Health Professionals learning Twitter

The new group of post-grad students I've been meeting today have reminded me how very different Health Service IT systems and administration are compared to those in Higher Education. Even trying to visit an online social network is met with a window announcing that this attempt has been blocked, logged and reported to the system administrator. How can health professionals become responsible professional participants online in the face of genuine risks and adverse, if not actively hostile, environments? I suspect the answer is that it's happening and will continue to happen. I only hope the collateral damage will be minimal.
For years now I've been challenging undergraduate nurses to get using Twitter for their professional development. I have an opportunity early in their 3rd and final year to suggest ways of engaging in networked learning. In recent months I have been delighted to see a real growth in engagement from a range of nursing and midwifery professionals and professional bodies, which gives newcomers an instant network to connect with (I began a list ages ago to help with this but it's had some significant additions recently).
In the first year, first week in fact, of the pre-registration Bachelor of Nursing programme, it seems only right to confront frivolous use of online social networking (see links at the foot of this post). I got a strong sense this year, at inductions in March, that, following a lecture on the subject, students were deleting their Facebook accounts, slamming the door to social media and throwing away the key. Suddenly, social networking was the enemy, as a single slip could prevent students from ever realising their cherished ambition of joining the registered ranks. Added to the risk of personally making a single simple costly mistake is the problem we all face when driving... How many of us have thought/said, 'It's not you I'm worried about, it's the [possibly insert the word "other" here] idiots on the road"? As much as this can be true in social media, it never stops us hopping right back into a car (because the destination and mode of travel is worth the risk).
As someone who has benefitted hugely from the networking Twitter enables, imagine my delight last week at finding this 'Nurses and Social Media' article, via Twitter, on the Department of Health's pages of the Chief Nursing Officer:

Nurses and social media cno.dh.gov.uk/2012/04/20/nur…. Very well done to @annie.coops for creating and sharing this
— Pam Nelmes (@PamNelmes007) April 20, 2012

Emboldened by this article, I've been encouraged to mention Twitter more than ever. But the professionalism question is never far away. For example, what to do about undesirable followers? Those 'other idiots on the road'? Amidst all the messiness of using social media, learning to accept that, just like the more appalling type of spam email you have to somehow learn to deal with, keeping your public profile 'clean' enough to avoid 'bringing the profession into disrepute' by association, means learning to be vigilant about blocking and reporting vile spam followers. How many Health Service users who stumble across your profile understand that you dont choose your followers, in fact you have to 'un-choose' the nasty ones. And that could predictably include service users! This kind of insight is easily missed in the nervy path towards trying to reap the rewards of networked learning. In leading students to leverage social media rather than safely dismiss it, it's a hard balance to strike, knowing which aspects of the territory to treat, and how. Newcomers to Twitter have a tough time grappling with the concept of what Twitter is without also taking on a 'sufficient' number of specific techniques to ensure their nascent use is not strangled at birth. It's like plugging a PC into the Internet without any anti-virus protection. That computer may only last a few seconds before it's compromised.
If you have any thoughts about what those specific techniques are, please let me know, or start a list somewhere and point me to it. Thanks!

Cardiff School of Nursing and Midwifery's own guidance is here. It is based on The NMC Code, and the specific social networking advice page.

Mindset 1 and Mindset 2

How much does it matter if you're a Mindset 1 person being asked to do things a Mindset 2 person does? This is admitted as a gross over-simplification, but, as you may have realised, I'm after the extreme end of the cohort: anything from the "I'm rubbish at computers (although I book holidays online, have a zillion friends on Facebook, etc. etc.)" downwards.
So while there may be a much more complicated picture out there, this one will do for now. I was reading Chris Jones recently (in J CAL 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00370.x ) again on the Digital Native thing and want to steer well away from deterministic concepts. But here's the table from Lankshear and Nobel's New Literacies Sampler 2006 (you can get the whole book as a PDF ):

Do you really need a 'Mindset transplant' to embrace learning with technology?

Collaboration tools and securing engagement

So the latest wheeze for getting students to engage with information technology with a view to networked learning concluded the other day.
The assignment for this module is a group presentation and so I give a talk about online collaboration tools. The audience has 'mixed' ability when it comes to information technology skills or any desire to use computers at all. Re. IT, this works well because the groups usually have at least one person who knows what they're doing and the others are in a good position to learn a lot from their peers.
The NMC requires undergraduate nurses to accumulate 4,600 programme hours (divided into 2,300 hours of practice and 2,300 hours of theory). Students sign a register in lectures and this, at least, gives them a reason to come. However, in an attempt to provide flexibility, I tell students that they need not attend the IT-lab workshop as long as they participate online. More importantly, no register is taken in the workshop, their register hour is logged by dint of their participation online, whether they attend the workshop or not. This usually means that I get to see the people who really want to come, and the rest can 'learn by doing', or merely demonstrate their ability at a time/place of their choosing.
Following my lecture, as the students were working in groups, I asked for one member of the group to reply to a discussion board I had set up, explaining what collaboration tools they had chosen to use and why. I asked them to return at the end of the module to reply individually to their group's original thread. It was this latter post that got them the 'workshop theory hour'. Specifically, I asked them to reflect back on their experiences with their group's chosen tool-set. About half the group did this, some of the comments being slightly perfunctory. But there was a good smattering of important lessons learned...
Some students had tried to use Dropbox for collaborative authoring of a presentation but this had caused problems because you can't really share the same file at the same time and someone needed to take charge with organising the shared space. One or two groups had tried to use Zotero on its own, uploading files to the shared library etc. but, unsurprisingly, they found this clumsy. Another group had shunned the perceived complexity of Dropbox and set up a dedicated Hotmail account, then shared the username and password with the group. They had found this to be rather messy, with multiple copies and versions of the same presentation going around and around. Facebook was popular for communication but was found to have very limited support sharing files.
So the overall message in this for the students was that they needed a range of tools to collaborate effectively. I hope the number of them will have learned how to complement the various component parts of a given activity with an appropriate tool. This is  foundational 'working knowledge' for accomplishing anything with IT and something my colleague Joe Nicholls has been banging on about for some time...
Here's a prezi I'm building to guide students:

I want to... on Prezi