Reflections on NLN Technology Conferences: 10 Years and Counting
Nursing education has just marked an important milestone. The most recent NLN/Elsevier Technology Conference took place October 22-24 in Tampa, the 10th national conference focused on technology hosted by the National League for Nursing. As the saying goes, we've come a long way, baby!!
The opening session of this year's conference, presented by founding committee members Mary Anne Rizzolo, Diane Billings, Helen Connors, Pam Jeffries, and me, was a review of highlights dating from the first conference, held in 2004 in San Antonio. Since that time, conferences have taken place throughout the United States, with each site presenting unique opportunities to view the latest technologies.
The initial purpose of the NLN Technology Conference was to help faculty tackle the growth of emerging technologies and harness their potential use in nursing education. The conference evolved, creating a platform for NLN Health Information Technology Scholars (HITS) to present their projects. HITS was a five-year grant to the University of Kansas funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration in 2007. The purpose was to develop, implement, evaluate, disseminate, and sustain a faculty development collaborative (FDC) initiative to integrate information and other technologies in nursing curricula. The NLN, the University of Kansas, and three university partners were involved: University of Colorado Denver, Indiana University, and Johns Hopkins University. All told, the grant provided training and mentoring for 265 scholars.
More recently, Elsevier became a major supporter of the conference, which has more than doubled in size from nearly 100 participants in the early years to more than 200 today. Distinct groups of participants present each year. Many of the HIT scholars continue to attend and present their own technology projects.
The theme for the 2015 conference, "Partnering for Connected Health," was woven into the plenary sessions and the various breakout sessions and posters. The pre-sessions included one on DIY (Do-It-Yourself) BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) strategies for building a connected learning environment using students' smartphones. The other pre-session was on collaborating with instructional designers. Telehealth had a strong presence, with numerous presentations from faculty who use integration remote monitoring for clinical students, interprofessional education, and tasks such as diabetes management in rural areas.
In her plenary address, Dr. Patricia Dykes, nurse scientist and program director for research in the Center for Nursing Excellence at Brigham & Women's Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, addressed the necessary competencies for nurses practicing in a connected health environment. She spoke about the use of consumer-facing tools, any tools that consumers use to connect to health care, such as wearable apps, to bring together inpatients and their families as part of the interdisciplinary care team. These tools help ensure concordance between the patient's goals and the goals set by the various providers on the health care team. During the second day's plenary session, we focused on integrating connected health into the nursing curriculum and asked participants to identify the take-away messages they would bring back to their organizations, as well as their next steps to start the integration.
We like to describe the technology conferences as unconferences, opportunities for participants to determine the dialogue in four specific underlying areas: eLearning, simulation, informatics, and telehealth. This year there were two new additions to the conference: a conference app and a gallery walk. Both generated quite a buzz.
Participants downloaded the interactive conference app for use throughout the conference and beyond. It allowed them to view the agenda, download slides, complete surveys, tweet, post pictures, send messages to other participants, and post messages about their experiences and "ah ha" moments.
I first experienced a gallery walk at the 2006 TIGER Summit. Facilitators hired to help develop a vision and action plan for this event suggested the walk as a means to ensure that all participants had exposure to the technologies on display so that they could fully engage in crafting a vision statement and action plan. When the gallery walk concept is used in education, students walk from station to station to experience the topic at hand. Our goal was to make sure everyone had an opportunity to touch tools and experience how they are used in a connected health environment, to dispel the myth that I hear consistently from faculty and students alike, that old people, disabled people, and diverse populations do not use technology.
To ensure that all participants had access to tools they might want to incorporate into their curricula, times for the gallery walk were assigned on the first day of the conference. Each participant stopped at the following five stations during the one-hour period:
1. Microsoft Health & Life Sciences: Demonstrations of tools from http://www.microsoft.com/health.
2. James A. Haley Veterans Affairs Hospital (Tampa, Florida): Ericka Reynolds, MS, RN-BC, clinical informatics nurse, demonstrated how the VA provides m-apps for patients and provided links for three different apps:
* Smoking Cessation (https://mobile.va.gov/app/stay-quit-coach);
* Weight Loss (https://mobile.va.gov/app/move-coach); and, for clinicians:
* Safe Patient Handling and Movement (https://mobile.va.gov/training/safe-patient-handling).VA apps are available for download at the VA app store (https://mobile.va.gov/appstore/all).
3. GetWellNetwork/QuadJoy/James A. Haley Veterans Affairs Hospital: Demonstration of how a partnership between three entities provides patients with limited mobility, dexterity, and communication abilities access to the network through Sip and Puff technology (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ah-B36iXMBg&feature=youtu.be). For a good piece about an interactive care model, see the 2015 article by K. Drenkard and colleagues, "Interactive Care Model: A Framework for More Fully Engaging People in Their Healthcare" (Journal of Nursing Administration, 45(10), 503-510). Learn more about the GetWellNetwork at http://getwellnetwork.com.
4. Zero to Three & Voxiva: Text4baby demonstration by Zero to Three (http://www.zerotothree.org), National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families. Access the text4baby app at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.voxiva.apps.t4b&hl=en. Visit https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/text4baby/id894749779?mt=8 and learn more about Text4Baby at http://www.cdc.gov/,women/.text4baby/ or https://text4baby.org.
5. Tele-Vitals: Michelle Kirwan, a 2013 NLN Simulation Leader and assistant professor at Towson University, demonstrated an app she developed to reduce readmissions for heart failure patients with the use of telemonitoring to transmit data.
Here are some resources for a gallery walk as an instructional activity in your classroom or online.
* National Writing Project Handout: http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/download/nwp_file/13853/Gallery_Walk.pdf?x-r=pcfile
* Peter Taylor (2001) Gallery Walk: http://www.cct.umb.edu/gallerywalk.html
* Carlton's Geoscience Teaching: http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/gallerywalk/what.html
And here are reflections and observations from the founding committee members and some of my own. (See the Table for highlights from the first nine years.)
1. Helen Connors reflected on the need for collaboration, noting that it is not easy to achieve transformations in higher education without a partner. One must work collaboratively and create partnerships to build a culture of innovation and build capacity.
2. Pam Jeffries noted that the increasing speed of technology growth requires faculty development, resources, and support for adoption, integration, and implementation in a nursing curriculum.
3. Mary Anne Rizzolo noted the increasing specialization within education, for example, simulationists are now needed in schools to support faculty and students.
4. Diane Billings remarked on the development of best practices and evidence to support the use of technologies to reach learning goals.
5. Although technologies seem to change frequently, the impetus for learning drives the usage of new tools. For example, at the University of Colorado, we started off preparing instructors to use PDAs to engage students in the classroom and clinical. This has morphed into engaging students using iPods, tablets, and now smartphones.
6. For many participants, telehealth was an abstract idea, or something a rural hospital might use, when we first started the technology conference. But with the availability of broadband and a move toward mobile devices, there is greater attention to its use in health care. Nursing is beginning to recognize the need to prepare more nurses for future uses of connected health, as exemplified in the breakout sessions on telehealth, the gallery walk, and in this year's keynote address.
7. We have seen the evolution of web-based learning to eLearning to, now, connected learning. Many of the best practices still apply, but there are now more tools to help students create their own learning pathways and connect the dots to better understand concepts and gain knowledge. Even the traditional use of objectives, as noted in Bloom's taxonomy, has been updated.
8. We have witnessed how networking has evolved into connectedness. Remember the old days when we used to have paper handouts? Now we have a conference app that not only connects us to content, participants, and speakers during the conference, but also later on. Using tools like the conference app keeps us better connected, even with increasing numbers of conference participants.
9. Although technologies have changed over time and there are more applications for engaging and educating students, there are still issues of money, technology infrastructure, faculty time, faculty rewards, and resistance to change that can impede acceptance and adoption within the curriculum. Although these issues are constants, we are better able to tackle the challenges we face by sharing ideas, strategies, and connecting with the colleagues we meet at the NLN Technology Conference. They create a community for brainstorming and can be invaluable to you as an innovator and a game changer in your school of nursing.
I want to offer a special thanks to all of you who attended this year's conference and those that took place in the past. If you have never been to an NLN Technology Conference, look for our announcements and plan to attend next year. As always, you can contact me at mailto:[email protected].