A desire to make a difference is at the core of what drives me to be innovative. I tend to come up with big ideas about how I want to do something. Some people think these ideas are crazy! Fore example, in 2013 I published a paper about the use of Facebook for nursing education.

Many nursing educators would question the use of Facebook in education because of issues around privacy and professionalism. When I was doing it I was being criticized by my peers. Criticism is a good thing. The bottom line is that being innovative is scary – you are literally doing experiments that may very well fail or even hurt your reputation. But failure is ok – we just need to learn from it.

Sometimes people question if what I am planning is allowed within the confines of my collective agreement. One such example is the creation of open access resources.

I am not going to get into a discussion of open access resources right now. What I want to point out is that there is a fear the experiments you do may have potential to get you in trouble at work. I am not sure how much of this fear is founded in truth but because of that I need to take the time to check if I am allowed to try some things.

I have decided to push some boundaries, find out what the possibilities are and keep being innovative. One project at a time I hope to make learning better for everyone. 🙂


NurseKillam

Laura Killam is an experienced nursing educator from Northern Ontario with a keen interest in improving student learning through innovation. For more information please visit http://nursekillam.com/.

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