Social Media in Nursing Education: Responsible Integration for Meaningful Use

Abstract

The astonishing popularity of social media and its emergence into the academic arena has shown tremendous potential for innovations in teaching. The appeal of using social media in the learning environment is enhanced by accessibility and affordability. However, it has also broadened the scope of consideration for protecting student privacy. This article explores the legal impact of privacy concerns when social media is used as a teaching tool. Institutions of higher learning must formulate guidelines that will govern appropriate social media use so that novel teaching modalities can be safely explored. Students must be educated by faculty regarding the standards of conduct and privacy considerations related to social media. The National Council of State Boards of Nursing has issued the White Paper: A Nurse's Guide to the Use of Social Media, a must-read for nursing faculty in the current academic arena.

Medical Professional and Usage of Social Media

“…British Medical Association (BMA) recommends that doctors and medical students should not accept Facebook friend requests from current or former patients and they should be conscious of their online image and how it may impact on their professional standing 22 . It is suggested that, instead of face book friend with the patient, it is more professional to create a separate website specifically designed for posts regarding medical events, so that the health care professionals can discuss with the patient's and follow up them in a more professional way to solve the problem 3,23 . Medical professionals should know the privacy settings and monitor the regular updates of Facebook's privacy policy to adjust their data protection 21 .…”

“…Member of the medical profession are need to abide by the code of conduct of medical ethics in order to render the best possible services to the humanity and to maintain the honours and dignity of the profession 26 . Any unprofessional posting in public domain may cause unfavourable impact on medical professionals and even the institutes 23 . There could be negative professionalconsequences if the information featured in a social media profile in terms of photos, nicknames, posts, and comments liked or shared, as well as the friends, causes, organizations, games, and media that a person follows 27 .…”

Evaluation of the self-eye examination method for health promotion

“…It is a task to be accomplished at schools, homes, workplaces and other community spaces (10) . In this regard, the effective ocular health promotion involves a combination of a few components, namely, guided education for adoption of prevention measures, health service improvements, and a greater accessibility and expansion of public prevention policies on ocular disorders (15) . Half of children's blindness cases could be avoided with an early detection and by emphasizing educational strategies that benefit patients and help health professionals (16)(17) .…”

Social Media in Nursing Education: The View of the Students

“…Different kinds of social media tools are used to share documents, work in groups, and learn from videos, which are good applications to use in schools [1,6]. According to previous research, 53% of nursing schools reported using social media applications, and Twitter has been used in critical care simulations [7]. The most wellknown social media applications in education are Facebook, Twitter, different kinds of blogs, and Second Life [1,5,6,8,9].…”

“…When social media usage numbers are increasing, more new learning environments are also being built [1,7]. Nowadays, students have smartphones and tablet computers that could be used to support learning.…”