What are the Faculty Lecturers' Knowledge, Attitude and Practice toward Using Social Media's in Nursing Education and Research?

Introduction: Social media(such as Yahoo mail, Gmail, Academic email, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Skype, Viber, Line, What's app, Telegram and…) has been used globally as a key vehicle for communication. Faculty workers and their roles have been reshaped and redefined by the integration of technology into the academic workplace and for facilitate their communication must be used social medias especially in education and research objectives. So the goal of this study is assessment of Faculty lecturers' knowledge, Attitude and practice toward using social media's in nursing education and research. Method and materials: This pilot study is a descriptive-analytic and questionnaire based with three dimensions (knowledge, attitude and practice of faculty lecturers about social media usage).The study participants were a total of 35 persons that 15 of them were nursing teachers and 18 of them were PhD students that co-operate with Razi nursing faculty of Kerman medical science university in third semester of 2015.after doing the validity and reliability of questionnaire (with responses of 10 PhD students before study and Cronbach alpha of internal correlation = 0.89) and after gathering data we used SPSS version 21 for analysis data. Results: In knowledge questions about social media 42.74% of participants reported have knowledge about details of social media. In the second part, participants also showed that the mean of scores in their attitude about using social media in nursing education was 3.21(SD= 1.31) and about nursing research was 3.30(SD= 1.43) (from 1 to 5).Third part of result reported the participant's practice in social media usage in nursing education and research. The mean range of usage in education field was 13.84% and research was 4.53%. Discussion and conclusion: This study showed percentage of knowledge, attitude and practices in nursing faculty lecturers is not in a good range, Therefore, presenting further complexity and challenges for university administrators and decision makers in developing effective policies is very important issue. Make acceptance of faculty members and their thought about these objectives, is very important for Facilitating teacher-student's communications.