Occupational Therapy, Social Networking and Facebook

Some time ago now I wrote a blog post detailing my initial forays into social networking sites in order to develop an online presence in preparation for teaching in the virtual world. At that time I was decidedly ambivalent about revealing myself as a person in a professional context and I continued the experiment only because almost every piece of literature I was reading about online teaching and learning was telling me that a personal presence was an essential factor in minimizing attrition and facilitating engagement in online learning.

 

A year on and I can’t imagine life without online networking. I use Facebook mainly, but have a presence on other sites as well and whilst I am aware of, and have experienced one or two of the challenges of mixing the personal and professional on Facebook I have developed strategies to manage these. I thought I might share a few with you here.

 

Privacy – Facebook has been criticized for revealing too much information about its users. No, the users reveal too much information about themselves by not understanding or implementing appropriate privacy settings. I make my profile available to friends only, categories my friends into groups and then further screen what I revel to whom. It seems to work out fine.

 

Refusing student friend requests – I was anxious about rejecting friend requests from undergraduate students but didn’t want to offend by rejecting them. Actually, very few of them want to be friends with me (should I be upset about that I wonder?), and if any do I just explain that once they graduate I’m more than happy but until then I prefer to take a more boundaried approach. I don’t think I’ve offended anyone yet, but I guess you never quite know.

 

Our online Masters students are different though. I created my account specifically for this group in order to demonstrate that although a lecturer I was also a human being (apparently it makes me more approachable). It would seem silly therefore to exclude them, even though it could be argued that some of the same boundary issues are relevant. I am now friends with several of my MSc students, and you know what? I feel I know them better as people too, and am more engaged with them so I guess it works both ways.

 

Being invited to be friends with a stranger – This is a difficult one. I started rejecting anyone I didn’t know (you can do this quietly, by ignoring them) but then I thought that I might be missing great opportunities. This is social networking after all. So, I’m more discerning now and I’ll add strangers from the OT worlds if we have things in common. This has resulted in some collaborative working and interesting discussions and debates, reinforcing the idea that a stranger is a friend you haven’t yet met… Maybe. Random strangers however, are still quietly ignored.

 

So, in summary, I have found a way of using Facebook professionally that works for me. I’ve also been fortunate enough to find old “real” friends too, but that is another story.

COT Conference 2008

Image: Will, Sarah and Angela

I've just returned from my day at the COT conference at Harrogate, having left a number of the OT team there for the remainder of the week. Between us we had a number of posters, papers and seminar sessions accepted so we have all been busy both in the preparation and the delivery (especially slap bang in the middle of marking for the conferment board next week!). It was good to see so many of our students there too, maybe a blog post on your experiences would be of interest?

An unusual presentation perhaps was the seminar that Will, Sarah and I delivered on "Is social networking bringing occupational therapists togther?" using our experiences of meeting colleagues via blogging from all over the world. The planning and development of the seminar was conducted between Sarah and I here at Salford, Will Wade at Oxford Brookes, Merrolee Penman in NZ and Natan Berry in USA using many of the web 2.0 applications (e.g wikis, blogs) and a virtual meeting space (elluminate). Sarah, I and Will then delivered the seminar at conference on behalf of us all - and we only met Will in person the day before the seminar was due to run - so living proof that networking is indeed bringing OTs together!

The session was well attended and seemed well received and many questions were fielded afterwards - so as promised here are

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our slides which will give you all the links to the blogs we used to illustrate our points - particularly for the discussions about using blogs to demonstrate and evidence CPD activity for the HPC re-registration requirements.
Part of the session explained how to set up a blog and how to comment on others' blogs. So if you are visiting this post having attended the session - I challenge you to make a comment on this post - just let us know that you visited. Click on "comment" at the end of the post and type your comment into the pop-up box, if you have a google account already you can sign in and your user name will appear on your comment, if you don't have an account and don't want to set one up just yet you can tick anonymous.
By all means, please feel free to comment even if you didn't attend - we'd love to hear from you.

Second Life and disability

In the process of developing the MSc Advanced OT to be delivered via e-learning I have had to spend many hours experiencing and researching opportunities for social networking in order to provide/access social areas for our virtual learning community. During this time I have generated a profile (an avatar)in Second Life as a virtual person! This has been a strange yet addictive experience as I have navigated through virtual classrooms, cafes, libraries and the occasional wrong turn into the unknown!! Throughout this experience I have been concentrating on where we may set up a virtual seminar or meet students for a virtual coffee and a chat - however after a conversation over lunch with colleagues earlier in the week I have been sent along a an additional train of thought.
A comment was made as to whether Second Life mirrored real life and had avatars who experience a disablility/dysfunction, having a choice would people choose a disability for their avatar? Further searching of news items and blogs suggest that there are groups set up by and for people with a disability within second life. In addition there are suggestions that people who are unable to communicate/socialise/mobilise etc in their real world are creating avatars that can do all of these things- they therefore are gaining a quality of life that eludes them in their real world. What an excellent tool for occupational therapists to consider in their interventions. Of course, as with any new idea, there are problems and a limited evidence base available - but I feel a research project coming on!!!!
Any thoughts welcome.........

Some links
http://2ndisability.blogspot.com/
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1294720,00.html

Occupational therapy education and social networking - an issue of disclosure?

Today I have been skimming the social networking services including facebook, myspace and bebo in order to assess their potential in OT education (if any). In order to do this I have had to register, and provide details about myself that can be seen by others - this made me very feel uncomfortable, so much so that I gave it some consideration.

Throughout my career, the concept of professionalism has been of paramount importance. I have views on what is and isn't professional and my colleagues share some but not all of these opinions. What we do agree on however, is that there are differences between our professional self and our personal self. Generally we keep our private lives private from students and clients and personal information remains personal. In order to join myspace though, I had to give my date of birth and other "personal" details. Do I want my students to know I am XX years old? Or that I listen to XX obsessively on my ipod? On facebook I had to decide whether or not to be "friends" with a number of students already registered. How do you say no politely? I don't consider it to be professional to be friends with our students (although I do hope I am friendly).

I was amazed at the level of personal detail provided to the general public by occupational therapists. Is it OK to tell the world you hate your job when the "world" might be one of your clients?". Is it OK to tell the world that you couldn't go to work due to a monumental hangover when the "world" might be your boss? And the classic for me is the student who tells the world that they didn't really miss an OT exam because they were ill, but because they didn't get out of bed! In this case the world could just be their tutor!

My inclination is to deregister and therefore anonymize myself immediately, yet I know that in order for virtual communication to be effective, those involved have to seem very human in order to counteract the sterility of the computer. I don't think I have ascertained the value of social networking in relation to formal CPD and education, but can see that it has a role for informal support and networking. Those of you who have given this matter some thought, or who have more experience that me please comment - I'm open to persuasion.