This week our class focused on blogs and RSS and the tag of the week was reflection. Many class members shared bookmarks on delicious for blogs about education, articles about blogging as an educational tool, and sites to use for setting up blogs. Edublog was a site frequently mentioned touting 10 ways to use education blogs to revolutionize how you teach and how your students learn. I found a fairly comprehensive article on using RSS in education that I shared with the group (D’Souza, 2009). After searching the internet, perusing many of my classmate’s sites and watching the videos posted on our course website, I felt I had a pretty good grasp of blogging and RSS. This was amazing in itself, because prior to this week I had never even noticed the little orange RSS icon
, let alone known what it was about. I set up a Google Reader account and subscribed to many of my classmate’s blogs as was suggested. How cool that I can now see any new postings all in one place without having to go from blog to blog!
Tomei & Lavin (2008) offer my favorite definition of blogs as “personal websites operated by individuals who compile chronological lists of links to stuff that interests them, interspersed with information, editorializing, and personal asides” (p. 383). After gleaning a basic understanding and definition of blogs, I set out to determine what role blogs might play in nursing education. From learning to communicate within patient charts accurately and succinctly, to disseminating information on evidence-based practice with the goal of providing safer patient care, written communication is certainly a necessary component of health care. In The Potential Use of Blogs in Nursing Education, Maag (2005) writes, “The art of blogging can unleash the hidden capabilities of aspiring writers and motivate expression of thoughts, ideas, and interests in real time.” Maag points out that personal publishing via blogs can be an excellent educational practice because the medium promotes self-directed versus teacher-directed learning, encourages self-reflection as a model of social experience and self-identity, and enriches the process of learning.” This article really resonated with me because of the struggle I see within nursing education to embrace a more learner-centered model. Could blogging help nursing education move away from a teacher-directed, lecture driven format where we feed students information and evaluate learning through test after test after test?
The Maag article also resonated because it mentioned blogging to encourage self-reflection. There was the reflection word, aka the tag of the week. All of my courses at SPU have involved reflection and in my education courses we have discussed reflective journals as effective tools to enhance learning in the clinical environment. As students think and write about their clinical practice, they construct some of their own learning. I have been researching and learning about the benefit of journaling and summative student self-reflection as a means for retaining and learning material. Thinking inwardly, recognizing and acknowledging personal abilities and limits, asking questions and looking for bias or incomplete information in the answers are reflective stages that lay the foundation for the kind of learning necessary to nursing education and practice (DeYoung, 2009).
A review of the literature on the value of reflective journaling in undergraduate nursing education provides rationale and support for engaging undergraduate students in the reflective process; however there is evidence that educators struggle to incorporate reflective processes into education (Epp, 2008). The review concludes that nurse educators need to utilize various tools and strategies for facilitating the growth of undergraduate students into reflective practitioners. A reflective blog would certainly constitute such a tool.
References
D’Souza, Q. (nd). RSS ideas for educators: Version 1.1. Retrieved October 6, 2009, from http://www.teachinghacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/01/RSS%20Ideas%20for%20Educators111.pdf
DeYoung, S. (2009). Teaching strategies for nurse educators (2nd ed. ). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education.
Epp, S. (2008). The value of reflective journaling in undergraduate nursing education: A literature review. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 45(9), 1379-1388. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0020748908000266
Maag, M. (2005). The potential use of blogs in nursing education . Medscape Nurses. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/498947
Tomei, J., & Lavin, R. (2008). Blogs, identity, and engagement. Education for a Digital World. Retrieved October 8, 2009, from http://www.col.org/resources/crsMaterials/Pages/edDigitalWorld.aspx
