Best Practices for Communication in an Online Environment, Essay Example

Within the modern day, technological advances continues to promote and expand communication and connectivity, prompting various nurses and patients to engage in social media and other online forums of scholarly discussions. Almost everyone has an established identity online, rendering it quite uncommon to find any person, professional or not, who does not have a Facebook account or email address. Nurses retain an integral role in the identification, assessment, interpretation, and dissemination of information and knowledge within the healthcare world. Indeed, social media provides a platform that can help nursing instructors provide nursing students with a more trenchant understanding of health policy, ethics, patient privacy, professional communication, and competencies in writing. Various barriers still exist with regards to the integration of social media platforms into nursing pedagogy, yet various resources are available to facilitate the integration of social media into nursing pedagogy. Engaging students through electronic means on social media has changed the nature of how information is received and diffused. Nurses who use social networking sites, online chat rooms, and blogs to communicate both professionally and personally with other professionals and nurses can use social networks to foment amicable interface with other nurses. Nurses have the ability to share with one another experiences in the workplace, especially challenging ones, which can be inestimable as both a reflexive and journaling practice that is invaluable within the nursing world (Bulman & Schutz, 2008).

Unfortunately, while social networking has profoundly affected the way people communicate, it has been deplored because of the ubiquity of contemporary acronyms, poor grammar. misspellings, and other modern contingencies that prevent clear communicative strategies. Scholarly online discussions vastly differs from social network because scholarly discussion forums require ample evidence from scholarly sources in order to retain any academic or pedagogical currency. Social networking provides a more open forum in which personal opinions and biased information permeates without requiring credible scholarly sources. Online scholarly discussions calls for the use of formal academic language devoid of spelling mistakes and colloquial expressions and acronyms.

References

Brusco, J. M. (2011). Know your netiquette. AORN Journal, 94(3). 279–286. doi: 10.1016/j.aorn.2011.07.003

Bulman, C. & Schutz, S. (2008). (Eds.). Reflective practice in nursing. Hoboken NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Ryan, C. (2015). Best practices for communication in an online environment [Word]. Retrieved from Week 1 Lecture Notes Online Web site: http://frameset.next.ecollege.com