7 things you should know about ….. BLOGS
SCENARIO
Dr Smith works as a Nephrologist in an
Academic Medical Center. Although she
loves Nephrology, she wants to find a way
to excite her learners (medical students,
residents and renal fellows) about
nephrology. In addition, although there are
a few people in her division interested in
education, there are not many. Dr. Smith
feels a little isolated and stagnated in her
teaching and would like to find a way to
liven up her presentations and connect with
a community that is like minded about
teaching learners about the kidney. While
searching on the Internet for something one
day, she comes across a Blog and decides
this is a wonderful way to both better engage
her learners and to connect with other
nephrology educators. A blog is an on-line
journal that a “blogger” utilizes to post their
thoughts and ideas and to encourage others
to respond to create a dialogue if you will
among strangers. The blogger can also post
videos, resources and pictures –almost
anything he or she likes.
So, Dr Smith created a blog and posted short
cases and tutorials for her students to work
through when things got slow on the
Nephrology consult service. She also asked
each student to post a reflection on the blog
about their experience with a patient on the
consult service that was meaningful to them.
In addition, Dr Smith connected with other
Nephrology bloggers who commented on
her presentations and made suggestions for
changes to make the presentations more
engaging and interactive. They shared
resources with her and she shared resources
with them. It was ultimately a time saver for
all involved because by sharing resources,
mini-lectures and developing a community,
everyone benefitted.
1 What is it?
“A blog (a truncation of the expression
weblog) is a discussion or informational site
published on the World Wide Web and
consisting of discrete entries ("posts")
typically displayed in reverse chronological
order (the most recent post appears first).”
(Reference: Wikipedia.org).
2 Who’s Doing It?
There are many different types of blogs.
They have been around almost as long as the
internet has been around. There are
entertainment blogs, political blogs,
education blogs, travel blogs, and sports
blogs. You name it and someone out there
is blogging about it. Healthcare blogs have
been relatively late to the game, but are still
becoming more and more popular.
3 How Does It Work?
With advances in platforms such as
Rampages, blogging has become easier than
ever. You do not need to know anything
about web site development. All you need
is ideas and opinions and you can get started.
It is even easy to embed photographs, videos,
audio files or almost anything else you want
to put on your site. You can include
hyperlinks to websites or even other blogs.
By making your blog public, you can solicit
feedback from the public. Asynchronous
communication via blogs has developed into
large communities of like-minded
individuals posting about topics of interest
to them. Some of the more prolific bloggers
with an expertise in a specialized area have
even been successful in turning it into a
commercial enterprise by selling
advertisement on their sites.
4 Why is it significant?
Blogs allow people from all walks of life
and levels of expertise to come together to
express opinions, support causes, educate
the public or in the case of education,
engage the learner. It is a way of networking
with experts from all over the word without
leaving the home. It creates a record of
these discussions that can be referred to later.
5 What are the downsides?
The beauty of blogs is that anyone can do it.
The downside of blogs is that anyone can do
it. Someone can publish on their blog
information that is totally ridiculous and
there is no way of vetting the information. It
is “buyer beware”. This can be a problem
for the less sophisticated learner who has
trouble discerning a credible from a noncredible resource. In addition, blogs can be
edited, so you may not see tomorrow what
was there today.
6 Where is it going?
Blogs continue to be very popular many
years after they first began to pop up on the
Internet. They are becoming more creative
and expansive with the increasing ease of
video publishing and embedding links and
other resources,
7 What are the
implications for teaching
and learning?
Blogs are a fun tool to use to engage your
learners. There must be clear guidelines
about the use of the blogs by the students.
There needs to be rules about appropriate
and inappropriate content, about the
etiquette about posting on someone else’s
blog in the class. There needs to be
expectations at first about a minimum
number of posts, but when done properly,
you may have trouble getting your students
to stop blogging!!