With more than 500 million unique users some claim that Facebook is now the web. Certainly it is one of the main ways our learners (and many faculty and staff) keep in touch with each other. There are many other social media impacting on contemporary medical education including LinkedIn, Biomed Experts, Blogs, Wikis, Rate my Prof/Doc/MD, geotagging, Flickr, YouTube, SlideShare, Second Life, Twitter and Googlewave. This presentation will build on ideas presented in an earlier IAMSE Webcast to consider the many ways that social media are impacting on contemporary health professional education. Issues such as authority and control, net-gen learners, trans-institutional student networks and digital professionalism will be discussed to both orient participants and provide them with better approaches to working in these environments.
Opportunities and Challenges of Social Media in Medical Education
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Rachel Ellaway Ph.D is the Assistant Dean and Associate Professor for Education Informatics at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine as well as the Director of Simulation. Dr Ellaway is the author of the OpenLabyrinth virtual patient authoring and delivery system, chair of the AFMC Informatics Resource Group and she writes a regular educational technology column for Medical Teacher. Her work in developing and implementing profession-focused educational systems was recognised in the award of a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education to the University of Edinburgh in 2005.