Last week @UoLchildnursing hosted our first Twitter Chat using the #CYPUoL. The aim of this account is to promote the work we do as educators, researchers and practitioners in Leeds and also engage with students and help them link to the wider community of nurses and other healthcare providers. As a first chat it was successful with several students and colleagues joining and contributing their thoughts on the subject of "Why be a children's nurse?"
This informal communication was exciting and seemed to allow the sharing of not only knowledge and experience but also of feelings and personal goals and ambitions. by the end of the chat people seemed more confident about sharing and it was excellent to encourage people to send their first ever Tweet.
We now need to keep the momentum going. This will involve building followers to the Twitter account, considering the type of content we want to share and promote and also discussing with students the topics that they feel are important. This first topic was chosen as something that would allow all students to have experience of including those that had only been on the course for 4 days. I did a hard sell about twitter in my session with the year 1 students just prior to the chat but in hindsight this needed to be earlier and incorporate a hands on practice session. What i had also not considered is that people need to see the potential and benefits themselves. I love Twitter for networking, learning and connecting but just telling people this isn't as powerful as seeing that for yourself. It would be beneficial to use Twitter within a taught session with the students and let them see how it works. It would also be useful to catch up with these students in a months time and see how many have set up accounts and how useful they've found it. Following the chat I have put my first Storify together. This has helped to pull together the threads of the Twitter chat and will hopefully help people to make sense of what was discussed.
Putting together the Storify I have realised that you need to be clear in your own mind how the strands fit together so that conversations can be retold. In the same way that you would search for themes when analysing transcripts from interviews you need to be able to see the individual strands whilst at the same time understanding the whole and retaining meaning. With future Storify's I think it would help to read through the Tweets prior to starting to get some sense of the parts that made the whole. This will be particularly important when pulling together more extensive chats.
Overall though I have found this a useful experience. I have recognised areas of improvement for engaging students and colleagues with twitter and learnt some valuable lessons on how to Storify. A good day!
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AuthorKirsten Huby Lecturer Child Nursing interested in blended learning, educational technology and improving student engagement. Archives
September 2017
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