Preliminary Evidence for the Emergence of a Health Care Online Community of Practice: Using a Netnographic Framework for Twitter Hashtag Analytics.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Online communities of practice (oCoPs) may emerge from interactions on social media. These communities offer an open digital space and flat role hierarchy for information sharing and provide a strong group identity, rapid flow of information, content curation, and knowledge translation. To date, there is only a small body of evidence in medicine or health care to verify the existence of an oCoP.

Objective

We aimed to examine the emergence of an oCoP through the study of social media interactions of the free open access medical education (FOAM) movement.

Methods

We examined social media activity in Twitter by analyzing the network centrality metrics of tweets with the #FOAMed hashtag and compared them with previously validated criteria of a community of prac

SUBMITTER: Roland D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5533942 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature