The nursing students' attitude toward using blogs in a nursing clinical practicum in Taiwan: a 3-R framework.

Background: Some nursing educators have been using blogs as a channel to reflect on, share, and discuss questions and ideas for educational purpose. There were not many studies focused on the application of blog technology to the professional development of nursing education in Taiwan.
Objectives: The major goal of this study was to use a blog platform for students, writing their reflection notes, and observing the feedbacks from peers during their clinical practicum. Then we tried to probe the nursing students' attitude toward adopting 3-R categories based blog, which included wRiting reflection notes, Reading peers' notes, and Receiving peers' feedback.
Participants: Of the 179 fourth grade from one five-year technical college students enrolled in a clinical practice course in Taiwan were used as a pool of sampling. Four-eight students were invited by the researcher to take part in this project.
Results: 90% of the participants agreed that blogs provided them with opportunities to share personal experiences with others. 81% of them valued that blogs provided opportunities to offering encouragement and emotional support to their peers. A majority of the participants believed that reading peers' journals was helpful in enhancing their professional development. In addition, all of them agreed that reading peers' journals can help them understand their peer's viewpoints. Most of the participants agreed that they were benefited through receiving feedbacks on the blogs. About 98% of them agreed that feedbacks can promote interaction with peers.
Conclusions: The findings of this study generally indicated the participants' positive attitude toward using blogs in their clinical practicum. A majority of the participants also claimed that blogs provided them the opportunities to share personal experiences with their peers as well as to see things from their peers' viewpoints. They believed that reading peers' notes was helpful in enhancing their professional development. In addition, most of them agreed that receiving feedbacks could promote in-depth reflections; therefore, they were encouraged to write more reflective notes. Thus, future clinical practicum design should exert efforts to foster students' collaboration, reflections, and dialogues by providing blog platform.
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