#SWDE2019 – A Toolkit for Social and Digital Media Policies in Field Education
It is the second day of the 2019 Social Work Distance Education Conference and at 10 AM, I’ll be in the Peraux Room of the St. Anthony Hotel to share our poster about the Social Media Toolkit for Field Educators. This is a project I have been working on with Allison Curington (University of Alabama), Mary Jacque Carroll (University of Alabama at Birmingham),and Robin Snider (Jacksonville State University). The poster will provide both information and tools that field directors can use to guide curricular development of learning approaches and assessment strategies to achieve practice outcomes. Participants will learn how to access the Social Media Toolkit for Field Educators, a free resource with educator’s guide and a PowerPoint slide deck.
If you can’t make it to the poster, I am included all the important details in this blog post.
#SWTech: The Beginnings of an Online Community
In just a few days, Google will eliminate its online community platform, Google+, and with it will go the first iteration of our #SWTech Online Community. This has me thinking about the whys and whats of how our #SWTech community started and developed, and how it will soon evolve. This blog post is my first attempt to chronicle the people and platforms that shaped our community. My methods were simple. I sent emails to some members requesting information, and talked over the phone and video calls with others. I readily acknowledge the bias and poor memory that I bring to this brief and simple historical record. In fact, this was a common theme I heard from others. I think Neil Ballantyne, Senior Lecturer at Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and board member of husITa, said it best when I asked him how he discovered the #SWTech group:
#APM18 Helping Social Work Students develop a Professional Online Presence for Interprofessional Communication
Laurel, Allison & Mary Jacque
On Thursday, November 8, 2018, I will be presenting with Allison Curington and Mary Jacque Carroll, both field directors extraordinaire, at the Field Education Institute at the Council on Social Work Education’s 2018 Annual Program Meeting. As part of the institute, we are facilitating a one hour on how field educators can help social work students develop a professional online presence for interprofessional communication. We will be sharing information and tools that field directors can use to guide curricular development of learning approaches and assessment strategies to achieve practice outcomes around interprofessional communication with digital and social technologies. One of the tools we will be sharing is the second edition of Social Media Toolkit for Social Work Field Educators, which has been revised with content based on the 2018 NASW Code of Ethics.
You can access your free copy of the toolkit here: https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2018/11/05/revised-social-media-toolkit/
Social Work Educator Tips: Guidelines for Online Discussion Forums
Karen Zgoda is a social work educator, a Doctoral Student in Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, MA, and a founding member of #MacroSW, an online community for macro social workers. In this blog post, she shares her tips for helping social work students learn how to be professional in online learning environments. This post is cross-listed on Karen’s blog at https://karenzgoda.org/.
Did you know that 95% of Americans own a cell phone of some kind, 7 in 10 Americans use social media, and that 89% of U.S. adults currently use the Internet? In fact, many check the most popular social media sites daily:
Despite the ubiquitous nature of technology and social media, we should not assume that social work students know the rules of online etiquette, especially online etiquette in professional settings. Students may not realize they are using casual language, making inappropriate or snarky comments, or revealing much about their personal lives they would not want their supervisors or professors to know. In fact, students are learning to regularly clean up their social media to take better care of their online reputations and their brand. If students are not sure what this means, I show a video clip from the The Ellen DeGeneres Show that highlights very effectively in 10 minutes why this can be problematic:
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2017
One of my favorite things to do at the end of the year is to read all of the “year-in-review” lists. Books, records, movies, top ten social work journal articles – it doesn’t matter what the list is about, I’ll read it. I am always curious how and why people choose to rank their favorite things from the year. This must be because I find it hard to choose a favorite book or movie when there are so many good options, and how can I exclude anything as a social worker, the profession that loves diversity and strives for inclusion. So for 2017, I offer a list for the Teaching & Learning in Social Work Blog. Not the top-ten blog posts, but the entire year. Here are the numbers:
Number of Blog Posts in 2017 – My goals was to write or publish at least two posts a month, which happened more months than not:
Total Blog Posts = 25
Highest number of Blog Posts published in one month = 6 (October)
Lowest number of Blog Posts published in one month = 0 (August)
Guest Educator Posts in 2017 – Another goal I have for this blog is to provide a space for others to share their work, particularly work that does not fit into the traditional academic publication venues. For 2017, I am thrilled that eight social work educators wrote seven different blog posts about their scholarship of teaching and learning for the blog. I want to thank all of these authors for sharing their work and for all they do to educate future social workers!
Scholarship Dissemination Posts – My final goal for the year was to write more about my own scholarship by sharing content from conference presentations and any published articles. I published seven posts about national conference presentations with colleagues, and wrote about one article I had published in 2017. Clearly, I am doing more conferencing than publishing.
Below is a list of this year’s post grouped around the topics of assignments, projects, guest educator posts, and conference presentations.
Harnessing Technology for Social Work Scholarship: #CSWResearch Day at Ohio State University
The blog post was written by myself and Melanie Sage of the University at Buffalo, and we describe our visit with the College of Social Work at the Ohio State University in August 2017, where we talked about how social work faculty can harness technology for their social work scholarship. We also interviewed two of our OSU colleagues, Drs. Bridget Freisthler and Holly Dabelko-Schoeny, about our presentation and how it supports their use of technology for scholarship. This is cross-posted at the Human Services Information Technology Association’s (HusITa) Blog: http://www.husita.org/harnessing-social-media-for-social-work-research-and-scholarship/.
Dissemination to the right stakeholders is a crucial part of social work research. However, as social work academics, we are often trained to think that publication in peer-reviewed journals is the pinnacle of sharing our research with our peers and the academy. But for our work to have substantial impact, we want it to reach service providers, communities, and consumers, too. Access to peer-reviewed journals can be challenging due to cost,availability, and complexity. Increasingly, academics and research scientists are turning to social media platforms as a way to disseminate and engage with others about their work.
One of the early studies looking at the value of social media in research dissemination was an article by Darling, Shiffman, Côté, and Drew (2013) titled The role of twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication. Based on a survey of 116 marine biologists, they found that scientists who used Twitter for professional reasons could rapidly develop new research ideas and easily share works-in-progress for pre-reviews. Additionally, these researchers found they could communicate their findings not only with other academics, but also with broader audiences such as decision makers, journalists and the public in a way that could amplify the scientific and social impact of publications, and that sharing in this way increased their citations too. Here is an infographic of the article’s major findings.
So how does this translate to social work research? Melanie Sage and I present to multiple audiences, from peers to conference attendees, about the role of social media in social work scholarship. For years, we have been using social media and technology tools to connect with colleagues, share research, and collaborate. Based on our expertise in this area, we were invited to lead a discussion about the role of technology in social work scholarship at the Social Work’s Grand Challenge Initiative Conference (#GC4SW) held at the University of Southern California (April 25-28, 2017). In this discussion, we shared the ways in which social media can be a tool to help social work academics and practitioners to discover and share knowledge, as well as build relationships for collaborative work. Social media platforms are well-placed to allow social workers across the professional continuum to engage with each other, creating communities of learning and practice that bridge the gap between practice and research in social work. We suggested four practices with social media for advancing the Grand Challenges for Social Work; you can read about them here.
Teaching & Learning in Social Work by Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Laurel Hitchcock
Photo Credit: Jared Bash
