Teaching Junior Doctors the Benefits and Barriers of the Social Web - Presentation from Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference

Andy Tattersall

Last week I attended the second Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference held at Sheffield Hallam University. I'd been lucky in being accepted to speak at both conferences with last year's talk about my Research Hack videos. The conference is a lively and engaging event for anyone involved in teaching and learning with an interest in social media.

The day started with a key not, (not keynote) which was an introduction to the theme for this year's conference - The Empowered Learner?

Giving my presentation in my Christmas jumper

After that we were rushed off in several small teams to carry out our own hack projects to create digital resources to support digital learners. Thankfully we had been given the full run of the new and impressive Charles Street Building so quickly located a desk with a large screen in one of the many open learning spaces. Along with four other team members we set to work on creating an Adobe Spark video that explained how students and academics should seek for online information in a 'Post-Truth' world. We had just short of an hour but managed to create a three minute video that explained the problem of poor quality information and how to critically appraise and avoid it when learning and conducting research. I'm pleased to say that our group was one of the winners and as a result we won a gold chocolate medal each, which my daughter happily accepted to eat and share in the celebrations.

My presentation was one of six Thunderstorm sessions and was about my Masterclass ILA which I have run for the last couple of years for fourth year medical students. The abstract is below.

Sketchnote of my talk @debbaff

The purpose of this presentation will be to showcase the teaching I deliver to 4th year medical students at The University of Sheffield. The series of five two hour classes called Masterclass ILAs (Inquiry Based Learning Activity) focus on the social and mobile web and how the students can gain a better understanding of it as junior doctors. The sessions are an opportunity for students to build upon their own experiences of social media in a personal and professional setting and how they can use these and other technologies to their advantage once they qualify as a medical professional. The sessions explore the problems large organisations such as the NHS have in staying up to date with such as social media and how they can negate potential problems they can cause. The feedback from running these sessions has so far been excellent and more are planned for later this year.

The short set of slides from my talk can be viewed below.

Teaching Junior Doctors the Benefits and Barriers of the Social Web from Andy Tattersall

One of the winning teams - me on the right

Delegates were encouraged to attend and wear their best Christmas jumpers, which I gladly did. Sadly though my DJ Santa top didn't sway judges and I missed out on a second prize for the day, you win some and lose some. The conference was a great opportunity to see what colleagues from around the UK were doing with social media in Higher Education. I'm already looking forward to next year's conference as it seems this popular event can only go from strength to strength as more educators discover the benefits of using social media as part of their teaching.