Lessons learned from co-designing a high school beach safety education program with lifeguards and students.

ISSUE ADDRESSED: School-based beach safety education programs are common, but best practice guidance and information on their design and development is limited. METHODS: Researchers, professional ocean lifeguards and students participated in a co-design process to inform a lifeguard-delivered, school-based beach safety education program for a coastal community in New South Wales, Australia. Lifeguards and researchers (experts) provided structured feedback about the program in a survey and facilitated workshop; students (n = 26) aged 11 to 13 years participated in focus group sessions intended to garner in-depth understanding of their experiences at the beach and knowledge of, and attitudes towards, beach safety. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The co-design process provided a novel and inclusive model for beach safety education program development, and valuable lessons for future efforts. Specifically, student focus groups identified several facets of pre-teens and younger teenagers' beach experience that prompted revision of the education program, primarily framing of program content and safety messages. Peers are a primary motivator for this age group and students' burgeoning independence emerged as an important theme. While knowledgeable about beach hazards and risks, students conveyed mixed safety attitudes and self-reported safety practices, highlighting the importance of designing programs to motivate behaviour and promote safe decision-making vs raising awareness alone. Findings illustrate the value of adopting co-design processes for all beach safety programs, school or otherwise. SO WHAT?: Beach safety programs may not be delivering information that is needed, wanted or useful. Structured consultation with the priority population must become standard practice in beach safety and drowning prevention education program development.

The use of Messenger for research collaboration: An auto-ethnographic study.

The use of social media for the collaboration of academics has been increasing in recent years. However, there are no reported studies on using Messenger as a collaborative platform to write and publish journal articles and apply for research and development grants. We use an auto-ethnography to reflect on our experiences over the last 3 years, using Messenger as our medium for our ongoing collaborative research activities. Our results highlight the benefits and challenges of using social media for this engagement. The capabilities of Messenger, as opposed to traditional correspondence through email, have paved our preference to use this platform. We can engage in dynamic collaboration and focussed discussion with less formal communication conventions through Messenger. In addition, the extra features, including easy phone calls, sending links, resources and screenshots, and using emojis and stickers for more socially cohesive interactions, are valued features of Messenger. We used the activity theory to highlight the interrelationships of factors (i.e., personal, social-emotional, structural, technological, and organisational) contributing to the success of collaborative academic activities, including the successful publication of journal articles and securing research and development grants. The findings of our study significantly contribute to understanding how social media can be effectively used for academic engagement.

Using social media for assessment purposes: Practices and future directions.

The use of social media across the world is rapidly increasing, and schools are advancing its use for learning, teaching, and assessment activities. Despite growing evidence for their accessibility and affordances for educational purposes, very little attention has been paid to their use in assessment. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA), this paper is an initial step to explore how social media have been used and reported in the literature, and describe some key challenges. A total of 167 articles were initially accessed from three databases, but only 17 were relevant after applying the exclusion criteria. Results show that the most dominant social media used in assessment are Facebook and Twitter. Also, the assessment practices are limited to sending and discussing assessment tasks, following up on progress, giving feedback, and engaging in self and peer assessment. Key issues include the trustworthiness of the assessment process and outputs, limited features of social media platforms, technical support, time commitment between teachers and students, and intersections of social and academic engagements. We discuss the implications of these findings with the critical gaps in the theorisation of using social media for assessment purposes.