Over the past several months, I’ve been reading Candice Rettie’s blog posts on the National Nurse Practitioner Residency & Fellowship Training Consortium website and have been talking with her about these posts. I will admit, I often just scan them. I get hundreds of emails every day, and read a lot of different blogs. So, when Candice asked me what I felt the most important themes of this blog are, I couldn’t give her as complete and detailed response as I would like. Yet, perhaps, there is something important we can learn from my response as well. What we learn and remember while doing other things can be very informative.
We all gather, process, and analyze information differently. We all learn in different ways. Some of this is a result of how we were brought up. Are we digital natives, having grown up in a world that has always had cellphones? Are we digital immigrants who placed calls on rotary phones and haven’t yet quite figured out how to Snapchat, and wonder why we would even want to anyway? Are we extroverts jumping into conversations or introverts hanging back waiting to be asked our opinions? As educators and people accrediting educational programs, how well do handle these different styles of learning?
Face to face, I tend to be an introvert, but online, I can be a bit extroverted. I’ve been online so long that I consider myself more of a digital aborigine instead of a digital native of digital immigrant. I’ve been online so long that my natural introversion yields to extroversion in online discussions. If you know where to look, you can find stuff I posted online back in 1982.
So, what I get out of the blog posts here may be a bit different than what others are getting or what Candice is aiming at. I experience the blog posts here as artifacts of a community of learners and teachers committed helping new nurse practitioners hone their skills in the ever changing world of providing primary care in challenging environments. I think that’s pretty cool. I hope every member of this community recognizes how cool that is. I hope each one of you feel invited to join the discussion, no matter how much of a digital introvert you might be.
What does this community mean to you? What are your hopes and aspirations for the future nurse practitioners?
