Social Work Scholarship in the Age of Social Media

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Dec 8, 2015

It has been almost two months since the Council on Social Work Education’s Annual Program Meeting in Denver this past October (#APM2015), and I have been thinking a lot about one of the round table discussions I attended.  The topic was  “Blogs, Podcasts, and Tweets: Reconsidering Scholarship in the Age of Social Media” and the conversation was led by Jonathan Singer of the School of Social Work at Loyola University and Nancy  J. Smyth of School of Social Work at the University at Buffalo.  Its purpose was to engage participants in a dialogue about the ways social media are changing how social work educators and scholars think about, produce, disseminate and measure the outcomes of scholarship in social work.  I recorded the discussion with Periscope, a video recording app for Twitter, and you can watch the video here.  Be warned – the discussion started at 7:30 AM, requiring me to juggle my mobile phone with a large cappuccino.

There were about twenty other people present, representing all areas of social work academia (tenured and nontenured;  administrators, researchers and teachers; large research institutions to small liberal arts colleges).  Here are just some of the questions or concerns mentioned during this discussion:

– How can digital content (blog posts, tweets, podcasts) be incorporated into the tenure and promotion process?
– What is the best way to share ideas about scholarship via social media? Will it get scooped?
– How do we ensure a level of quality with social work scholarship that is published via social media?

I am not sure any of us walked away from the discussion with the answers to all our questions, but I believe the consensus was that social and digital media are powerful tools for sharing and discussing social work scholarship. To be clear,  I’m not arguing that social and digital media will replace the traditional forms of social work scholarship such as journals, books and conference presentations.  I know that writing this blog will not get me tenure, but it does provide me with different ways to connect with other scholars, share ideas and write about topics that don’t fit into traditional publication avenues.  Social media provide vital and rich ways to share, curate and discuss practice and research in social work.  I am convinced that today’s social work faculty need to become savvy enough to share and discuss social work scholarship in digital environments.  Here are my three reasons for using social media as part of my scholarship:

#APM2015 Using Documentaries and Twitter to Meet Macro/Policy Objectives in Social Work Education

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 17, 2015

Today, Dr. Jimmy Young and I are presenting at the 61st Annual Program Meeting of the Council on Social Work Education about our social media assignment using a documentary movie and Twitter. There is a growing awareness that social media can be a valuable tool in social work education to help students develop and practice social work competencies. This presentation will inform participants about the development, implementation and evaluation of a social welfare macro/policy assignment for social work students using social media. In our session, we will The learning objectives for this session include:

1. Understand how the social media platform Twitter can be incorporated into assignments for social work policy and macro courses.

2. Demonstrate how social work educators can assess attainment of competency among social work students using a social media assignment paired with a Rubric for evaluation of the assignment’s learning outcomes.

3. Appreciate the role of professional collaboration in the development, implementation and evaluation of social media-based assignments.

Here is a link to the Prezi that we will show during the presentation.

Fall 2015 Live Twitter Chat Assignment for Social Work Students

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 2, 2015

To help social work students and educators learn about Twitter and develop the skills to participate in a live chat, Jimmy Young of the California State University San Marcos and I (Laurel Hitchcock of University of Alabama at Birmingham) have designed an assignment for social work students that involves joining a live Twitter chat with other social work students, educators and practitioners from around the country to talk about important social and economic justice issues.  The assignment is designed for a policy or macro-practice course, but it can be incorporated into almost any social work course.  Here are the some of the details of the assignment:

1. Students watch the documentary Inequality for All, and then write a brief reaction paper to movie.

2. Then, students participate in the live Twitter chat scheduled for October 8, 2015 at 8:00 PM CST/6:00 PM PST. This chat will be sponsored by #MacroSW, a bi-weekly Twitter chat focusing on macro social work practice issues, and hosted by myself & Jimmy.  During the chat, we will ask questions about the film and income inequality that will guide the flow of the conversation.

3. After the live chat, students write a brief self-reflection essay about the experience of participating in the chat.

While the written parts of the assignment are optional to participate in the chat, we highly recommend some type of reflection so students are engaged with the content from the documentary prior to the chat, and have an opportunity to critically assess how the experience can inform their future social work practice.  We have written in more detail about the assignment in previous blog posts which include detailed instructions for the assignment, grading rubrics and tips on how to introduce your students to Twitter.  Our first chat was held on October 28, 2014, and you can read details about it here, including a transcript of tweets from the conversation.  There is no cost to educators or students to participate in the chat, and we welcome anyone, especially social work practitioners, to join the chat.

Because we are working to improve the chat and the assignment as an educational experience for social work students, we are very interested in any feedback from social work educators.  Please contact us (by clicking on our names below) if you plan to have your class or maybe a student group participate in the chat.  We also welcome questions.

 

Jimmy Young

Laurel Hitchcock

How to cite this post:

Hitchcock, L. I. (2015, October 2).Fall 2015 Live Twitter Chat Assignment for Social Work Students[Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2015/10/02/fall-2015-live-twitter-chat-assignment-for-social-work-students/.

Implementing Service Learning Labs across a Social Work Curriculum

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Sep 29, 2015

Today, D. Scott Batey and I are presenting at the 16th Annual Conference of the Engagement Scholarship Consortium at Penn State about our work with service learning labs in the social work curriculum at UAB.  In this workshop, we will describe how we developed and implemented the service learning labs to date, discussing lessons learned from our planning process.  We hope to provide a model that participants can apply to their own institutions, and will share the next steps for our project, including implementation and assessment of the service labs.  Additionally, there will be time for participants to brainstorm with the presenters and each other. The learning objectives for this session include:

1. Understand strategies to plan & engage multiple partners in developing a community-based service learning project to support student & community outcomes.

2. Demonstrate how educators can duplicate the planning process for curriculum-based service learning projects at their institutions.

3. Appreciate the role of professional collaboration in the planning and development of service learning projects across a curriculum.

You can access a copy of the slides for the workshop PPT Slides for ESC Presentation.

Finally, here is the abstract for our presentation, titled Implementing Service Learning Labs Across a Social Work Curriculum:

Service learning has become an important component of higher education.  In addition to building community investment among a new generation of emerging adults, service learning increases community capacity to meet the many and varied local challenges.  These activities are closely aligned with the professional values of social work and social work education, and graduates of one undergraduate social work program have consistently voiced a desire for more practice opportunities.  To respond to these issues, we began a strategic planning process for integrating service learning into the professional curriculum.