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Tweeting during conferences: educational or just another distraction?

2013; Wiley; Volume: 47; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/medu.12337

1365-2923

Alireza Jalali, Timothy J. Wood,

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Social media tools are increasingly common in medical education and provide a variety of new facilities. One interesting use might be for the dissemination of information from medical education conferences. Therefore, learning how these tools, specifically Twitter, are being used to disseminate information would be informative to conference planners. The purpose of this study was to analyse the information disseminated using Twitter during the 2013 Canadian Conference on Medical Education (CCME), which is the largest meeting of this type in Canada. Are tweeters chatting about medical education topics related to the conference or just creating a background of white noise? To measure the impact of Twitter, we used TweetReach.com and analysed the CCME 2013 official conference hashtags (#): #CCME13. The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a tweet. We analysed the #ccme13 hashtag 24 hours before, during and 24 hours after the conference. This analysis generated 3090 tweets from 288 different tweeters. These tweets included 1569 regular tweets, 1160 retweets, and 361 replies to another tweet. Then we analysed the frequencies of other hashtags associated with #ccme13 in order of appearance. The most common hashtag was #MedEd (= medical education), which was found in 451 tweets (14.6% of total tweets), followed by #PaperTiger (= hashtags used during one of the conference symposiums), found in 231 tweets (7.5%), #MedEdPatientsafety (94 tweets, 3.0%), and #WelcomePlenary (93 tweets, 3.0%). The most common non-education hashtag was #top200thingsILoveaboutQuebec, which ranked at 24 in our list of most used hashtags (12 tweets, 0.4%). Next we studied the hashtags used by the largest numbers of the 288 contributors (Tweeters). #MedEd was used by 119 (41.3%) contributors, followed by #PaperTiger (used by 33 contributors [11.5%]) and #sgm2013 (= Spring General Meeting of the Canadian Federation of Medical Students) (used by 30 contributors [10.4%]). The non-education #top200thingsILoveaboutQuebec was tweeted by only 3 contributors (1.0%). The analysis of tweets at CCME 2013 showed that Twitter was used to discuss the medical education themes related to the conference more often than for other purposes. This supports the idea that Twitter may be a useful tool for facilitating discussions related to conference topics. Furthermore, evidence of this use of Twitter supports the suggestion that conference organisers should implement new innovations that would facilitate the use of social networking tools in the dissemination of relevant and useful information to a potentially wider audience.