The Use of Blogging in Tertiary Healthcare Educational Settings to Enhance Reflective Learning in Nursing Leadership

Purpose:
The use of blogs as a learning methodology in hospital education settings has not been widely utilized to any great extent. This study explores the effectiveness of using a blog to enhance reflective learning in a nursing leadership development workshop of a tertiary care setting.

Relevance/Significance:
The need for competent nurse leaders, is ever more essential in a healthcare environment burdened with decreasing resources, rapid change, increasing regulatory requirements, while at the same time ensuring patient safety and quality patient outcomes. Emerging technologies such as blogs, which are more interactive, customizable, and social media focused, are driving the educational transformation in creating learning environments that support reflective learning.

Strategy and Implementation:
The participants for this study included nurse managers from the Department of Veterans Affairs VA Medical Center as part of a Nurse Executive Leadership Institute Series. A convenience sample of 14 nurse managers who were recruited and randomly assigned to two groups, the BL group (received the blog reflective assignment) and the TA group (received the traditional reflective written exercise) using simple random sampling. The degree to which the learning experience was enhanced by the blog was measured by the differences in reflective learning scores between the two groups using the Reflective Learning and Interaction survey tool (Peltier, Hay and Drago, 2005). Social demographic questions were included in the first section of the survey tool. Using SPSS, descriptive statistics were analyzed with a two-sample, two-tailed t-test using t-distribution for small sizes. The calculation of means and standard deviations was done to discover the differences between the groups.

Evaluation:
With the traditional p-value of <.05, the groups did not differ significantly on any learning dimension. However, although there were no significant differences between groups, the mean scores on Reflection (BL 4.10 (0.38) (TA 4.28 (0.74); and, Intensive Reflection (BL 3.67 (0.33) (TA 4.18 (0.56); show that both groups identified a reflective learning experience.

Implications for Practice:
Nurse educators need to ensure that reflection is incorporated into the planning and implementation of learning activities. Findings from this project inform the practice of other nurse educators contemplating to incorporate social mediated learning such as blogs, into their learning strategies.