My name is Sarah Stewart.
I am a health professional (nurse and midwife) with nearly 30 years of clinical and education experience. I now work as facilitator, researcher, educator, project manager and consultant specializing in eLearning, social media, networked learning, professional development and mentoring.
I really enjoy sharing my knowledge and experiences with people who wish to know more about social networking, web 2.0 and networked learning. This work has been recognised internationally, and has resulted in invitations to speak at conferences and workshops this year. And if I can't help you, I will know someone who can.
Networked learning and communities of practice
I am very interested in how health professionals network and learn in the workplace, both formally and informally. As we face ongoing staff shortages in health especially in rural areas, I firmly believe that a major answer to recruitment and retention problems is mentoring and supporting each other in communities and networks, be that in local face-to-face or online contexts.
Open access
I am also very committed to the concept of open access to health education and research resources. Not only does open access benefit health professionals, but it has the flow on effect of educating health consumers, and facilitating ongoing communication and collaboration. Thus, you will see that any information I share such as images, presentations and videos will have a Creative Commons BY Attribution license, which means you are free to use my resources in any way as long as you attribute them to me.
My commitment to open access includes organising, managing and facilitating a program of a free online professional development seminars for midwives in 2008, and the 24 Hour Virtual International Day of the Midwife which is about to go into its 4th year.
ePortfolio
I am currently exploring the feasibility for health professionals of using open resources such as wikis and blogs to develop a professional ePortfolio.
Personally
On a personal level, I am wife to Mark, and mother to Ellen and Andrew. I am based in Dunedin, New Zealand but am very flexible about where I work. At the moment I am working part-time at Otago Polytechnic Educational Development Centre (EDC) as an educational designer, where my responsibilities include designing and maintaining the EDC blog and website. I am an EdD student enrolled at Otago University, Dunedin. I also have an e-learning/social media consultancy, Ed-Bytes.
A lot of my time is spent online building my own personal network and exploring new ways to communicate. In 'real' life I love to read, walk the dog, take photos, and at the moment I am learning about growing vegetables in my urban graden.
