CRITICAL SELF REFLECTION RELATED TO MY CURATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA PARTICIPATION

When I entered in this course, I was unaware of the importance of social media in building a strong professional identity. I didn’t have strong social media presence. I used Facebook and Instagram only to share my personal life activities. While interacting with my class mates on class forums, I realized that social media can also be utilized to make my strong professional identity by sharing and engaging in content related to my profession.

In the beginning of this course (Foundations of health system), I didn’t have sufficient knowledge about content curation tools and software programs. I usually used “My documents” or personal folders to save my resources and was only aware of google as a search engine. It is difficult to organize and retrieve files in “My Documents”, and with large number of resources can easily becomes messy and overcrowded. As the course progresses, I learned about different content curation tools and search engines such as elink, Diigo, Pinterest, Yahoo, Bing, Quora, etc. I also searched in detail about their pros and cons, their accessibility, retrievability and ability to share resources with others. Finally, I decided to use elink, Diigo, Yahoo and google to search and save my curated content. As I started curating and saving information by using these tools, I realized that content curation is a necessary skill to get broad and easy access to information. Content curation, not only helped me in better arrangement of my resources but also helped me extracting the required information with ease. Content curation tools provides ability to collect a large number of relevant information, studies, viewpoint at one place without wasting too much time and money.

In healthcare system, providing accurate and timely information is necessary. Health Professionals can use content curation to blend many resources and information not only for their self, but can also provide this service for benefit of other health professionals, readers and patients who need information, resources and answers to their questions.

At the start of my Masters program, I wasn’t aware of social media participation and its benefits. In my home country (Pakistan), social media participation and class discussions are usually not part of education curriculum. I found it very difficult and time consuming to write blogs, commenting on other classmate posts and answering critical questions. My first blog was “Modernizing the Canada health act”, in which I discussed some key points of improvement in Canada health Act. After reading comments on my first blog, I realized that when we highlight a key point that needs to be changed or need improvement, we should also provide the means and process through which we can change or improve the particular thing or issue. During the course I not only learned, but tried my best to overcome mistakes by curating more information about the particular topic, its benefits and drawbacks, ways to solve the particular issue and available resources in the particular area. The most important thing which I learned during blog writing is APA style format, references and citations. During the course, I realized the importance of constructive critical feedback as learning activity because it increases our knowledge about different health topics, broaden our vision and thought process, provides a new perspective that we never have considered and provide us an opportunity for improvement.

Using twitter for learning purpose was also a new experience for me. I found twitter very useful in sharing online resources and for class discussions. I also tweeted my blogs so that other people can also read and provide their feedback on them. Hashtag strategy is also a significant way of getting regular news update about relevant topics. Using twitter in academia provides a great way of socialization and encourages students to discuss current issues related to their studies.

In this course, I gained knowledge about different information curating tools, ways of organizing collected information, using social media for education purpose, writing blogs on different health topics and most importantly using social media in making strong professional identity.