Much has been written about the challenges and dilemmas of social media practice within Higher Education. Many of these debates handle this issue via the ethical questions that social media usage raises, the nature of new and networked pedagogies, and how social media can be purposefully integrated into a Higher Education teaching system.

This event adds issues of students’ professional practice to this mix, and how issues of University students' developing professional identities interface with issues surrounding the incorporation of social media into HE practice more generally. With most professional associations now adopting guidelines for social media usage, what emerges in the development of student self-representation online is a double-bind of their envisaged or prospective professional identity, and a personal one.

This one-day event will bring together three scholars to discuss these issues from their own, uniquely different, research contexts to offer new and critical perspectives on this current topic, with plenty of opportunities for participants to join in the discussions.

Digital Professionalism and Online Boundaries in Health and Social Care

Claudia Megele (Middlesex University)

Noting the changing and challenging notions of professionalism and boundaries, this presentation offers an overview of a pilot research project aimed at developing participants’ understanding and appreciation of digital professionalism and online boundaries. Thinking of boundaries as points of encounter rather than separation, this research uses a scaling mechanism and a structured approach for analyzing various case studies, vignettes and online postings in order to raise participants’ awareness and enhance their understanding of the dynamic and fluid nature of online boundaries and digital professionalism. The project was also part of wider research studying the impact of social media on identity, mentalisation, empathy and relationships.

Tweeting pictures: sharing to learn, learning to share

Anna Wilson(University of Stirling)

Although much of the attention paid to students' use of social media focuses on dangers and dilemmas around ethics and identity construction, this paper explores an alternative perspective. Social media have the potential to contribute to how professionals learn from each other, and how student professionals in higher education engage with professional communities. Given the increasingly image-saturated nature of social media communications, practice-related images abound online, despite interdicts from institutions and professional bodies.  This presentation draws on images shared during two regular Twitter chats (one among teachers and one among midwives), and asks: how might such images contribute to students' learning, both about their profession and about professional norms in an online space?

“You might possibly say something….”  Medical students’ dilemmas in developing digital professionalism

Julia Gillen (Presenter) (Lancaster University); Fiona Curtis(co-researcher) http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fhm/about-us/people/fiona-curtis 

Students’ development of professionalism is vital within medical education, yet social media communications can blur professional and personal boundaries. This study investigates attitudes and practices of second year medical students in a British university. Results show that their experiences and reflections had illuminated the dangers of careless use of social networking sites and had already resulted in altered practices, but that some dilemmas in developing future professional identities remained unresolved.