Developing a Personalized Social Media Policy for Social Work Practice
Editor’s Note: This blog post is adapted from the Second Edition of the Social Media Toolkit for Social Work Field Educators.
There are many reasons for social workers to have a personalized social media policy – to maintain boundaries, protect privacy and confidentiality, and model professional behavior. To be clear, I am not referring to the policy that your organization or institution might have, directing the faculty, staff, and students on when it is okay to use social media, but one that you develop and follow as an individual practitioner, student, and/or educator. The purpose of a social media policy is to inform clients, students, colleagues, and others about when, how, and why you use social media in a professional capacity. From an ethical lens, this is a recommended practice per National Association of Social Worker’s (NASW) Technology in Social Work Practice Standard 2.10 – Social Media Policy and fits with the NASW Code of Ethics standards of informed consent with clients (1.3e-i), respect with colleagues (2.1), and when conducting supervision and consultation (3.1).
The following steps provide a guide for developing a social media policy that can be used as an assignment in a classroom with students or adapted for practitioners:
Internet Survival Guide for Social Workers
Agata Dera, MSW, is an Associate and Live Support Specialist with the Columbia School of Social Work’s (CSSW) Online Campus, where she works with social work faculty and students in online courses to optimize the digital learning environment. In this blog post, she shares tips and practices when connecting to the internet for online learning and engagement.
Introduction
At the Columbia School of Social Work (CSSW) my primary responsibility is to provide technical support to our online community. At the time of writing this piece, I have supported roughly 27 unique online social work courses at CSSW. In the last few years, I have offered technical guidance to hundreds of students, faculty members, Deans, guest speakers and other personnel.
As an award-winning online program, our goal is to provide our students with the highest quality of online learning in the most thought-provoking, innovative, engaging and accessible environment. One of the things that makes this possible is our program’s technology standards for hardware, particularly when it comes to internet connection. As part of our program’s tech requirements, students, faculty and guests connect to our live class sessions via Ethernet, (a wired connection to the internet), as opposed to Wi-fi, (a wireless connection). This allows us to design creative classrooms which focus on student growth while limiting any potential interruptions due to technical issues such as loss of internet connection.
In this post, you will find tips and resources about connecting to the internet, which I have found to be really useful. Please note that this post is based on my experience proving tech assistance to an online social work community, and its intention is to support anyone interested in learning more about the internet and ways to stabilize their connection.
The unprecedented shift into teleworking; a personal story about working remotely in social work education
Editor’s Note: Agata Dera, MSW, is an Associate and LiveSupport Specialist with the Columbia School of Social Work’s (CSW) Online Campus, where she works with social work faculty and students in online courses to optimize the digital learning environment. In this post, she discussed how she transitioned from an office space to remote working. As many of us are working at home because of the COVID19 pandemic, Agata offers practical suggestions and encouragement to this new way of working for many social work professionals. You can connect with Agata on Twitter at @agataddera.
Over the past few weeks of this year, as the world stands together in the face of a pandemic, I have witnessed so many of my colleagues experience an unprecedented shift to working from home. As according to Forbes (Eisenberg, 2020), it is likely that more than half of our workforce is now working remotely, I cannot help but to reminisce of my transition into a virtual workforce. I hope that by sharing my story with you, you will have the insight I wish I once had to enhance your productivity and overall success.
For the past several years, I have been solely working from home due to severe health issues. Working remotely provided me with the flexibility I needed to be able to recover from several major spinal cord surgeries while also continuing my professional career. I truly believe that for me, being able to work from home is a blessing as my career is such a big part of my identity.
Academic and Professional Blogging
Editor’s Note: This post is one in a series about how technology can be used to develop and sustain one’s professional network. The idea for this post came from a think tank hosted by the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work in June 2019, looking for a way to teach students in their new online Doctorate of Social Program (DSW) program about how to develop key stakeholder networks in relation to a substantive topic area. In this series, we are exploring the concept of a Professional Collaboration Network (PCN), which are technology-mediated user-centered relationship constellations designed to enhance or enrich connections, knowledge, and professional opportunities. This post reviews how academic and professional blogging can be used to share and curate information for practice communities.
Blogs, and the act of blogging, have come a long way since the mid 1990’s when they essentially performed as personal journals published on the internet; they are now often fully fledged outlets for journalism, advocacy, and academic research (Smith, 2010, Kanter and Fine, 2010, Kirkup, 2010, Rosenberg, 2009). Although some may feel that blogging has become passé in the current and crowded social media landscape, others would argue blogging is alive and well (Fiesler, 2019; Perry, 2015). The main goal of this blog post is to describe why and how academic blogging can help contribute to your Professional Collaboration Network (PCN), and offer some basic tips for getting started. To learn more about PCNs, please read this post:
Today most people know what a blog is; in fact ,you are staring at one right now. The bigger question as academics or professionals is why would we want to develop/maintain a blog? Here we dive into just a few of the many answers to this question:
Social Work in the Times of COVID-19: One way to share, document & support
The COVID-19 public emergency is unprecedented and affects our personal and professional lives. From trying to find diapers and toilet paper to figuring out how to work remotely with students and colleagues, few of us were prepared for the speed of which this emergency changed our daily lives. And we have yet to know and understand what things will look like in the next few weeks or months.
Thus, we are trying to capture this moment in history by harnessing the power of technology for social good. Through short videos posted on Flipgrid (a social learning platform designed for video discussion forums), we are hoping to create community while also collecting our stories as social workers (practitioners and educators). We hope these stories can help us support and learn from each other during a time of social distancing as well as provide a source of information for future directions for the profession (i.e. what are the best ways to work remotely as a social worker or what are best practices for transitioning learning to online environments). We anticipate that these videos will provide a wealth of information for blogs posts or other scholarship that will inform how social work needs to adapt to complex social problems. This might include qualitative thematic analysis or quotes from posts. Any peer-reviewed content will be anonymized, but please remember that these posts are a form of public social media.
How do you do relational Twitter?: Developing your Professional Collaboration Network
Editor’s Note: This post is one in a series about how technology can be used to develop and sustain one’s professional network. The idea for this post came from a think tank hosted by the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work in June 2019, looking for a way to teach students in their new online Doctorate of Social Program (DSW) program about how to develop key stakeholder networks in relation to a substantive topic area. In this series, we are exploring the concept of a Professional Collaboration Network (PCN), which are technology-mediated user-centered relationship constellations designed to enhance or enrich connections, knowledge, and professional opportunities. This post covers how you can develop and nurture professional relationships with Twitter.
This is the third blog post in a series on using Twitter to create Professional Collaboration Networks (PNCs). Previous posts defined PCNs and discussed the value of Twitter as a network and how it can benefit lifelong learning, and shared some best practices. There are many professional reasons for being on Twitter, including disseminating one’s own work, announcing happenings, seeking help, and learning from others. To be successful in most of these tasks, you need to be plugged into a social network of people who are motivated to share your work. This post addresses how one moves from using Twitter to follow others and announce your work to developing real relationships with the real people at the keyboards.
This post is built from real-life experience of the amazing professional experiences and friendships that can come from the effective use of PCNs. About six years ago, I (Melanie, the first author of this post) connected with a small group of social workers who were using Twitter, which led me to connect with folks like Jonathan Singer (@socworkpodcast) who I went on to present and write book chapters with, and Laurel Hitchcock and Nancy Smyth, with whom I spent three years writing the book Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology. Beyond these meaningful work products, social work relationships on Twitter have evolved into sharing meals, spending time in each other’s homes, and splitting Airbnb’s at social work conferences across the nation. Not to mention people I can lean on, and am happy to support on good and hard days.
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
