Meeting Course Objectives through Blogging

As technology’s presence continues to expand, the nursing profession must adapt to meet patients in these new spaces of social media. Recognizing the Internet’s ability to establish virtual communities, various health initiatives have started to rely on these mechanisms.  Examples of this trend include the use of blogs in healthcare to support conversations and public health education, as addressed with West et al.’s (2013) study of blogging and promotion of breastfeeding. Nurse educators need to prepare advanced practice nurses to use social media as a tool for patient care.  However with the ever expanding knowledge needed to practice healthcare, how can this become more than just another area to teach?  The use of social media as a tool to accomplish learning objectives seems intuitively appropriate.  This presentation will show how a realtime blog was used in an international course to show evidence of meeting course objectives.  The presentation will show some advantages of using Wordpress as a platform for a blog.  Constructing, utilizing and evaluating the blog used for an international graduate level course held in Kenya will be the focus of the presentation.  One of the biggest assets of blogging is the flexible platform to incorporate multiple media types into reflection and discussion, not just textual materials. This blog was created in real time to share lived experiences. Sharing helps students to process their experiences and solidify the changes that occur in their ideology and helps educators with the proof of burden of meeting general course objectives.