Low-Stakes Twitter Assignment for Social Work Educators

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 21, 2013

 A little over two weeks ago,  Dr. Jimmy Young (@JimmySW) of  the University of Nebraska Kearney and I presented at Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) Annual Program Meeting in Dallas, TX about the basics of Twitter and how to do a live or real-time Twitter Chat.  Click here to find out more about this presentation.  Although it went smoothly, doing a live Twitter Chat in front of a live audience was stressful, and is probably one of the more complicated ways to use Twitter in the classroom.  This got me thinking about all the low-stakes ways that social work educators can use Twitter in the classroom to engage students and promote knowledge building and skills development.  I have been using Twitter in my undergraduate social work courses since 2011, and have written two blog post about why I think Twitter is a valuable learning tool for students (see How I learned to stop worrying and love Twitter, Part 1 and How I learned to stop worrying and tweet, Part 2).  Over time, I have developed a boilerplate assignment that is easily adaptable to different types of courses or even already existing assignments.  For this post, I will describe the different parts of this assignment,  and connect each part to CSWE’s current social work competencies:

1. Create a Twitter Account for Professional Use: Twitter is free and easy to use.  At the beginning of the semester, I ask students to sign up for Twitter account, stressing that it will be used for professional purposes.   It has been my experience that most social work students are not familiar with Twitter so I show them how to sign-up for an account.  I also share online resources about how to create an account, how to use it, and how the platform works.  My favorite resources include Twitter’s Help Center and a blog post titled Twitter 101 written by Dr. Nancy J. Smyth (@nysmyth) of the University of Buffalo.

When signing up for an account, students have the opportunity to create a public profile about who they are and their interests.  The profile includes space for a photo, short bio, location and website.   I ask students to create a public profile that is professional, describing themselves as a student, their current university or college and their practice interests.  In class,  I  show my own Twitter profile as a starting point and then review the public profiles of other social workers, educators and/or students.  As a class, we develop a list of common characteristics from these profiles, identifying any best practices or good models for the student’s own profiles. Alternatively, I have asked students to write a brief one-paragraph social media policy for how they plan to use Twitter as a professional social work, including examples of what they will and will not include in their tweets.

Social Work Competencies:  Identify as a professional social worker and conduct oneself accordingly;  and apply social work ethical principles to guide professional practice.

2.  Post weekly Tweets: Once students have a Twitter account, they can begin posting  tweets immediately.  By design, Twitter limits how much is written in one post (140 characters or less), which requires users to really think about what to say and how to say it.  Students often find the character limit frustrating because it restricts their word or phrase choices.  During class discussions, we talk about the place of brevity in professional communications, best word choices for public posts and how to compose a professional tweet.  For the assignment, I ask students to post two tweets each week for ten weeks.  One tweet must be their own writing on a topic related to class and their second tweet must be a reply to someone else in the class.  This gives students practice in writing professional tweets over time and also gives them an opportunity to engage in a public conversations with each other outside of class.   Typically, I do not provide a lot of guidance on what students should put in their tweets to give them choice about topics that interest them, but the possibilities are endless.  Here are some examples:

1. Dr. Lisa Scheble (@LSS_SocialWrkr) at Florida State University asks her students in her Human Behavior & the Social Environment course to write a summary tweet from each class lecture using the course hash tag #HBSE.

2. Ask students to locate a research article and summarize the findings in a tweet.  Tweets by Information for Practice  (@Info4Practice) offer good examples of how to summarize research articles.

3. Encourage students to write a summary tweet about a paper or report written for a class such as a policy analysis or literature review.  Carla Sofka (@CarlaSofka) at Siena College asks her students to write a summary tweet for a major diversity assignment in a intro practice course.  She lets her students decide if they actually want to post the tweet or not, which shows one way that Twitter can be discussed in the classroom without actually using the tool. 

4. Ask students to tweet Q & As about general class content, assignments or other related materials. You can reply as needed and also encourage students to answer each others’ questions.

5. Jimmy Young posts questions about ethical dilemmas to students in his policy class using the course hash tag #sowk388.

6. When you have a guest speaker in class who uses Twitter, ask students to write a tweet to the guest speaker about what they learned from their talk.  Not only does this give good feedback to the guest speaker, it gives students the opportunity to communicate with professionals outside of the academic environment.

No matter how or what I ask  my students to tweet about, I make sure do the exact same number and types of tweets each week.  Not only am I modeling for the students, but I also find it to be an effective way to engage students outside of the classroom.  I frequently use Twitter not only to respond to their posts, but to  send reminders about the class, ask questions about how their projects are progressing or answer their questions.  I also try to respond to tweets from social work students in my colleagues’ classes from around the country.  This shows students that their tweets have value outside of the classroom, and gives them practice interacting with other social work professionals in a public conversation.

Social Work Competencies: Apply critical thinking to inform and communicate professional judgments; respond to contexts that shape practice; and almost any of the content-driven competencies depending on the content of the tweets (i.e. apply knowledge of human behavior and the social environment for Lisa Scheble’s class).

3. Creating  a curated list of Twitter users

One of the best features of Twitter, in my opinion, is the tool to create a public list of other Twitter users.  A list can be created on any topic, and can be public or private.  Because it is possible to follow hundreds or thousands of users, a list allows you to organize people or groups into different categories and can serve as filter if you only want to look at certain types of tweets.  For example, each semester, I create a public  list of all the students in a class, provide a description of the list and sharing it with the entire class.  When I review the list, I only see the students’ tweets from my course, giving me a quick and easy way to see who is tweeting what or who is not tweeting.  I include myself on this list and other individuals who are involved with the course such as our librarian or a guest speaker.  

To create a list for my assignment, I ask students to identify a social problem, geographic area, and/or vulnerable population  and then over the semester have them create a public list on the topic including a description of the list.  Students need to follow at least 15 different individuals or groups on their list by the end of the semester.  Along with creating the list, I ask students to talk and write about their lists.  In class, I will ask for a volunteer to pull up their list for the class and talk about their topic for no more than five minutes.  Students will talk about why they choose to follow a particular group or individual on the list, and discuss what they have learned from their list.  Also, I have students complete a brief writing assignment about their public list including how they chose their topic, how they selected individuals or groups to follow and not follow, and what have they learned from creating this list.  Specifically, students need  assess two of the individual or organizations on their public list using the following criteria:

1. Name of Individual or Organization
2. Description of Individual or Organization
3. Intended Audience of this Twitter user
4. Potential use of this user’s tweets
5. How did they find this Twitter user?
6. Why did you decide to add the user?

Social Work Competencies: Identify as a professional social worker and conduct oneself accordingly; Apply critical thinking to inform and communicate professional judgments; and almost any of the content-driven competencies depending on the content of the list (i.e. engage in policy practice to advance social and economic well-being and to deliver effective social work services for a list about state-level public and private agencies that provide services and advocate on behalf of children in foster care.)

4. In-Class Discussions and Self-Reflection Writings

The final part of this assignment includes opportunities for students to talk and write about their experiences with Twitter over the semester.  I have already described some examples of class discussions and writing assignments already in this post.  Other examples include an initial writing assignment about the students’ expectations of the assignment including concerns about using social media for professional reasons, and a final self-reflection on what they learned from using Twitter over the semester.  This assignment is done before the students even start using Twitter.  For class discussions, I often ask questions such as “Should social workers follow their clients on Twitter?” or “What does professionalism look like on Twitter?”  Most of these in-class discussions and writing assignments were were not part of my original assignment that first semester I experimented with Twitter in my courses.  Rather, they organically grew from student feedback, discussing the assignment with colleagues and observing how other social workers were using Twitter.  I have found these discussions and reflections to be invaluable in providing students with an understanding of how Twitter and other social media platforms can be a tool for professional communication, information sharing and networking. 

Social Work Competencies: Identify as a professional social worker and conduct oneself accordingly; apply social work ethical principles to guide professional practice; apply critical thinking to inform and communicate professional judgments; and respond to contexts that shape practice.

So how are you using Twitter in your own classrooms? I would love to hear about your experiences with Twitter or other social media platforms.

How to cite this post:

Hitchcock, L. I. (2013, November 21). Low-Stakes Twitter Assignment for Social Work Educators [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2013/11/21/low-stakes-twitter-assignment-for-social-work-educators/.

Tweeting Is Not Just For The Birds… By Natasha Langner

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 5, 2013

Natasha Langner is an undergraduate social work and psychology major at the University of Montevallo.  In this post,  she discusses what she learned from using Twitter during an internship at the Washington Center in 2013.

During the summer, I had the pleasure of studying in DC through The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars interning with Becky’s Fund, which is a non-profit organization working towards assisting victims of domestic violence as well as bringing awareness to the issue in the community through various programs and through the social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

My first assignment with the organization was to find five interesting articles dealing with domestic violence. I had to read, analyze, summarize the content, and then use the summarized content to come up with an engaging sentence that will attract the readers to click on the Twitter link. This is actually harder to do than it seems, especially since I never used Twitter in a professional setting before that assignment.

One of the most important things I had to keep in mind as I used Twitter was the fact that whatever piece of news I decided to share with the online community, I had to make sure that it was thought-provoking and that the audience learned something. Because of the vast amount of information that Twitter generates, I had to make sure that my Tweets stood out, which requires creativity and an analysis of the articles that I shared.

My strategy for using Twitter is asking many, many different questions. Whenever I read a news article, I ask myself why the information is important to me, and why should the public care about this information. If you cannot come up with an answer to both of those questions then you should probably find something else to Tweet. Next, I create a question that is directed towards my audience, whether asking for their opinion on the issue at hand (because everyone loves to give their opinions), or asking the viewers to think about how this issue affects them personally and what they can do about it.

The greatest advantage of utilizing Twitter as a student is the networking aspect. When I was in DC, we were constantly reminded to network with other interns as well as professionals in the city. When we engaged in networking events, Twitter was the most popular form of communication and connection among the people after the initial meeting. Twitter allows students to connect with other professionals and it exposes us to an abundant amount of resources from all over the world. When I met people in high positions they did not say, “Here’s my e-mail if you need anything”, but they did say, “Follow me on Twitter, or Let’s connect on Twitter”.

For future professionals, Twitter allows us to build our “work samples” in the areas that we are passionate about. Employees will look at your online profile before they will look at your resume or before they decide to hire you. Twitter allows them to see your involvement in the issues that are important to the organization or the company that you are hoping to work for one day. Having a strong Twitter account, meaning you use your Twitter for discussions of important issues, will enhance your image as a future professional because it tells others that you are keeping yourself informed in the current events as well as advocating on behalf of the issues by taking the time to inform the public.

My recommendations for using Twitter include:

– Find an organization or an issue that you are passionate about and follow them.

– Learn to summarize vital information in two good sentences and then learn how to use that information to engage the public. This practice will be valuable in other areas of your life.

– Be consistent with your account. Try to Tweet something important on a frequent basis. Do not make your followers wait a year until you make another Tweet.

– Be engaging and creative with your audience. If they do not see how an issue applies to them, they will probably ignore your Tweet.

-Finally, use Twitter as if someone’s life depended on it. If domestic violence is your issue, then make sure that each Tweet counts because you might literally save someone’s life with the information that you post.

Tweeting Is Not Just For The Birds… By Natasha Langner

How to cite this post:

Langner, N. (2013, November 5). Tweeting Is Not Just For The Birds… By Natasha Langner [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2013/11/05/tweeting-is-not-just-for-the-birds-by-natasha-langner/.

How I learned to stop worrying and tweet, Part 2

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 30, 2013

This post was originally written for Curation Culture, a blog by my friend and colleague, Andrew Battista.

In my previous post about Twitter, I discussed how I developed public lists in Twitter as a form of curation, an activity of organizing and giving meaning to the information available in the world.  By using Twitter to curate, I discovered a natural progression to using it as a tool of professional communication with students and professional colleagues. I want to share some of the examples of how Twitter became a useful and effective communication tool for me and my students:

Posting Links: This is be done by tweeting an article or other link from another sources such as a newspaper, website or other online source.  Other Twitter users can click on the link to access the article for review, and then respond by tweeting. For example, one student,  who was interested in mental health issues, posted an article from a national newspaper about the overmedication of children in the US foster care system.  This elicited several responses from their classmates as well as other Twitter users, creating a public and open conversation by the students and other professionals in the field.  I frequently post links from Alabama and National newspapers about articles related to social welfare policies in the state as a way to get conversations started among my students.

Direct Messaging: This is a private message that you can send to another Twitter user.  A student in one of my classes was working on a paper about foster care and adoption for a different class, and had developed a public list on the topic.  She was following the Twitter feed of a federal child welfare agency and noticed the agency was tweeting about the latest statistics on adoption.  She wanted to know about the data related to foster care, so she sent a direct message to the agency.  She reported that she received a tweet back from a government official at the agency, sending a website link to the latest statistics on foster care in the US, just hours after posting her question.  I have used direct messaging to contact other social work educators and colleagues from around the country when I have specific questions that I don’t want to share publicly.

Using Hashtags or  Backchanneling: This is when the hashtag symbol (#) is used with along with a keyword or tag to help mark or label what a tweet is about.  This allows Twitter users another way to keep up with an on-going public conversation by searching Twitter for the hashtag. This works best if everyone agrees on the hashtag and actually puts the hashtag in their post.  For example, I designated a hashtag for each of my courses.  The hashtag for SWK 420 Social Work Practice with Small Groups, Communities and Organizations is #SWK420UM.  Students include this hashtag when they are tweeting something related to course content or an assignment, making it very easy to track their tweets or a class related conversation.

This is now a common practice at national conferences and other meetings for many disciplines, including social work.  Over the summer I was unable to attend the National Association of Social Workers 2012 Conference: Restoring Hope: The Power of Social Work so I followed along with the conference on Twitter using #SWHOPE, which was designated by the conference organizers. The conference’s keynote speaker was Leymah Roberta Gbowee, a 2011 Nobel Peace Laureate, Social Worker and founder of Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, and I was able to follow her speech through the tweets of individuals attending the conference.  It was not the same as being there to hear her words in person, but a good and cheap alternative.

I have also used this backchanneling in the classroom.  Last semester, I took my SWK 420 class to the library for instruction related to their community assessment project.  This project requires students to find statistics and data from such sources as the US Census Bureau and the Annie E. Casey Foundation about different counties in Alabama.  Dr. Andrew Battista suggested that we use Twitter during the class to share data resources.  So while Dr. Battista showed the class different resources for their assignment, I listened to the questions the students were asking and knowing their interests posted links that included relevant resources for their assignment.  For example, one student was going to do an assessment of Jefferson County, AL and was interested in statistics on HIV/AIDS.  I posted a tweet with a link to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s HIV/AIDS Statistics and Surveillance website. The student was able to access the website in class, decided to use it as a data source for her project and then followed the CDC on Twitter.  Additionally, other students had access to the same information in real time.

I know there are many other ways that Twitter is being used to promote professional communication between students, instructors and the professional community.  Do you have another example or idea?  Please share your thoughts by posting a comment.

How to cite this post:

Hitchcock, L. I. (2013, October 30). How I learned to stop worrying and love Twitter, Part 2 [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2013/10/30/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-tweet-part-2/.

How I learned to stop worrying and love Twitter, Part 1

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 30, 2013

This post was originally written for Curation Culture, a blog by my friend and colleague, Andrew Battista.

I signed up for a Twitter account long before I actually tweeted. In fact my first tweet was September 8, 2011, a full year after I set up the account. While I was using Twitter to follow other people and organizations, I never posted a tweet because I couldn’t figure out how I could say anything in 140 characters, and thought who would read it anyway. Since that time, I have logged in 416 tweets, have 200 followers and follow over 500 different individuals and groups. While not this is not biggest leap into the world of social media, my use of Twitter has grown and developed over time, and it has become, for me, an important tool for networking, information sharing and professional development.

How did I make this small leap into the world of microblogging? Two things…first, I read David Carr’s article Why Twitter will Endure. Carr makes a good (and balanced) argument that Twitter is a tool for keeping up with current affairs. He writes… “I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.” And then I went to meeting at Carmichael Library and heard Andrew Battista say for the first time something about something about Twitter in the classroom as a way to help students curate resource lists and promote learning via social media and other things. I had been looking for a way to connect and engage with my students in course content while introducing them to social media as a professional, not social, tool, and I had finally stumbled on it. So with help from Andrew, I decided to start using Twitter as an experiment in one of my classes, and I knew I had to do the assignment along with the students.

The first part of the assignment asked to students to create their own free Twitter account, and then follow the tweets (a message posted via Twitter containing 140 characters or fewer) of at least 40 different people or organizations (also known as Twitter users) related to specific social problem such as homelessness, drug abuse or child neglect. By following a list of Twitter users around a similar topic, students would gain an awareness of conversations happening in the public and professional sphere on their selected topic. The second part of the assignment asked to assess the various types of Twitter user’s and their feeds and determine why or why not they want to “follow” a given account on their public list. I gave the students simple criteria to make their assessment such as who was the Twitter user, who was the intended audience, how did they find this feed and why did you decide to add or not to add the feed to their public list.

I selected food insecurity as my topic for my public list. I started by searching Twitter for individuals and organizations that I already knew were connected with hunger and food insecurity issues…the UN World Food Program, Feeding America, and Michael Pollan. I found it hard to search in Twitter sometime so also went to straight to agency’s website such as the Food Action and Research Center and looked for the Twitter logo on their website, which would link me to their Twitter feed. I also did a few Google searches and located several new individuals such as the Renegade Lunch Lady.

Another way I found Twitter users to follow was to review another user’s following list. Besides a public list, every Twitter user has a list of people they follow (Following) and a list of people who follow them (Followers). For example, I reviewed who the UN World Food Program was following (over 31,000 different users) and discovered a lot of international organizations and food advocates. I wanted a more national and local feel to my public list so looked who Feeding America was following (over 33,000 users), and began following several individuals and groups from their list. Using these two methods, I had list with over 100 different users in a matter of hours. Then, I reviewed my list for about a week, and then began to “Unfollow” some users for a variety of reasons. Some did not post interesting or relevant information, some were too international in their focus, and some posted too much information and cluttered up my list. I eliminated several users until my list was about 80 users. Over the semester, I added a few other Twitter users to my food insecurity list based on recommendations from students, and now I add to the list when I find a new individual or organization through my research or discovery process. I have created several other public lists based on other topics such as social work groups and professionals in Alabama and public health social work. I also follow other people’s public lists.

One of the great things about a Twitter list is that it sorts all the tweets you receive on a specific topic. You can then review only those tweets rather than search through all of tweets posted by the people or groups you follow. I found my own list to be a valuable resource while I was co-teaching the Summer Harvest Course with Jill Wicknick this past summer. My part of the course focused on introducing students to the problem of hunger and food insecurity in Alabama and the US. While reviewing my own list on food insecurity I was able to easily locate the latest data on food insecurity in the US for a lecture, and stayed informed on the food stamp debate among politicians in Washington DC related to the Farm Bill.

How to cite this post:

Hitchcock, L. I. (2013, October 30). How I learned to stop worrying and love Twitter, Part 1 [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2013/10/30/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-twitter-part-1/.