What do We Know about the Use of Social Media in Medical Education

Abstract In the last years there has been a growing interest in using social media in every area of higher education (from political and social sciences towards engineering or medicine disciplines), with tools and technologies such as blogs and microblogs, folksonomies, RSS feeds, wikis, media-sharing applications, networking sites or other social artifacts. When applied to medical education, social media is seen to hold remarkable potential to help both medical educators/doctors, physicians, librarians and students to enter in the web 2.0 era, enhancing their teaching-learning experiences through customization, personalization, and rich opportunities for networking and collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to promote scholarly inquiry about the development and adoption of best practice in teaching and learning in medical education with social media. Our main objectives are to introduce theoretical aspects of using social media and its potential impact on medicine and healthcare, and how social media is currently being employed for medical education.