#SWDE2019 Keynote – What role will Social Workers choose in shaping the digital future?
On April 10th, Melanie Sage, Nancy Smyth, and I delivered a keynote speech at the 2019 Social Work Distance Education Conference in San Antonio, TX. We asked social work educators to imagine a world where social workers were innovators with technology. Our goal was to have a conversation and share how we had been talking about technology will writing our book – Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology.
We started our conversation about how social workers could help close the digital justice gap on Twitter, moving from virtual spaces to physical spaces. Many social workers joined in this conversation along the way. We talked about a range of issues from boundary and privacy challenges to accessibility and connection with technology. As Nancy said, “we were near-sighted as a profession. We need to look through the lens of possibilities, not the lens of our fears.”
In this blog post, we are sharing highlights, references, and slides from the keynote. We hope you will help us continue the conversation together and in your places of work and community.
Here are some of the people and examples of technology that we highlighted in the keynote:
- Courtney Cogburn, an assistant professor of social work at Columbia Univeristy, who is the lead creator of 1000 Cut Journey, an immersive virtual reality racism experience.
- Desmond Patton, an associate professor of social work at Columbia University, who is the founding director of SAFElab, a research initiative focused on examining the ways in which youth of color navigate violence on and offline. Please read his recent blog post, Why AI needs social workers and “non-tech” folks.
- Ruby Guillen and Christina Tipton, co-founders of the California National Association of Social Workers’ Technology Committee.
- There is lots of information about Design Thinking online. Here is one article to get you started: Design Thinking 101 by Sarah Gibbons.
- Laura Nissen’s blog, Social Work Futures,provides great resources and ideas about how social workers can start using future frameworks to think about technology.
For information about the robot examples:
- Robots for Joy, Robots for Sorrow is a project out of the University of California, San Diego, where computer scientists, social workers and care givers designed robots to help people with dementia. Read more about their design and results here:
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~lriek/papers/moharana-panduro-lee-riek-hri19.pdf. The citation for the paper is:
Moharana, S., Panduro, A., Lee, H., and Riek, L.D. (2019). “Robots for Joy, Robots for Sorrow: Community Based Robot Design for Dementia Caregivers”. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI). - You can read about the example of a robot in healthcare settings being used to deliver bad news to a patient: Terminal patient learns he’s going to die from a robot doctor.
- PARO Therapeutic Robot: http://www.parorobots.com/
We asked a lot of questions of the audience in the keynote, questions we asked ourselves as have reflected on the role of technology in social work education and practice:
- What are the examples of technology from the past? What happens when we have to deal with changes due to advances in technology?
- What are our own cultural biases when considering the role of technology in practice with clients and communities? In social work education? What are the biases of the social work profession with technology?
- What would we, as social workers, do differently if we were shaping the digital future? In the classroom? In our own research? In our advocacy efforts?
- How can social workers shape the conversations around technology?
- Who are the people and organizations running technology projects?
- As we think about different types of technology, what would be an incredibly good outcome? An incredibly terrible one? What is the possibility for a social worker’s role in advocating the first and preventing the later?
- If you want to bring your skills to the technology table, how do you get into those spaces? Where are people doing this work?
Our final question of the keynote asked the audience what they would do when they get back to work to carve out a role in shaping the digital future. We used Menimeter.com to create a flowing grid that allowed attendees to answer the question. You can see all the responses here: SWDE 2019 Audience Responses to final question – What will you do when you get back to work to carve out your role in shaping the digital future?
During the Q&A section, participants asked how to engage their faculty colleagues who are not yet ready to dive in to digital spaces or think about the social work future. Melanie reminded them that it is not helpful to try to engage through the use of shame- trying new things already feels vulnerable and risky. She suggests engaging them around curiosity; share what you are doing, and its impact on students and the field. Share an article about how tech is helping or hurting clients in their scholarly area of interest. Model safe ways to take risks, explore, be wrong, and keep going.
You can also check out the conference hashtag #SWDE2019 to read some of the tweets and digital conversations about the keynote.
How to cite this blog post:
Sage, M., Hitchcock, L.I. & Smyth, N.J. (2019, April 13). SWDE2019 Keynote – What role will Social Workers choose in shaping the digital future? [Blog Post]. Retrieved from:
https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2019/04/13/swde2019-keynote-what-role-will-social-workers-choose-in-shaping-the-digital-future/
