Social media, professionalism and higher education

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Social media, professionalism and higher education: a sociomaterial consideration Tara Fenwick

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School of Education, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK Published online: 29 Jul 2014.

To cite this article: Tara Fenwick (2014): Social media, professionalism and higher education: a sociomaterial consideration, Studies in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2014.942275 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.942275

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Studies in Higher Education, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.942275

Social media, professionalism and higher education: a sociomaterial consideration

Downloaded by [University of Stirling Library], [Tara Fenwick] at 04:34 14 August 2014

Tara Fenwick* School of Education, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK Within debates about student professionalism and how to develop it in higher education (HE), increasing focus has turned to students’ uses of social media. While social media skills are promoted by some HE educators, most emphasis is still given to perceived hazards and abuses of social media in practice. These are typically framed as a matter of professional ethics; some have argued for new codes of ‘e-professionalism’. This article problematizes the dynamics being conflated in these debates, drawing from three theoretical sources: current debates about professionalism; critical digital media studies that provide nuanced analyses of social media engagements; and sociomaterial concepts that reconfigure the issues to suggest new possibilities. The argument is theory-based and exploratory, not empirical. The aim is to pose new directions for research and teaching that open, not foreclose, new issues and enactments of professionalism. Keywords: professionalism; healthcare education and training; professional education; critique; e-learning technologies

Introduction Professionalism is by no means a straightforward or uncontested concept. Still, it is widely recognized to constitute an important aim of higher education (HE) (Scanlon 2011; Solbrekke 2008). This is most obvious in HE curricula devoted to the preparation of professional practitioners: medicine, teaching, management, engineering, and various health and social care occupations tied to university education. There is also a movement – notably in Australia – to designate ‘professionalism’ as a core competency for all undergraduate students (Wilson et al. 2013). Within debates about how to develop student professionalism in HE, increasing focus has turned to students’ uses of social media, particularly in the public service professions of health and social care. On the one hand, social networking media such as Twitter and Facebook are considered potential enhancements to practice by enabling information sharing and greater connectivity with those being served (patients, service users, clients, etc.). In this orientation, there are some movements to improve student professionals’ social media capacity (‘e-skills’) so as to better exploit social media opportunities in their future careers. On the other hand, strong concern is focusing upon the risks of social media in professional practice, especially in relation to issues of information sharing and client access. In fact, a new discourse of *Email: [email protected] © 2014 Society for Research into Higher Education


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‘e-professionalism’ is emerging with potentially significant effects, particularly for preservice professional education. New codes for practice are appearing in HE programmes, and also new training modules for students in risk avoidance on social media. The problem here is that there seems to have been a premature leap from conjecture to regulation. This move potentially closes down questions of what professionalism is, or is becoming, and what role digital media might play in emergent notions of professionalism (s). What also becomes lost in these debates is the actual everyday engagement of students as they traverse entangled locations of the web, the classroom, and the work-site practicum. We might even hope that our students learn how to engage with these sites critically – even creatively and experimentally – to open new practices of professionalism. Towards a re-configuration of HE approaches to social media in pre-service professional education, this article examines the concepts of professionalism and its recent turns towards pluralism and experimentation. These help both to understand what is happening in the recent moves to codify professional behaviours using predetermined universalized virtues, and to highlight the broader conflicts at work in attempts to define ‘professionalism’. Thus, we can see how ‘e-professionalism’ discourses are embedded with old desires to reinstate control, singularity, and freedom from anxiety and risk. But professionalism is only part of the issue. For the other part, the article turns to critical analyses of digital media. These help to illuminate the possibilities and opportunities of social media in professional curricula, which are more far-reaching than instrumental ‘e-skills’. This discussion is not concerned with the topic of building online communities, which is circumscribed by particular educational preoccupations and objectives. Instead, the literature featured here encompasses broader societal issues of trends and transformations wrought through digital cultures. Digital media studies advance a ‘sociomaterial’ understanding of engagements in social media: online users are not treated as separate from one another and from the technologies that they ‘use’, but as mutually entangled in emergent networks, inscribed into the very software that codes and ‘affords’ their interactions. These analyses raise important critiques about popular notions of connectivity and openness, and remind us of larger sociomaterial networks instantiating users – including student professionals – into the political economy of the web. These critiques not only help situate our understandings of the profound impacts of digital engagements on processes of knowledge-making and interacting and, therefore, on future professional practices, but also suggest issues that we might take up with students – engaging them in far more broad critical thinking about social media than ‘risk avoidance’. First, the article outlines the problems that have been identified with social media use in professional practice and education. To provide some focus, the examples used are drawn primarily from health and social care, where concerns are particularly strong and debates about online professionalism are prominent in the literature. Then current concepts about professionalism in these public service professions are examined, yielding useful critical considerations for online professionalism. The discussion then turns to digital media studies, beginning with some further explanation of the ‘sociomaterial’ concepts that pervade these contributions. The final section returns to rethinking social media and professional practice in terms of HE, highlighting areas for further research and suggesting directions for future development in curriculum and pedagogy. The discussion is theory-based and exploratory, not empirical. The aim is to open questions and alternate approaches for promoting social media professionalism in HE.


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The ‘problem’ of social media in professional education Across practices in health and medicine, social care, and education, professionals’ use of social networking media such as blogs and microblogs (Twitter), social networking sites (Facebook, Linked In), and content-sharing sites (YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, Pinterest) is on the increase. We are beginning to see studies that explore the specific uses and benefits of different social media in different contexts of practice, as well as the learning challenges they prompt. Some professional associations and educators have promoted, if cautiously, professionals’ development of online connectivity, capacity, and flexibility with social media as a potential enhancement of their practice. For one thing, social media is conjectured to expand professional presence online. It can also provide timely outreach support to clients at a distance, foster collegiality and camaraderie within a profession, extend professional development and national/international linkages, create client support groups, and enable wide dissemination of information for public service (Agazio and Buckley 2009; Green and Hope 2010; Schmitt and Lilly 2012). In social care, the proposed benefits have included outreach to isolated clients or youth who prefer online communication, engaging a range of stakeholders around specific issues, and empowering users (Dodsworth et al. 2012). However, much greater emphasis is accorded to strong concerns about the risks and perceived abuses of social media in practice (Greysen, Kind, and Chretien 2010; Kleich-Heartt and Prion 2010; Mansfield et al. 2011). Boundary-blurring between professional and patient or client is raised by the implications of mutual access to each others’ personal Facebook pages and Twitter postings. Boundaries are also seen as problematically slippery between providing collegial support and sharing personal information that can compromise patient/client confidentiality. Professionals’ personal messages to friends can be scrutinized according to codes of professionalism. Blogs and tweets have resulted in charges of unprofessionalism when there is perceived criticism of professionals’ employing organization. Overall, there is a general concern that online environments loosen inhibitions and create a false sense of intimacy, producing inappropriate postings that can be amplified immediately and internationally (Greysen, Kind, and Chretien 2010). These sorts of social media ‘risks’ are typically framed in terms of a disciplinary professionalism, where social media use becomes a matter of professional ethics. Some have even argued for a conception of ‘e-professionalism’ (Cain, Scott, and Akers 2009; Spector et al. 2010) as a distinct new paradigm requiring particular training, codes, and practices. Following this recent trend, policies have emerged in professional associations and schools to set forth explicit normative behavioural prescriptions to regulate and reduce social media use (Kind et al. 2010). For example, the UK’s General Medical Council national social media policy (GMC 2013) emphasizes the prohibitive: do not mix social and professional relations, do not share identifiable information about patients, and do not post material anonymously on any site if you identify yourself as a doctor. Similar guidelines were adopted by the American Medical Association in 2011. Unsurprisingly, there have been concomitant growing calls for student instruction to raise awareness of social media ‘hazards’ and avoid risky behaviour (Greysen, Kind, and Chretien 2010), resulting in new curriculum implementations to do just that. For example, John, Amandeep Cheema, and Byrne (2012) report the implementation of a mandatory module at King’s College London delivered across a range of


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professional programmes, teaching students ‘appropriate’ uses of social media in practice, guidelines, and consequences of ‘inappropriate behaviours’. Lie et al. (2013) present a similar initiative of required training for student professionals, reporting as indicators of success that 40% of students changed their web presence. Yet despite their willingness to prescribe what should happen, most of these studies end with a call for more empirical research about what practicing professionals as well as students are actually doing, and could be doing, with social media. In fact, there is little empirical evidence of social media use among student professionals. A recent systematic review across medical education research found only 14 studies (of ‘low to moderate quality’): the main challenges reported were technical issues with the social media and a range of participation, some very low (Cheston, Flickinger, and Chisolm 2013). Another scoping review that looked more broadly at social media use by health professional trainees (Hamm, Chisholm, and Shulhan 2013) found little research related to practice settings. Studies that exist tend to report students’ and supervisors’ perceptions of social media use, not their practices (Cain, Scott, and Akers 2009; Chretien et al. 2009; Foulger, Ewbank, and Kay 2009). Of course, hazards are important considerations, especially given the proliferation of Facebook, blogs, and Twitter usage among some student professionals. However, an overemphasis on risk avoidance can foreclose experimentation and new possibilities afforded by social media. What is missing is a problematization of the dynamics that are being conflated through these regulatory enactments of an ‘e-professionalism’ discourse. This discourse is supported by only sketchy evidence of how practitioners in different professions are actually working with social media. The move to link professionalism with universal prescriptions for proper online postings immediately narrows the debate to individual action and rule-based ethical choices. These approaches do not account for the complex ecologies in which practices of professionalism, including ethical encounters, are enacted. It precludes a richer understanding of the multifaceted dilemmas encountered by practitioners, their experiences and strategies in working through these, and the implications for new understandings of professional boundary issues, online identities, relations with clients and other stakeholders, and professional learning. In fact, this issue of social media in professional practice arguably deserves a more sociomaterial sensibility than it frequently receives. A ‘sociomaterial’ approach to understanding professionalism and learning begins with a relational orientation that brings material elements to the fore, including human bodies, objects, and technologies. Many actors, only some of which might be human, are recognized to be influencing what emerges as practice through their connections – perhaps particularly when those connections are mediated in virtual environments. Thus capacities for action, as well as decisions, identities, objects, and environments, are understood to be performed into existence through these associations of both human and nonhuman elements. Notions such as the autonomous individual, or the possibility of individual agency and ethics, are challenged by foregrounding these sociomaterial assemblages comprising practice, and questions of professionalism and responsibility become reconfigured. More will be said about this further on. Rethinking professionalism and professional responsibility Towards a rethinking of professionalism that can embrace online practices, we might step back to examine the historical ideologies of professionalism that are pulsing through


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these social media debates. Traditionally, professionalism has been represented as a normative value system and ideological control, associated with trust, specialized knowledge and discretion that are necessary for managing risk in public service (Freidson 2001). At the centre of these accounts, there persists a notion of professional responsibility as a matter of individual agency and ethical decision-making:


the individual professional, when encountering risk and uncertainty in his or her daily tasks, must employ his or her own capacity for critical reflection and take immediate moral and responsible decisions while at the same time linking his or her personal specialized knowledge to a collective commitment. (Solbrekke 2008, 76)

As Fournier (1999) and others have argued, these conventional discourses of professionalism have been and continue to be used as a disciplinary logic for purposes of occupational containment and control. Meanwhile, policy concerns over the changing nature of professionalism, some voicing the need for thinking in terms of pluralist professionalism models, are accelerating in health and social care. Recent debates in medical professionalism, for instance, have pointed out the inadequacy of singular frames of professionalism in the face of multiple regulators, fast-changing evidence, and diverse contexts simultaneously demanding different practices and accountabilities (individual patients, clinical teams, across care pathways, in health organizations) (Christmas and Millward 2011). In social care, Munro (2011) has called for renewed efforts towards developing professionalism and professional responsibility, arguing that these have been undermined through complex contradictory demands on practitioners that are insufficiently recognized, alongside an excessive proliferation of regulatory audit regimes. Growing research points to this pluralism of professionals’ obligations and the conflicts in responsibility that individuals must negotiate. Professionals must balance obligations to their employing organization and its rules of practice, to broad social needs served by their profession, to the profession itself and the standards and regulatory codes governing its practices, to individuals for whom the professional adopts a caring responsibility, and to personal allegiances influencing a sense of the ‘right thing to do’. This ‘web of commitments’ often necessitates what May (1996) has called ‘legitimate compromises’. Practitioners must respond to conflicting stakeholders’ concerns without necessarily meeting the full expectations of any one. Lewis (2006) argues that discourses of professionalism embed a fundamental conflict between the institutionalized discipline (the ‘profession’), and ‘professionalism’, which is about individual values and individual clinicians. The profession increasingly emphasizes expert-driven, high-tech, high-cost interventions sometimes at the expense of human primary care, social justice, and democratic inquiry. Yet, professionalism stresses the values of individual altruism, duty to multiple authorities, and the ethical responses to competing demands of clients or patients, society, and profession. Some have argued that entirely new understandings of professionalism are called for by these conflicts. On examining teachers and nurses in practice, Stronach et al. (2002) have deplored the proliferation of ideological or ethics-based professionalism and argued for more nuanced accounts that recognize the contradictory demands and arrangements of contemporary practice. They show, for example, that successful practitioners become adept at juggling multiple discourses of professionalism in their everyday work, ranging from those related to what they call the ‘ecologies’ of practice (caring, compassion, and student-centredness) to the ‘economies’ of practice (quality


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control, output assessment, etc.). Sociologists show that new public managerialism and markets create demands for professionalism that are singular, altruistic conceptions of the ‘good’ professional. For example, Evetts (2011) shows a general shift from ‘occupational’ to ‘organizational’ professionalism frames: the former derives from a profession’s disciplinary service commitments while the latter is driven by employers’ demands and output measures. One example of this might be the codes for social media practice that are emerging. The behaviours prescribed in these are based on employers’ and organizations’ concerns, not on encouraging students and practitioners to work out what might constitute social media professionalism(s). Amidst these shifts are continuing demands for genuine collaborative practice among public service professionals in arrangements such as multi-agency work or inter-professional teams. In an extended study of the everyday practices and challenges of these arrangements, Edwards et al. (2009) have demonstrated that individual-centred notions of practice and professionalism are inadequate. They suggest that a more helpful conception is relational agency, which treats expertise and responsibility as distributed. This relies upon mutual attunement and adjustment to others among the collective: professional practice and learning are mediated by artefacts and technologies as much as by human capacity and decision-making. All of this speaks to a more systemic, relational, and material approach to understanding professionalism and ‘professional responsibility’ in social media engagement. It also suggests that HE programmes have much to do in rethinking effective approaches to develop professionalism in different disciplines. Wilson et al. (2013) found that few students now have been encouraged to develop even simple understandings of the purposes and meanings of ‘professionalism’, let alone critical capacity to engage the issues of conflict, collectivity, and compromise that will be necessitated in their future practice. Part of the problem may be that HE programmes continue to purvey conventional unitary concepts of professionalism. And as Solbrekke (2008) shows, professional responsibility still is mostly treated as a matter of individual ethical decision-making, informed by professional knowing of particular values and commitments that can be inculcated through education and ethical codes. Certainly in the codes of ‘e-professionalism’, now being generated to govern practitioners’ uses of social media, this is the mode of understanding being circulated. Working with a sociomaterial sensibility A sociomaterial approach – where the material and the social are viewed as mutually implicated in bringing forth everyday action and knowledge – offers a different configuration for rethinking professionalism. The emphasis shifts away from preoccupation with language, communication, discourses, and the social to also foreground the important contributions to practice of material substances, settings, and devices (see Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk 2011 for an extended discussion; also Coole and Frost 2010). Increasingly, we see research being drawn from sociomaterial concepts in order to promote more robust understandings of professional learning (Mulcahy 2012; Nicolini and Roe 2013), professional responsibility (Zukas and Kilminster 2014), and even professional curriculum (Hopwood, Abrandt Dahlgren, and Siwe 2014) in the current turbulence encountered by practitioners. Furthermore, and particularly pertinent to the present discussion, digital media studies also take up a sociomaterial orientation, to help specify the nuanced conundrums and possibilities of online engagements (Orlikowski 2007). In HE, for example, Gourlay and Oliver (2013) argue that digital literacies need to be



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understood as sociomaterial: emergent through complex networks of human and nonhuman actors, through bodies and iPads and dusty libraries or airport lounges and email bombardments, all connecting in different circuits to produce different texts and positionings. It seems apposite, therefore, to pause and explore the utility of this sociomaterial approach for promoting alternative approaches to e-professionalism. ‘Sociomaterial’ is a broad term adopted here to represent a range of theoretical approaches whose specificities cannot be developed in this short article: STS (science and technology studies), actor network theory, ‘new materialist’ and posthuman analyses, and so forth. The central premise, as Orlikowski (2007, 1435) puts it, is ‘the constitutive entanglement of the social and material in everyday life’. ‘Material’ is the everyday stuff of our lives that is both organic and inorganic, technological and natural. ‘Social’ is our symbols and meanings, human interactions and communication. It is in the relations and entanglings among both material and social forces that everyday practices – including practitioners’ activities, decisions, responsibilities, etc. – are produced. Capacity is distributed, and agency is not limited to human actors. This sociomaterialist approach challenges humanist preoccupations with a single individual ‘using’ the tool(s) of social media for certain pre-determined objectives. Instead, look at the heterogeneous configurings and reconfigurings of human engagement with the affordances of social media software and the continually generated content. In digital media studies from a sociomaterial perspective, technology only becomes valuable, meaningful, and consequential when people actually engage with it in practice, writes Orlikowski (2010). Technologies are artefacts whose operation and outcomes are not fixed nor determine, but always temporally emergent through interaction with humans in practice in what Orlikowski (2007) calls ‘the contingent intermingling of virtual spaces’. When we follow the consequential and mutually constitutive relations between humans and technologies we can examine, for instance, how dynamic materiality configures and reconfigures not only existing practices but also future possibilities for alternate forms of user engagement with technology. In studies of professional learning, the rise of ‘practice-based’ accounts draws attention to the importance of nonhuman as well as human actors, the material as well as discursive and virtual, as inter-related in knowing and action (e.g. Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk 2011; Hager, Lee, and Reich 2012). These studies often work with Gherardi’s (2009) notion of ‘knowing-in-practice’. That is, knowing (including learning processes) cannot be separated from the activity of professional practices, and practices are understood as enactments that are more-than-human and situated between the established and the emergent. Amidst these dynamics of knowing-in-practice, material things are performative and not inert; they are matter and they matter. They act together with other types of things and forces to exclude, invite, and regulate particular forms of participation, including those we might associate with professionalism and professional responsibility. One key contribution of sociomaterial analysis to the online professionalism debate is to de-couple knowing and action from a strictly human-centred ontology, and to liberate agency and responsibility from its conceptual confines as a human-generated force. Instead, agency is understood to be enacted in the emergence and interactions – as well as the exclusionings – occurring in the smallest encounters. A second contribution is that closer attention to the sociomaterial prompts both students and educators to examine more critically the heterogeneous relationships in which they participate through social media, and the political capacities that are exercised on them.


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Considering social media more critically These sociomaterial analyses of digital media engagements, as well as of the nature of professional practice more broadly, raise a series of critical questions that help direct a reconsideration of the social media professionalism concerns. First, if the operation and outcomes of technologies such as new social media are neither fixed nor determining, but always emergent through interaction with humans in practice, then it is folly to focus only upon the behaviour and decisions of professionals, or student professionals, as though they post and upload in an autonomous vacuum. In practice, the various online users intermingling through social media – professionals, students and colleagues, patients/clients, families, and other stakeholders – are not easily separated from one another, the software, or their emerging content. Yet, almost no research in the social media professionalism debate takes account of these interchanges. Similarly, scarce are the studies that help to distinguish among social media platforms: how they materialize, mobilize, and are abandoned, and what they afford through their different modes of use, materials generated, attractions, and limitations. The existing literature in this area tends to treat ‘social media’ monolithically – as, admittedly, this discussion has done, in the absence of accounts pointing to more useful distinctions. Another important dimension to consider in the relations of social media with professional practice are the regulatory codes and openings built into the software itself. These create technological infrastructures of everyday life, or ‘codespace’ as Kitchin and Dodge (2011) describe it. Code does not just mediate existing social forms, it acts – it does things – and it interpolates, mixes with and ultimately produces collective political, economic, and cultural life (Williamson 2013). It does so in ways that are fundamentally changing professional work and communication as well as HE processes, among other things. Existing histories of social media already can be seen to influence particular forms of participation, problem-solving, or resistance. Facebook algorithms and routines, for instance, shape the content and style of exchange, and the nature of what is taken for knowledge. Patterns of ‘friending’, favouriting, linking, trending, and following, developed through online interactions, have become normalized along with their technological and economic meanings, shaping broader cultural expectations for relationships (Van Dijk 2013). These sociomaterial processes are bound to affect how professionals, their peers, and those multiple stakeholders they serve, engage online. More broadly, the fundamental imperatives promoted by social media – in particular those of ‘openness’ and connectivity – deserve critical consideration. Keen (2012) suggests a return to basic questions: Is openness and sharing necessarily a good thing? If we live online and everything is social, what is outside it? Where is privacy? (Or, what is it that ‘privacy’ is transmogrifying to become?) Such questions can encourage more systemic thinking among both students and educators in professional education programmes. Rather than simply learning ways to protect themselves against the hazards posed by ‘openness’, or how to avoid ‘friending’ the wrong thing, student professionals might be encouraged to examine their own patterns of social media participation as part of larger cultural trends. They might consider more critically how, in sociomaterial terms, software code is inscribing them, and their peers and stakeholders – including those pressuring them to develop ‘e-skills’ to better serve their clients – into particular ways of relating, representing themselves, and acting. Further expanding this sociomaterial scope of purview, social media platforms need to be understood as merely the visible surfaces of far-reaching networks that tie local or



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personal practices into powerful centres of capital. Facebook and Twitter are multinational corporations, whose commercial profits depend upon content sharing contributed by its users through their free labour. And of course, user connectivity is continuously trawled, hauled, and aggregated in data mining: every tweet and blog post are assembled and recontextualized for purposes and benefits that the people generating them mostly never discover. Thus, social media participants are caught in a central tension, becoming simultaneously both empowered agents supposing themselves to be acting beyond conventional institutional structures, and targets for exploitation by global capitalist networks (Curran et al. 2012). These considerations provide important critical balance for the simple exhortations that students and educators ought to develop more facility in using social media, or create more visible online presence and connectivity to increase their professional impact. Rethinking social media, professionalism, and HE However, the argument here is not to shut off our computers or put up new firewalls. The point is that perhaps professionalism in social media is more about developing a critical sensibility of what it means to engage in various platforms, what is being produced and for whose benefit, what is visible and what is present but not visible, in the various sociomaterial assemblings that are occurring. After all, the virtual environment accessed through all of these social media does not just present important dilemmas, but also affords unique possibilities of interaction. Common practices of content reiteration and remixing can connect participants in unique ways while making certain forms of knowledge more visible and valuable. Virtual tagging practices continually reconfigure knowledge while remixing past and present (Deuze 2006). There persists a common myth that students are ‘digital natives’ already adept in these online practices. This is of course inaccurate and overly simplistic, as Lea and Jones (2011) show through empirical study. However, these researchers also found that students ‘were adept at drawing on complex, hybrid, textual genres, using a range of technologies and applications’ and that reading is a core and ubiquitous activity (390). That is, students can be introduced to various social media modalities and invited to experiment with them in terms of particular professional objectives or problems and their constraints. Then, they can be prompted to critically interrogate what is happening. Ross (2012) suggests helping students to understand their participation in virtual activities in terms of spectacle, which focuses their attention on the performativity of themselves and others through these engagements. She shows how students can become aware of the different ways they become ‘present’ online (e.g. not just through their own actions and postings), and what different identities are performed through the ways their posted content mingles with others’ uses. Bayne (2010) works with students to help them capture and analyse their many ‘ghostly’ traces in virtual environments, photos and posts, and webpages, which continually recall their past engagements and identities. She engages students in critically examining those ‘uncanny’ elisions between presence/absence and here/there that they experience through the multiple synchronicities of virtual engagement. As a teacher, Bayne (2010) encourages a sensibility of ‘productive disruption’ among her students, to help reconfigure their natural sense of the ‘strange’ and their accompanying anxieties when they try to make sense of their virtual interactions. She draws from concepts grounded in posthuman and sociomaterial perspectives to recast social media use. Instead of working from anxiety and control-seeking, educators and students might

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likewise shift their purview towards making sense of online engagement in terms of distributed agency, emerging human–nonhuman interactions, and surprising new forms of practice. Implications for promoting online professionalism in HE This article has aimed more to raise questions for consideration rather than present recommendations for HE. However, there are implications here for teaching and learning as well as research that deserve development. First, as Wilson et al. (2013) also recommend, we need to encourage among students a more sophisticated understanding of professionalism. While Wilson et al. were writing about tenets of professionalism more generally, their general suggestions are pertinent for students’ social media professionalism more specifically. They recommend that HE should include (1) multiple perspectives and areas of uncertainty in social media knowledge and applications of knowledge; (2) illustrations of contextual variance; (3) explorations of relationships between external codes, social expectations, and individual values; and (4) engaging students in understanding the negotiations of various demands and perspectives of professionalism. Further recommendations for professional educators are suggested by certain pedagogic initiatives mentioned in this article that have worked well to encourage student experiments with various social media platforms. Students could be encouraged to use new forms of digital diary and reflection. Students might try projects requiring them to play with virtual content tagging and remixing, or to try crowd sourced information sharing. Students can learn how to conduct mobile trackings of their own practices, real-time consultations over distance, collective examinations of a problem co-produced with clients/patients using mobile devices and social media, and so forth. In these sorts of activities, the key recommendation is to ensure a critical educational context that guides students’ analysis of these engagements. This critical engagement ideally will be multi-faceted. It will help student to focus both locally on the spectacle and ‘strangeness’ of how they are producing and being produced; and systemically on the broader sociomaterial networks of code and capital that are materialized through their engagements, interrogating what this means for professional practice. This deeper multi-layered critical analysis, we might surmise, is precisely what HE can contribute to online professionalism – moving far beyond teaching a few mechanistic and reactionary behaviours of risk avoidance. This article also suggests implications for professional education research in social media. We would be well served, for instance, by new studies that begin from very different premises than online hazards and risk. What we are missing are nuanced accounts of situated practices: how students and practitioners in different work contexts learn to navigate the possibilities and dilemmas of social media in their work. We need studies that examine the forms of participation and regulation produced through these engagements, their outcomes in terms of public service, and their influence on student professionals’ learning to use specific social media in particular ways. We could also learn much through comparative and multi-professional studies of students’ and professionals’ online engagements. Those in medical education, for instance, could learn from the different experiments with social media that social workers are attempting, or that police, teachers, journalists, pharmacists, and others are exploring to expand their reach of service, their relations with service users, and a mutual flow of information with the public. Studies need to focus not only on dilemmas that arise in


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different practices, and how students understand and negotiate these dilemmas, but also the new possibilities and responsibilities for practice that are opened in these dilemmas. A sociomaterial approach to such studies would focus on capturing the important influences in these dilemmas and possibilities of software code and cookies, hardware (screens, batteries), other objects and devices, images and bodies, wifi hotspots, and so forth. This is the sort of research that can specify new enactments and issues of student professionalism in social media, avoid the ideological closure, and narrow down singularity of notions such as e-professionalism. Conclusion In HE pre-service professional programmes, the issues around student professionals’ engagements and learning with social media are attracting widespread interest. Much of this is expressed in terms of fear about the risks of social media, and has been mobilized as prescriptions to regulate what some are calling ‘e-professionalism’. While some literature advocates doing more to deliberately expand student professionals’ social media capacity, the majority focuses on hazards and transgressions of professionalism performed through social media uses. As was demonstrated in this article, this latter literature appears to rely upon simplistic, received notions of professionalism that do not account for the complex ethical encounters and multiple ecologies of contemporary practice in professional work. The object of focus tends always to be the individual as actor in social media, rather than the network of interactions among students-in-relation: with peers, professionals, clients/patients/pupils, other stakeholders, as well as with material objects, devices, and settings. Recent pluralist accounts of professionalism treat it as a contested discourse that reflects different values according to the frame and source of control. This recasts questions of professional responsibility with social media in terms of situated, collective engagements rather than as individualist ethical decisions. These pluralist accounts configure practitioners within diverse webs of commitments and demands for legitimate compromises, as well as multi- and inter-professional forms of practice animated by conflicting priorities and values. Unitarist rules and moral imperatives for the ‘good’ professional seem incongruous in such environments. These more pluralist and nuanced understandings of professionalism are not only more relevant in professional curricula given the turbulence and conflicting demands that students will encounter when they graduate, but also more able to incorporate new forms of professionalism that technologies may well help to open up. Alongside these pluralist and practice-based concepts of professionalism, sociomaterial perspectives and critical digital studies offer approaches that may be useful in progressing the online professionalism debate: not just for researchers but also for educators, and students. A sociomaterial focus helps students and educators to acknowledge the microdynamic relations among people, technologies and objects, and to examine the implications for practice when these relations cannot be controlled but are contingent, ongoing, and always being re-enacted. Critical digital studies show that there is no inherent power of technology or software such as social media platforms, but only different effects and identities that become performed when people engage with these technologies in particular ways in practice. For professional educators concerned about online professionalism, the most important way forward may not be how to protect and regulate students’ online behaviour, or even how to develop

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students’ social media skills. Instead, we might consider more critically and imaginatively, with students, how social media works in and through their engagements with it. Our gaze shifts from ‘the (lone) professional’ to practitioners-in-relation: with patients and families, colleagues from home profession and other allied occupations, stakeholders and advocates, and so on. In this approach, the critical concern does not rush so quickly to identify and govern ‘bad’ social media practice, but to look more closely at the myriad of possibilities for practice that can be generated. Along with them, we along with the students are likely to encounter new enactments and understandings of professionalism.

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