How to participate in a Live Twitter Chat – Tips for Social Workers

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jan 8, 2015

Live Twitter chats (a scheduled event when Twitter users communicate via tweets in real time) can be a great way for social workers and students to stay informed about all types of issues and interests relevant to the profession. For example, medical experts from the Mayo Clinic frequently host chats to share and discuss new treatment options in healthcare. Professionals can also use this tool to meet and talk (for free) with new colleagues from just around the corner to the other side the world. A good example is the #SPSM chat which hosts a weekly forum for mental health professionals interested in using social media to prevent suicide. During a chat like this one, a social worker might engage with influential thought leaders in their field and make their own contributions to the professional conversations that influence and shape social work practice. The Political Social Worker suggests that Twitter can be a powerful networking tool for social workers in her blog post The Benefits of Live Twitter Chats.

But participating in a live Twitter chat requires preparation. Live chats move fast and have guidelines to set the parameters of the conversation. More obvious is the need to be familiar with Twitter (a microblogging platform) before participating in a chat. Understanding what a tweet is and how to write one is a must to chat on Twitter. Being able to communicate and network with professionals in online environments is considered an important digital media skill for any 21^st century professional including social workers (Rheingold, 2012).

Here are some practical tips for social work students, educators and practitioners interested in being part of a live Twitter chat:

Twitter for Social Work Student Organizations

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Sep 11, 2014

About two weeks ago Cyber Social Worker (@CyberSocialWork) sent me a direct message via Twitter asking if and how I work with social work student organizations to use social media, specifically Twitter.  The short answer was…well, not really…but what a great idea!  I immediately sent a tweet to the student social work organizations that I was already following on Twitter, asking how they engaged via social media.  Then, I created a public list of Social Work Students Organizations for my Twitter profile.  While a few dedicated student groups responded, I had only five organizations to add to my list.  Is this because I am not very connected in the Twitterverse, especially with social work student organizations? Or maybe student groups in social work are just not using Twitter?  Maybe they are on Facebook or Instagram? Or are they organizing the old-school way with paper and pens in an empty classroom after hours? Social work students and educators may be missing an opportunity here.

Twitter: The Educational Commons By Justin Vest

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Dec 9, 2013

Justin Vest graduated with his BSW from the University of Montevallo in December 2013 and begins the MSW program at the University of Alabama in January 2014.  In this post, he discusses how his use of Twitter grew from a class assignment to a professional tool.

Twitter can be about celebrities and national or global trends, but I find its value in connecting users with educational content. I was first introduced to Twitter as an educational tool in Spring 2013 while taking Dr. Laurel Hitchcock’s class on social work with groups, communities, and organizations. The assignment encouraged students to engage with social media as a means of discovering information and connecting with other professionals. Over a relatively short period of time I have modified my own Twitter usage from that of  fulfilling a course requirement to actively utilizing it as a tool for continuous learning. Above all else, I feel my role in the Twitter-sphere is that of student. I have a wide array of interests (mostly professional) that I keep up with via Twitter to the point that it is one of my primary sources for information regarding specific topics. To do this, I have created lists reflecting professional interests and categorized most of the people and organizations I follow into one of them. I am then able to filter out everything in my feed except tweets from pages within a specific list. Other Twitter users can also choose to follow these lists.

As a social networking site, Twitter can also be a valuable tool for networking with other professionals. While I don’t personally generate a lot of interactive content, I have found it to be very useful in connecting with other social workers who share my own interests in macro practice, particularly in areas of policy. Given the limited emphasis on macro practice within social work education, it is nice to be able to follow the work and thoughts of social workers employed in the macro arena. Several great resources that I’ve seen come from Rachel L. West including this one on how to search for macro job listings and this one on using social media to establish a career in macro social work. Others of note include:

• Melinda Lewis (@melindaklewis), author of Classroom to Capitol blog
• Congressional Social Work Caucus (@SocWorkCaucus)
• Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy (@CRISPontheHill)

Perhaps the thing I find most fascinating about Twitter is its ability to give a voice to people who may not otherwise have the means to express their thoughts, feelings, and opinions. Twitter and other social media sites were credited, at least partially, with many of the successes of the Arab Spring. It was paramount to Occupy Wall Street organizers’ ability to call supporters to action at a moment’s notice and it provided a venue for many to express their frustration and educate others about issues of systemic racism in the U.S. after the verdict in the Trayvon Martin murder trial. Most of the pages I follow provide information that is not readily available via mainstream media sources and it is a great benefit to essentially use Twitter lists as a RSS feed pertaining to topics I want to learn more about.

One of my constant struggles with Twitter is determining what to share. The vast majority of my tweets contain links to outside sources, typically with the intent to inform others of something I believe is important or otherwise of note. Many things translate simply into an obvious category of professional interest like tweeting against cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in order to prevent reduced access to food for low-income households. Other topics do not fall neatly into the purview of social work and may be more prone to divisiveness. My main concern with these topics (think partisan politics) is how it will appear to a potential employer, so I attempt to convey an educational message while not necessarily endorsing the content. I do also plan to get in the routine of blogging about policy issues from a social work perspective over the winter break as means of both exploring in greater depth some political ideas as well as highlighting my professional values and skills to potential employers.

How to cite this post:

Vest, Justin. (2013, December 9). Twitter: The Educational Commons By Justin Vest [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2013/12/09/twitter-the-educational-commons/.

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/.