Social Work Educator’s Guide for #SWVirtualPal

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Dec 8, 2016

This guide to explains the hashtag #SWVirtualPal and how you might incorporate it into course content, a class assignment or learning activity.  You can also download a PDF version of this guide.

The purpose of the #SWVirtualpal hashtag is to create professional connections between social work students, practitioners, and academics across the planet.  It was created by  Amanda Taylor from the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, and Laurel Iverson Hitchcock from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the United States. To learn more about #SWVirtualPal, read this blog post.

Why #SWVirtualpal in Social Work Education?

Pen Pals have been a ‘thing’ for a very long time.  The earliest record of their usage, that we can find, is reported as being led by an ‘innovative Iowa teacher’ called Birdie Matthews, who at the time employed the methodology to bring the realities of WW II into the classroom (Myers-Verhage, 1995). Matthews  creativity in the classroom quite possibly led to one of the most famous pen pal relationships of all time, and this was between Juanita Wagner (her student at the time) and Anne Frank.  So why are we telling you all of this?  Well, before the internet the likelihood of a social work academic in the US, working closely and supportively with a social work academic in the UK would have been ‘virtually’ unheard of, or indeed a fairly disparate affair, which would have been laborious to maintain.  However, thankfully for us technologies have changed the way we work and the way we connect.  Today’s digital and social media  present all sorts of possibilities and opportunities; and being social workers with our default set on creativity, we decided quite a way back now to exploit all it is that technology affords.

Using Learning Wheels: The #APLOL16 Connected Conference

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 18, 2016

In this short blog, we (Amanda Taylor and Laurel Hitchcock) outline the success of the #APLOL16 Conference LearningWheel and through doing so hope to encourage social work and indeed other professions to consider this methodology as a conduit for collating and disseminating conference content.

Why a Conference Learning Wheel?

I  reached out to Amanda earlier this year about setting up a Conference LearningWheel for Alabama Possible’s 2016 Lifetime of Learning Conference because I had previously participated in the development of LearningWheels for other conferences, and saw several benefits for #APLOL16.  First, a Conference LearningWheel helps document learning that occurs during and after a conference.  By contributing short sentences (which become spokes of the wheel), conference attendees can share their insights, feedback and comments about the different conference sessions with an audience beyond that session and even beyond the conference.  Second, the LearningWheel also captures how conference attendees can best communicate with each other during or after a conference, and with others such as colleagues, students, community partners, or any like-minded person.  This is ideal for encouraging conference attendees to apply what they learned in their professional settings and promote collaborations.  Finally, I hope Alabama Possible can use the Conference LearningWheel as an evaluation tool to help assess the outcomes from #APLOL16 and to plan next year’s conference.  

#APM16 Day 4 – A Toolkit for Social and Digital Media Policies in Field Education

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 6, 2016

It is the last day of CSWE’s 2016 Annual Program Meeting in Atlanta, and I am presenting with one of my favorite UA colleagues, Allison Curington, at 10:00 AM in Atlanta Marriott Marquis Hotel International 8. We will be talking about a project that we have been working on for the past year, a Toolkit for Social and Digital Media Policies in Field Education.   Allison and I started collaborating on this toolkit after many, many conversations about the growing use (and misuse) of social media in field education by students, educators and field supervisors.  We saw that field directors were increasingly dealing with ethical and practical issues related to the use of social and digital media in field education, and we wanted to provide information and tools to help field directors raise awareness with students and field supervisors.

In our interactive workshop today, we plan to present on the toolkit for the first time and pilot one of the tools – Social Media Policy Checklist and Worksheet for Social Workers. We hope you will join us.

#APM16 Day 3 -Incorporating Digital & Social Technologies into Social Work Education

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 5, 2016

This is Day 2 of CSWE’s 2016 Annual Program Meeting, and it will be a busy day.  One of the highlights for me will be presenting as part of panel of other #swtech educators – Drs. Melanie Sage (University of North Dakota), Jonathan B. Singer (Loyola University & The Social Work Podcast) and Nancy J. Smyth (University at Buffalo, SUNY). Our panel discussion is about how to how to infuse social and digital technologies into social work courses and curricula. Topics will focus on digital literacy, using theory to inform the integration of technology into online courses, and creating assignments and learning activities for social work courses that incorporate technology.

#ESCUNO2016 Annual Conference – 10/12/16

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 12, 2016

Day 2 at the Engaged Scholarship Consortium, and today I am presenting with my colleague Dr. Erika Rinker about our experiences with the UAB Fellows in Engaged Scholarship Program.  Unfortunately, our beloved colleague Libba Vaughan, who is really the mastermind behind the program, could not join us today.  We hope to do her proud with this presentation.   If you are at the conference, please join us in CenturyLink Room 207 at 1:45 PM today.

Our presentation provides an overview of a faculty development program providing a one-year fellowship to selected faculty members eager to develop exemplary curricular service learning approaches in higher education. Erika and I (Social Work and Foreign Languages and Literatures) will share our experiences as fellows in the program and lessons we learned.

Here is our abstract:

This presentation provides an overview of an urban research university’s faculty development program that provides a one-year fellowship to selected faculty members eager to develop exemplary curricular service learning approaches in higher education. The goal of the program is to help faculty members develop a strong background in service learning pedagogy and provide a venue for them to design a new course or to modify an existing course to include a service learning component. The Fellows program is structured around a year-long series of workshops that explore theories, implementation, and assessment of academic service learning and how to integrate this methodology into courses across a variety of disciplines and professional programs. In its’ third year, the program has supported 33 faculty fellows to date. Participants attending this presentation will learn about the program’s history and implementation, application process, workshop topics, and successes and challenges. Further, two fellows (Social Work and Foreign Languages and Literatures) from the program will describe their experiences and perspectives their year-long fellowship including changes to their courses, pedagogy and becoming part of a community of inquiry focused on engaged scholarship. Their perspectives will provide differences and similarities between educators working in the humanities/liberal arts and professional healthcare-based educational programs.

Click here to access the slides from the presentation.

How to cite this post:

Hitchcock, L., Rinker, E., Vaughn, L. (2016, October 12). #ESCUNO2016 Annual Conference – 10/12/16 [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2016/10/12/escuno2016-annual-conference-101216/.