faculty. There were a few questions sent in via the Google+ Q&A app and the #CMEpalooza Twitter hashtag, but some sessions had no questions and I had generally hoped for more. I knew going in to it that getting questions might be a struggle; the Q&A app requires users to have a Google+ account and Twitter usage in the CME community is not exactly robust.

That is why I am thrilled to announce the newly established MedPageToday Text Line. All participants of CMEpalooza Fall are encouraged to text any questions they have to 267-666-0CME (0263) and we will relay the questions to the panelists (standard texting rates apply, blah, blah, blah). Participants can still send in questions via the Q&A app or Twitter if they prefer, but I’m hopeful that the availability of a text line will give even more participants a level of comfort to send in their questions. Many thanks to MedPageToday for their sponsorship of CMEpalooza Fall and making this possible.

So remember: 267-666-0CME. 267-666-0CME. 267-666-0CME. Can someone make this into a catchy jingle for us?