Re-Capping Teaching & Learning in SWK for 2021
One of my academic favorites is Dr. Katie Linder who produces a podcast called You’ve Got This, where she offers advice and examples for other academics as they navigate the world of higher education. Frequently, Katie talks about goal setting and how she works to accomplish her own goals. As I listened to her end-of-the-year podcast about her 2021 goals, all I could think about was my blog.
You see, every year, I set goals for this blog, and rarely do I accomplish these goals. Here is some of the evidence:
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2019
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2018
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2017
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work Blog Posts for 2016
I even tried to set goals for the first quarter of 2020 and publish only seven blog posts. Sigh! Here they are:
Using LinkedIn for #SWVirtualPal
Editor’s note: This post is cross-published on the Social Work Virtual Pal website. Social Work Virtual Pal is a global and virtual community of practice for the social work profession, that digitizes the practice of having a pen pal for professional learning and networking. This community focuses on connection and collaboration among social workers to offer the profession with an opportunity to harness its collective knowledge for the greater good. We have resources for social work educators so, please consider incorporating #SWVirtualPal in your social work course. Learn about Social Work Virtual Pal here.
Social Work Virtual Pal now has a LinkedIn Group for social work students, instructors, and practitioners to connect with other social workers around the world. Similar to our Twitter account, this is a virtual space that digitizes the practice of having a pen pal for professional learning and networking. In addition, this community focuses on connection and collaboration among social workers to offer the profession an opportunity to harness its collective knowledge for the greater good. In this blog post, we offer details for creating a LinkedIn Profile, establishing your digital networking goals, and then joining our LinkedIn Group to find your #SWVirtualPal.
Where to start
LinkedIn is a social networking site designed specifically for professional use and offers a robust user profile system that serves as a digital resume. It is a great place to establish your online presence as a social work student or practitioner. As with any social media platform, you’ll want to start with creating your LinkedIn profile. There are many online tutorials on creating a high-quality LinkedIn profile, and LinkedIn’s Help feature offers many tips and guides on navigating the platform. Before getting started with your profile, you will want to have a professional-looking photo and a copy of your resume handy. Set aside a few hours to create your profile. Here is a good profile checklist designed for college students, but applicable to anyone.
Because #SWVirtualPal is designed to help social workers from around the world connect with other social workers, there are some additional features to consider adding to your profile:
Introducing our new @SWVirtualPal student co-hosts
Social Work Virtual Pal (#SWVirutal Pal) is a global and virtual community of practice for the social work profession, that digitizes the practice of having a pen pal for professional learning and networking. This community focuses on connection and collaboration among social work practitioners, students, and educators to offer the profession an opportunity to harness its collective knowledge for the greater good. Click here to learn more about Social Work Virtual Pal.
In this blog post, we, Dr. Amanda Taylor-Beswick (@amltaylor66) and Dr. Laurel Hitchcock (@laurelhitchcock), co-founders of Social Work Virtual Pal (@SWVirtualPal #SWVirtualPal), are delighted to introduce our new #SWVirtualPal co-hosts: Hannah Chambers, who is studying social work at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work, and Geoffery Kennedy, who is studying social work at the School of Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast. Hannah and Geoffery are aiming to reach out to as many social work students as possible as part of our contribution to connecting the profession; our efforts to support the development of strong and purposive professional relationships across the globe.
They are keen to connect with established student groups working to support learning and professional development; they are keen to unite to support student connections as part of the global social work educational requirements, from the International Federation of Social Workers, that outline how:
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2018
One of the reasons I like a good “end-of-the-year list” is the opportunity to reflect on what I did and did not miss out on over the past year. I’m always thrilled to discover I read one or maybe even two of the most notable books on the New York Times yearly list. Then, I start planning my reading wish list for the coming year, which usually involves magical thinking about reading every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature or the all the Pulitzer Prize winners for Non-Fiction from the last ten years. Even if I don’t actually read all of these books, I believe in having some goals for my reading and other activities. For the Teaching and Learning in Social Work Blog, I had three goals for 2018:
1 .Write or publish 30 blog posts
2. Increase the number of blog subscribers from 100 to 200
3. Publish 10 guest educator blog posts
Here is how those goals worked out:
1. Wrote only 13 blog posts during the year, but published a total of 21 posts (70% completed)
2. Only added 40 more subscribers to the blog (40% completed)
3. Published 8 guest educators posts (80% completed)
While not all my goals were achieved, I was still able to collaborate with others to accomplish some solid writing for the blog including information about projects that I have been working on, and all my conference presentations for the year. Below is a list of this year’s posts, grouped around the topics of projects, guest educator posts, and conference presentations.
Projects: These posts describe new projects that I started or worked on during 2018:
#husITa18/#SWSD2018: A Connected Community of Learning for Practice: Social Work Virtual Pal
On Friday July 6, 2018 at 5:39 PM in Dobber B of the RSD at the 2018 International Social Work, Education & Social Development Conference, we (Amanda Taylor and Laurel Hitchcock) will be presenting about #SWVirtualPal, an online community for social workers from around the globe with the goal of helping them to engage, learn from each other, and hopefully collaborate on international projects. The development of Social Work Virtual Pal, an innovation that builds upon the original ‘penpal’ idea, currently exists as a Twitter account @SWVirtualPal with an accompanying hashtag #SWVirtualPal. Because of our passion for digital and social technology, we designed Social Work Virtual Pal to promote and support connection through computer mediated engagement via Twitter (a microblogging social media platform), where we first met and connected. This community fills a need in global social work education and practice, that aims to link social work students, educators and practitioners from vast distances and across multiple time zones that in turn break down geographical boundaries. without having to leave their own location and using minimal resources.
In previous blog posts, we have shared our thinking around Social Work Virtual Pal, including ways that social work educators can incorporating @SWVirtualPal into the classroom. Here are links to these posts:
– #SWvirtualpal: Hashtagging for Connection
– Social Work Educator’s Guide for #SWVirtualPal
– Social Work Virtual Pal (#SWVirtualPal)… a very ‘real’ connection!
Below you’ll find our conference proposal and a link to our handout.. We’d love it if you joined us on Friday, July 7th and found your own #SWVirtualPal and shared your experiences about using online communities for learning and professional development.
Conference Handout: https://tinyurl.com/SWVirtualPalPoster
Social Work Virtual Pal (#SWVirtualPal)… a very ‘real’ connection!
As with all other professions, social work has history of developing local and global ‘Communities of Practice’ (Farnsworth, Kleanthous & Wenger-Trayner, 2016 ). In previous times, the form and work of these communities were largely dictated by geography and cost. The time and financial implications of meeting ‘in person’ very much shaped the nature, the scope and the possibilities of the work; and meeting in person, at that time, was often the only feasible thing to do. The emergence of communication and social media type technologies has changed all of that. Dating back 30 years, new forms of social work academic communities (husITa, 2017) began to surface. Inasmuch as online communities and connections continue to materialize, survive and thrive, sadly notions of ‘real’ still permeate conversations regarding the online world (Couts, 2013; Zgoda & Shane, 2018).
A recent example of a ‘real’ community of learning for practice is that of Social Work Virtual Pal, with its Twitter feed @SWVirtualPal and an accompanying hashtag #SWVirtualPal; the former used to facilitate connection and latter to collate and curate conversations. We, Laurel Hitchcock and Amanda Taylor developed Social Work Virtual Pal due to the benefits we each found from meeting regularly online. What began as a chance meeting on Twitter has turned into a connection that enables us to discuss issues relating to social work education in the US and the UK, and to consider the use of new technologies to support teaching, learning and global connections. To learn more about Social Work Virtual Pal, please check out our previous posts:
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
