Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Will you be my friend? The use of social networking for midwifery professional development

I have been privileged to have had the opportunity to work with Annette Dalsgaard Vilain over the last couple of years on various projects, including the Virtual International Day of the Midwife. Annette is a Danish midwife and educator who I met online...I can't remember how/where/when! Needless to say, we have been able to utilize the collaborative nature of social media to work together, support, and learn from each other. All this has resulted in a paper that we wrote collaboratively, for the journal of the Danish Association Midwives, entitled "Will you be my friend? The use of social networking for midwifery professional development".

We wrote this article because of our concern that most the midwifery literature about social media is quite critical and  focuses on the risk of using social media as health professionals. We wanted to rectify this somewhat, and provide more balance, talking about how social media can be used for professional development, and citing the VIDM as a case study.

Will You Be My Friend

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good article considering the current popularity of social media in research. It would be interesting to open up the "black box" to understand why they are not using social media. One note - microblogging (twitter), SNS (Facebook), and wikis cannot be grouped together because they have very different features that have impact on use and outcomes of use. Refer more to Management Information Systems literature if you write future articles.

Sarah Stewart said...

Thanks for the feedback, and also for the advice about looking at Management Information Systems in my future work. I know that these tools have very different outcomes, but I still think there is a general acceptance that they are "social networking" tools, so in an article like this , which is a general commentary, I am comfortable to include them under this generic definition.