The impact of social media in higher education
23 September 2015You may well be wondering why a nurse has been invited to blog for Salford Business School, I asked the same question until I recognised that using social media in nurse education is part of our business. As a lecturer in children’s nursing, I am also part of the fitness for professional practice team and a few years ago I noticed an increase in referrals of student misconduct using social media platforms.
At the same time I was seeing a decrease in student communication via more traditional channels of email, telephone and the virtual learning environment and instead I was being asked by some students to use social media.
In an attempt to try something different, I began in 2012 with a personal twitter account (@wlasinclair) wondering if anyone was even interested in my posts. I had incorrectly presumed that all of our students would use twitter and even more inaccurately believed that they would communicate with me via twitter.