Nursing Education 2.0: YouTubeTM

Diane J. Skiba

PERHAPS WE CAN BLAME IT ON MY BEING SNOWED IN, but I recently discovered YouTubeTM 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 “Øystein & Meg” (Øystein & 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? Top of Page
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 user-generated 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 Top of Page
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 web-page; 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) . There is no doubt that someday soon, one of your students will submit a paper that consists merely of a web address where you can watch her YouTube project.
Second, as the Internet changes from a dissemination tool to one that promotes social networking, it is important to think about how tools like YouTube can be used to create a learning community. This tool, among others, allows “students to replace passive learning with active participation, where everyone has a voice, anyone can contribute, and the value lies less in the content itself than in the networks of learners that form around content and support one another in learning goals” (3) . Faculty need to think about the following questions:
Is there value in having students create their own videos instead of web pages?
Is there value in creating a promotional video to introduce your school, your particular specialty program, your research, or yourself to potential students?
Is this a method that allows online students to feel more connected to the faculty, program, or school?
Is there value in using this tool to bring outside experts, ideas, or content into your class?
Third, faculty need to think about how the use of video helps engage learners and draw them into the experience. Becoming involved in a video experience “heightens a student's visual literacy, an important skill in today's electronic culture” (3) . YouTube allows the learner to experiment in new media to convey information and knowledge. “Many educators believe that the act of creating content, in virtually any form, is a valuable learning exercise” (3) . Remember, interviews with members of the Net generation indicate that they are bored with our usual text-based PowerPoint slides. This generation grew up on video games and multimedia.
Fourth, videos, both in the classroom and in online courses, can serve as triggers for discussions. They have several advantages over graphic and textual media: “portrayal of concepts involving motion, the alteration of space and time; the observation of dangerous processes in a safe environment; dramatization of historical and complex events; demonstration of sequential processes the viewer can review and the promotion of affective, social, and cultural ideas with powerful visual treatments” (5) .
In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jenkins wrote about the rise of our networked culture and speculated on the impact of the YouTube phenomenon. “Now try to imagine what would happen if academic departments operated more like YouTube or Wikipedia, allowing for the rapid deployment of scattered expertise and the dynamic reconfiguration of fields. Let's call this new form of academic unit a ‘YouNiversity’” (6 , p. B9). In his musings, Jenkins suggests thinking about a department as an intellectual network where students interact not only with professors, but with industry and the community.
Although Jenkins refers specifically to the transformation of the graduate program in comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he presents interesting notions that we all should consider. One statement that resonated with me concerned distance learning. Rather than thinking about distance learning solely as a means to transmit knowledge to the world, Jenkins states that “we should see these efforts as opportunities for us to learn from other sectors” (6 , p. B10). He concludes: “We may or may not see the emergence of YouNiversities, but YouTube already exists. And its participants are learning plenty about how media power operates in a networked society” (6 , p. B10). Jenkins' thinking provides a broader context to view the social phenomenon of Web 2.0 tools, especially YouTube, in education.
YouTube in Health Care Top of Page
So, has YouTube permeated health care and nursing education? You would be surprised. Here is a sampling of what I found under the terms nursing and medical education, student projects, schools of nursing, and the promotion of nursing as a profession. (One word of caution: If you search on the word nursing, especially in this unstructured environment, you will find a lot of different meanings of the word.)
Drexel University's “Content Review on NCLEX® EXCEL! — Adult Nursing” is one in a series of content reviews available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFS8vjsi5OE.
“Echocardiograms and Cases on You Tube” is at casesblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/echocardiograms-and-cases-on-youtube.html.
A student project called “Nursing BACK” is a hip-hop dance scenario that describes nursing and all its opportunities. Go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kVv2aqnEjs.
“Nursing at Medical University of South Carolina” is a promotional video about a school of nursing available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V0qwAkRizU.
Another school of nursing promotion, for the University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Sciences, is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc_iLIeC_3w.
“Nursing, it's more than a job,” a promotional video about men in nursing and their opportunities, by a community college and sponsored by the Washington State Health Association, is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o4yYwU2sE8.
The Making of The Men in Nursing Calendar, about making the calendar, is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6lABwUb1-U.
And if you think YouTube has not infiltrated health care, think again. Practitioners in Wales, specifically the Builth and Llanwrtyd Medical Practice in Powys, have launched a series of health education films on YouTube. Their videos include advice about flu vaccinations, blood sugar testing, and cervical screening (7) . The flu vaccination video is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jl_3YGHboc. Also, check out the public service videos provided for patients from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=52oi-NdQ_g.
YouTube in Your Curriculum Top of Page
To find out more about YouTube, visit their website (www.youtube.com). If you want to upload your own content, sign up for a free account. Let me know if you or your students have created any YouTube experiences by sending an email to E-mail: Diane.Skiba@uchsc.edu.
References Top of Page1. Grossman, L. (2006, December 13). Time's person of the year: YOU. Time. [Online]. Available: www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html. 2. Levy, S., & Stone, B. (2006, April 3). The new wisdom of the web. Newsweek. [Online]. Available: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12015774/site/newsweek/. 3. Educause Learning Initiative. (2006, September). 7 things you should know about YouTubeTM. [Online]. Available: www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=7495&bhcp=1. 4. Lenhard, A., & Madden, M. (2005, November 2). Pew Internet & American Life Project. Reports. Family, friends & community. Teen content creators and consumers. [Online]. Available: www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Content_Creation.pdf. 5. Misanchuk, E., Schwier, R., & Boling, E. (1996–2000). Visual design for instructional multimedia. [CD-ROM]. 6. Jenkins, H. (2007, February 16). From YouTube to YouNiversity. Chronicle of Higher Education: Chronicle Review, 53 (24), B9–B10. 7. Website clips are a hit. (2007, January 17). Nursing Standard, 21 (19), 5