Dialogue vodcasts: a qualitative assessment

Abstract

to another tweet. Then we analysed the frequencies of other hashtags associated with #ccme13 in order of appearance. The most common hashtag was #MedEd (= medical education), which was found in 451 tweets (14.6% of total tweets), followed by #PaperTiger (= hashtags used during one of the conference symposiums), found in 231 tweets (7.5%), #MedEdPatientsafety (94 tweets, 3.0%), and #WelcomePlenary (93 tweets, 3.0%). The most common non-education hashtag was #top200thingsILoveaboutQuebec, which ranked at 24 in our list of most used hashtags (12 tweets, 0.4%). Next we studied the hashtags used by the largest numbers of the 288 contributors (Tweeters). #MedEd was used by 119 (41.3%) contributors, followed by #PaperTiger (used by 33 contributors [11.5%]) and #sgm2013 (= Spring General Meeting of the Canadian Federation of Medical Students) (used by 30 contributors [10.4%]). The non-education #top200thingsILoveaboutQuebec was tweeted by only 3 contributors (1.0%). What lessons were learned? The analysis of tweets at CCME 2013 showed that Twitter was used to discuss the medical education themes related to the conference more often than for other purposes. This supports the idea that Twitter may be a useful tool for facilitating discussions related to conference topics. Furthermore, evidence of this use of Twitter supports the suggestion that conference organisers should implement new innovations that would facilitate the use of social networking tools in the dissemination of relevant and useful information to a potentially wider audience.