Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2019
It is that time of year again – the annual review of the Teaching & Learning in Social Work Blog. This will be my fourth year reflecting on the work of this blog; the first end of the year post was in 2016. This year, I am thinking more about my motivation for starting and maintaining this blog for the past seven years. As I think back on why I started Teaching & Learning in Social Work, I’d have to say I wanted to be a more confident writer. Academic writing is not easy. This blog helped me to find my academic voice while allowing me to experiment with writing. I try to be personable in the posts I write, using plain language and concise phrasing. While I can say I am more comfortable with my professional writing, the greatest benefit to this blog is having space to share my work and the work of others in a very non-traditional space. Publishing is a peer-reviewed journal is currency for academics, and it is a narrow, rigid, and polished way to share one’s work. By writing blog posts about my work early in the process, I can share with a wider audience including students, social work practitioners and professionals from other fields. I can also as publish work that may never find a home as a journal article, but is still of value to others. For example, I write frequently about my assignments and classroom activities on this blog. I also post information about my conference presentations here so others can easily reference the materials. Overall, I can say with confidence that writing and publishing Teaching & Learning in Social Work has truly be beneficial and motivating for my academic writing.
For 2019, I had three goals for improving the blog:
What is a Professional Collaboration Network (PCN) & why do you need one?
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of blog posts 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, that I attended along with the other authors of this post. Our goal at this think tank was to brainstorm how to teach students in their new online Doctorate of Social Program (DSW) program about how to develop key stakeholder networks using digital and social technologies. 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 the “whys” and “whats” of a PCN.
Social media and other forms of digital technologies are ubiquitous tools for communication in the 21st century, including in the lives of clients and communities served by social workers. It is clear technological tools are being used to create and maintain relationships when a third of America’s marriages now start online (Cacioppo, Cacioppo, Gonzaga, Ogburn, & VanderWeele, 2013), and 69% of internet users utilize social media, 74% of those daily (Pew Research, 2018). Social work professionals need to understand how these tools work, and learn to use them for creating and maintaining professional relationships with colleagues, communities, and the vulnerable populations served by the profession, and disseminating information to communities of interest.
Reflections from the Summer 2019 Institute on Pedagogy and Technology for Online Courses
Growing up, I loved summertime! I have some fond memories of traveling, riding my bike, swimming, and general goofing off. Now, this past summer I worked….okay, there was a little swimming and a lot of traveling, and I took an online course. Not just any course; I am a proud graduate of the Columbia School of Social Work’s Institute on Pedagogy and Technology for Online Courses. In what has to be the most tardy “what I did over the summer” essay ever, I want to share why I took this course and more importantly, my key takeaways from this experience.
The Institute has been around since 2017 and consists of five weeks of modules with a two-hour live session and homework each week. While it is geared toward training instructors for Columbia’s Online Social Work Program, anyone can apply for the Institute, and completing the training doesn’t obligate one to teach for Columbia’s Online Social Work Program. The Institute models what a typical online course is like at Columbia, and incorporates many best practices for how to teach an online course. In fact, the Institute has won awards from the International E-Learning Association and United States Distance Learning Association. To learn more about the Institute I recommend the following articles:
#APM19 – Building Capacity for International Field Placements: A Program Development Checklist
Are you attending the Council on Social Work Education’s Annual Program Meeting in Denver this week? Want to know more about how to do an international social work field placement? Do you need a session to attend on Friday, October 25th at 7:30 AM? Well, then we have a session for you. Please consider attending the panel discussion about the ongoing development for our international field placement checklist; which I am doing with my good colleagues from the Department of Social Work at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Colleen Fisher, Mary Jacque Carroll, Stacy Moak and I will talk about how the key benefits, challenges, and social justice considerations of developing new international field placement, and review our checklist which is in the early stages of development. Overall, our goals is to share our capacity building strategies for international placements through a practical checklist designed for social work.
For those of you who cannot make the presentation, we are including some details in this blog post. First, here are some screen shots of our checklist:
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
