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:
#APM19 – Evolving the Signature Pedagogy with the Social Media Toolkit for Field Educators
On October 27, 2019 at 8:45 AM, during the Annual Program Meeting for the Council on Social Work Education in Denver CO, Mary Jacque Carroll, Allison M. Curington, Robyn V. Snider and I will be presenting on information and tools that field directors can use to guide curricular development and assessment strategies around interprofessional communication with digital and social technologies. If you are still in Denver, please come find us in Governor’s Square 11 – Plaza Building of the conference hotel. We’ll also be sharing how you can develop your own professional social media policies to support communication with students and field agencies as well as how to create activities for students in field to increase understanding of the ethical use of social and digital media in social work practice.
You’ll also learn how to access the Social Media Toolkit for Field Educators, a free resource with educator’s guide and a PowerPoint slide deck.
Teaching & Learning in Social Work by Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
