Twitter Project for HBSE Course

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Dec 12, 2014

Dr. Becky Anthony (@becky_anthony) is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Work at Salisbury University and Ms. Bobbi Arrington (@bobbielle) is an instructor at School of Social Work at Monmouth University.   In this blog post, they write about how they developed and managed an assignment using Twitter in their Human Behavior and the Social Environment Courses.  In another post,  Ms. Arrington interviews Ms. Nadia Jeter, a BSW student who completed the assignment.

As professional users of Twitter, we understand how social media can be utilized to share knowledge, resources, and information.  As professors, we wondered would students be able to gain similar professional benefits if they utilized social media, specifically Twitter, in the classroom.  To help us answer this question, we created the “Twitter Project” for our Human Behavior and the Social Environment (HBSE) students.

Based on the course design where the content of each week is about a specific diverse community, we assigned students into groups and gave each group a specific diverse community. These communities included: religious communities, people with disabilities, social classism in the United States, African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and LGBTQ populations. Each student was asked to post, using our classroom hashtag, two tweets per week about their assigned community. They were encouraged to post about news, current events, and advocacy opportunities, focusing on examples of social and economic injustice. Learners were graded based on writing two posts (or tweets) per week.  The assignment was worth eight points.  A student received a point each week they posted two tweets that advocated on behalf of an issue that affected their particular population.

Follow-up to 10/28 #MacroSW Twitter Chat

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 7, 2014

How do you get social work students passionate about policy issues?  Jimmy Young and I have an answer for you – live Twitter chats!  We were overwhelmed with the response from social work educators and students to our live Twitter Chat last Tuesday, October 28th.  My best estimate is that close to 200 people, mostly students from at least six universities across the country, participated in our one-hour chat about income inequality.  You can read a copy of the transcript from the chat here.  What I observed during the chat was that students were engaged in open, thoughtful and respectful conversations about the problems in our country due to the wide income gap between the rich and poor.
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The chat was hosted by the #MacroSW Chat folks who graciously allowed Jimmy and I to co-moderate a discussion about the film Inequality for All.   When organizing this event, we targeted to social work students in social welfare policy and macro practice classes. Click here  to read about how we set up the chat and developed an assignment using Twitter.

Many thanks to #MacroSW Chat, especially Pat Shelly (@PatShellySSW) of the University of Buffalo School of Social Work and Karen Zgoda (@karenzgoda), Instructor at Bridgewater State University, who sponsored and promoted our chat.  And a big thanks to everyone who participated in the chat – including social work students and educators from Appalachia State, Bridgewater State University, California State University – Long Beach, Tarleton State University, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Buffalo School of Social Work, and the University of Nebraska Kearney.

How to cite this post:

Hitchcock, L. I. (2014, November 7). Follow-up to 10/28 #MacroSW Twitter Chat[Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2014/11/07/follow-up-to-1028-macrosw-twitter-chat/.

Is social media “creeping” into field education?

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 22, 2014

Social and digital media are creeping into social work practice. This is how Mishna and her colleagues (2012) describe the development of online communication technologies in social work practice (including the use of email, texting and social networking sites such as Facebook).  In their qualitative study, they interviewed 15 licensed social work practitioners about their use of online communication tools with clients and discovered that social and digital media tools appear to be changing how social workers interact with clients, for better or worse.  One of the more significant themes they reported was that digital communication is being driven by client need/demand and that ethical boundaries may be crossed before a social worker even realizes what happened.

If social media and other online communication tools are creeping into social work practice at the agency and community levels, then it must also be creeping into social work field education. How? And more importantly, how are we as a profession managing it in field education? I don’t teach social work field education, but I am always interested in how my courses inform and help students transition to field education during their last semester of BSW education. Specifically, I want to understand how social and digital media are becoming a part of field education and how are students, field educators and field agencies using these tools.

For the past few semesters, I have incorporated a Twitter assignment into my macro practice course which students in our program take the semester before their field placement.  Every semester I observe how they carry their newfound knowledge and skills with social media into their field agencies.  I recently wrote an article for the Field Educator about these observations, which range from deleting their Twitter account to creating and managing a Twitter account for their field placement agency. While I am a sample size of one, I talk with field educators every chance I get, asking what they are doing with social media.  Recently, one field director told me she had her students ask their field instructors about the agency’s social media policy (a statement about who can post what on social media related to the agency) on the first day.  If the agency doesn’t have a social media policy, then the students were required write a  social media policy for the agency and present it to senior management as part of their learning contract.  She said it has been a very successful task for both the students and their field agency partners. We also talked about the possibility of students writing their own social media policies, a statement that looks a lot like informed consent where a student articulates when, how, where and why they will or will not interact with clients or communities via social media.  This step helps the students articulate their ethical boundaries in advance, before they find themselves in the middle of an ethical dilemma with a client or agency and not sure how they got there.

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.

Using Storify in the Classroom: A Student’s Perspective from Natalie Savoy

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Mar 10, 2014

Back in January, Dr. Jamie Mitchell from Wayne State University wrote about an assignment for her Human Behavior in the Social Environment Theory class that incorporated Storify, a social media platform that allows users to curate a digital narrative about any topic.  The assignment required students to articulate how a theory of their choosing could be applied to a real-world, under-served population or problem of interest using Storify.  As a follow-up to Dr. Mitchell’s post, I asked one her MSW students, Natalie Savoy, to share her thoughts on the assignment, what it was like to use social media in the classroom and how social media might be incorporated in her future role as a social worker.  Here are Natalie’s responses to my questions:

What was your initial reaction to using social media for an assignment in your Human Behavior in the Social Environment Theory course?

Using Storify to Explore Theory in the MSW Classroom by Dr. Jamie Mitchell

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jan 5, 2014

Dr. Jamie Mitchell is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Wayne State University.  In this blog post, Dr. Mitchell writes about how she incorporated Storify into a theory-based assignment for an MSW class last semester.  

When I realized this past summer that a standardized core assignment in my regular Human Behavior in the Social Environment course had been changed in a way that limited the ability of students to explore a theory of their choosing during the semester, I began testing educational technology tools as a means of restoring that opportunity in a fresh way. I know from experience that some MSW students may view social and developmental theory as abstract and somewhat dated; and I work incredibly hard to highlight the relevance of having a strong theoretical foundation to praxis. It’s important to me that students connect with and write about at least one theory that engages them personally, leading me to develop this new assignment centered on Storify.  Storify is a website that allows one to curate a digital narrative on any topic using an integrated social media search engine to locate sources such as tweets, blog posts, YouTube videos, and Google images. That “story” can then be published publicly and shared on other social media platforms.

My goal in developing this assignment was to give students an opportunity to articulate how a theory of their choosing could be applied to a real-world underserved population or problem of interest. Before the course began, I developed my own test Storify that could serve as an example to students and used it to develop a detailed rubric.

From the first day of class I introduced the new assignment and fielded questions from anxious students who were not comfortable with social media. To provide support for adopting Storify, I created a folder on my course website with existing tutorial videos and fact sheets on using Storify, and I developed my own resource for students on how to integrate a variety of content using bookmarklets to capture content around the web to import into Storify. I also worked through any glitches with students as they experimented with the platform and reserved a few minutes at the end of each class to demonstrate Storify functionality throughout the semester.

I was beyond impressed with how invested students were in creating high-quality digital narratives. The majority of students included more sources than were required, and went further in contextualizing how each source contributed to an understanding of the theory’s application to the issue or population than was required by the assignment rubric. Students also chose topics that were deeply personal to them and incredibly germane to the field of social work; covering topics such as human trafficking, school bullying, rape culture, racial profiling, immigrant experiences, inner city poverty, and LGBTQ empowerment. I used my own twitter account to share student projects, even tweeting prominent authors like Dr. Brené Brown when students utilized the Shame Resilience Theory she pioneered. I consider this initial foray into employing Storify as a course assignment to be a resounding success!

I would advise instructors who are interested in developing an assignment with Storify to familiarize themselves with the variety of existing resources such as free tutorial videos (Storify Guided Tour and Getting Started) and tip sheets, to experiment with the service themselves, and to explore the wealth of existing Storify stories for inspiration. Storify is free, intuitive, and user-friendly but it can be optimized by using additional strategies. For example, Google Chrome offers a bookmarklet or browser extension for Storify that allows users to bookmark content around the web and store it in a collection within Storify for later use. The website Topsy allows one to search for tweets by key words and hashtags as far back as two years, well beyond the six months that Twitter archives. Students may also find it useful to know that in addition to using the internal search engine within Storify, and using a bookmarklet to capture outside content, they can copy and paste the URL of any webpage into Storify to import content.

I’m excited about the possibilities for integrating Storify in other ways in my MSW classroom. This refreshing platform has proven to be a reliable and creative social media tool for encouraging students to research, contextualize, and curate content. Below are just a few examples of Storify submissions by my MSW students:

Feminist Theory, Slut Shaming, and Rape Culture by whitentonm

Racial Profiling: Do I Look Suspicious? by Tony Theel

Prison: The New Slavery by MStellini

Women in Sports: Woman first, athlete second by Natalie Savoy

Opening Our Eyes To The Truth About Older Adult Abuse by Melissa Stumpo

The Disney Princess Effect on Young Girls and Feminist Theory by sternb13

Walking the Tightrope of Motherhood by Ellen Coleman

**Note, Storify is a public domain and students are aware that all submissions are public until removed**

How to cite this post:

Mitchell, J. (2014, January 5). Using Storify to Explore Theory in the MSW Classroom by Dr. Jamie Mitchell [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2014/01/05/using-storify-to-explore-theory-in-the-msw-classroom/.