Nursing Education 2.0: YouTubeTM

PERHAPS WE CAN BLAME IT ON MY BEING SNOWED IN, but I recently discovered YouTube(TM) and began to contemplate its potential impact on nursing education. There is a lot of controversy surrounding trash on YouTube, but this is a social phenomenon that cannot be ignored by educators. As you will see here and in future columns, my intention is to focus on Web 2.0 tools and how we can begin to use them to transform nursing education. I will build off five themes (Web 2.0 as a social networking medium, digital natives, Net generation, visual literacy, and thinking outside the box) and develop the notion of Nursing Education 2.0 - that is, emerging technologies that will transform the way nursing education is offered. HERE IS HOW MY INTEREST IN YOUTUBE GOT STARTED. I received an email asking me if I had seen the video titled "Introducing the Book" (aka "The Medieval Help Desk") at www.youtube. com/watch? v=xFAWR6hzZek. Produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting television channel for a show titled "Oystein & Meg" (Oystein & I), this 2001 video, in Norwegian with English subtitles, is marvelously funny. It is about a new technology called the book. An end user, who is puzzled and skeptical about using the book as a replacement for the scroll, calls on a technical support person to show him how to open and close a book and turn the pages. As the support person reassures the user that the text will not be lost, I was LOL (laughing out loud). WATCHING THIS VIDEO, I started to think about how it might be used in my course "Human Computer Interaction Design. " I also began to reflect on digital natives and their preferences for multimedia learning, how faculty can adopt technologies and new ways of teaching, and how we can prepare a generation of nurses to use electronic health records and clinical decision support tools in their practice. What Is YouTube? According to its website, "YouTube is a place for people to engage in new ways with video by sharing, commenting on, and viewing videos. " It "started as a personal video sharing service, and has grown into an entertainment destination with people watching more than 70 million videos on the site daily. " According to the website, YouTube "is building a community that is highly motivated to watch and share videos" through a web experience (www.youtube.com/t/about). YouTube is part of the social phenomenon of Internet usergenerated content and one of the "You" tools described in Time's Person of the Year article (1). It is what Newsweek describes as "putting the WE in the Web" (2). The Educause Learning Initiative refers to YouTube as a social application that "allows users to post and tag videos, watch those posted by others, post comments in threaded discussion format, search for content by keyword or category and create and participate in topical groups" (3). YouTube in Higher Education Why would the notion of watching user-created videos be important for higher education? First, remember that the students now entering the hallowed halls of higher education are digital natives who grew up in a multimedia world and are most comfortable with technology. If you want to engage students of the Net generation, you will want to explore this tool as an adjunct to your classroom or online teaching environments. For example, what will you do if tech-savvy learners submit video projects that they have created instead of traditional papers? This is not a far-fetched idea. If you follow the Pew Internet & American Life Project, you will see numerous reports about how teenagers, adults, and seniors use the Internet. According to a study on teen content creators and consumers, "57% of online teens create content for the Internet. That amounts to half of all teens ages 12-17, or about 12 million youth. These Content Creators report having done one or more of the following activities: create a blog; create or work on a personal webpage; create or work on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; share original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remix content found online into a new creation" (4). …