Role of nursing informatics today

Growing up in a competitive world made me the diligent being that I am today. However, at those times I had to do a research on some school topics assigned by my elementary teacher, I’d still have to dig books on our school library and had it photocopied at the local circulation center. All the while, my classmates, the luckier ones, had been sitting at the comforts of their homes surfing the internet and printing data out in one sitting. I wasn’t bothered then. I was still at the top of my class.

Come college years and I’ve been left by time. Professors and fellow students use this thing called the “ Internet” to exchange ideas, assignments, projects etc. Networking sites sprouted and brought about convenience in the passage of information from one person to another. Our teacher created email groups (Yahoo! groups were popular then), blog sites, and networking sites such as Facebook and Friendster, to announce assignments or examinations and sometimes, create a trending topic that we can all react and give our ideas to. These tools helped me and my classmates stir up the way we experience learning.

Even so, as I read the article From E. T. Net to Social Media: Nurses Communicating Online, I came to realize something that is unobtrusively true, even then. Let me quote a piece of the article. It goes:

“ However, even here, despite the interactive possibilities, much of the communication seems to be ‘ old-style’, ‘ Web 1. 0′ and we do not see much discussion. The ’1% rule’ still seems to hold, that “ if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “ interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it” (Arthur, 2006).

Perhaps nurses are happy with this and feel that they get enough communication and collaboration via such more passive methods.” True enough, this phenomenon is still widespread in topic columns or any other issue-fed trendings. There will always be two or three people attentively replying to posts and offering their ideas to help improve situations. The rest, that includes me, are the avid readers of the column, fleeting at the corners of the site, merely consuming the ideas of everyone else.

This article served as an eye opener. One: that I should be learning more than just reading. Two: that I should be sharing my ideas to others too. Three: that I should acknowledge that Facebook and Twitter sites are not just for the fun that they market themselves to be, they can be educational too.