On Wednesday a colleague and I attended a Clinical Education Network event (ClinEdNet) looking at the use of social media in clinical education. ClinEdNet was set up by people in Leeds Institute of Medical Education (LIME) at the University of Leeds to foster the sharing of information and enable networking. At this event Alison Hartley (Curriculum Development Associate - University of Bradford) presented research she had done with a cohort of pharmacy students to explore how they were using social media. It was an interesting and thought provoking presentation. . Alison had become aware that course reps were finding out information from the cohort through Facebook and that they could gain instant feedback from their peers during programme planning meetings using this medium. She asked students to reflect back on how they had used social media over the 4 years of the programme and found a very clear pattern of development and a sophisticated way of enhancing learning, networking and supporting each other as well as clear rules and sanctions. Whilst the whole presentation was enlightening there were a couple of points that made my colleague and I stop and reflect on the work we have been doing with Twitter.
We have made a good start with the @UoLchildnursing Twitter account and have had 2 successful twitter chats but are still not engaging our own students very effectively. What resonated from Alison's presentation was the fact that the use of Facebook and then WhatsApp was student led. It was their choice which medium to use, how to use it and whether to engage or not. There was no input from academic staff this was something students chose to do. Twitter is different to Facebook and I think naively we had thought that due to the open nature of Twitter people would be happy to use it - we had not considered that students may want to use their Twitter account in a specific way and may assume that interacting this way with members of academic staff is invading their privacy. What also made us stop and think was that the pharmacy students were using Facebook for specific purposes and we realised that we may not have been as clear as we could be about the purpose of the group Twitter account. We went away and had a think and discussed with @Emziness her thoughts from a student perspective and feel that we may have come up with a plan.
Thank you to @AlisonSHartley for discussing her research and the conversations that followed.
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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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