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.
#APM19 – Changing Teaching Practices for Technology: Using the SAMR Model for Technology Integration
On October 27, 2019 at 10:00 AM, during the Annual Program Meeting for the Council on Social Work Education in Denver CO, Melanie Sage and I will be sharing some insights from Chapter 4 of our book, Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology, co-written with Nancy Smyth. If you are still in Denver, please come find us in the Majestic Ballroom –Tower Building of the conference hotel. We will be sharing how Puentedura’s SAMR Model for Technology Integration can be used to incorporate technology into traditional social justice assignments in social work education. There will also be time to adopt one of your current assignments using the SMAR Model.
Additionally, we’ll be talking about our virtual book group that will be launch in January 2020. You can read more about it here:
For those of you who cannot make the presentation, we are including the details in this blog post.
Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology Book Group
If you teach social work with technology, either online or in a traditional classroom, we (Melanie, Nancy and Laurel) invite you to learn with and from peers in this free book group – Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology. Goals of this virtual book group are to: 1) create a supportive learning community; and 2) provide space for reflection about one’s own professional development with teaching with technology.
This group will run from January to June 2020, with monthly meetings and a moderated online private Facebook group. The group will include live virtual meetings, with discussion moderated by an author and a guest educator. In between meetings, social work educators will lead and moderate book discussions, and offer reflective questions and simple learning tasks. Participants should have access to the book by January 2020. The schedule follows:
#SWTech – An Introduction and History of the Online Group
Editor’s Note: This blog post was written by the following users of the #SWTech Community – Melanie Sage, Assistant Professor of Social Work at the University at Buffalo; Laurel Iverson Hitchcock, Associate Professor of Social Work at the University of Alabama at Birmingham: Jonathan B. Singer, Associate Professor of Social Work at Loyola University and founder of the Social Work Podcast; and Nancy J. Smyth, Professor & Dean at the School of Social Work at the University at Buffalo.
This is an introduction to #SWTech, an online network of social workers interested and engaged with technology for social good. Our goal is to help individuals new to #SWTech learn about the norms, history, and general merrymaking within the community. This statement can also service as a resource to send people who are interested in learning more about #SWTech.
Description
#SWTech is a hashtag used by people and groups interested in the intersection of social work and technology. People use #swtech primarily on Twitter, but the hashtag is occasionally used on other social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram. This hashtag is used in tweets and other posts on social media to share about such topics as:
#SWDE 2019 – Imagining Social Work Education into the Future: Skills for Social Justice in a Technology-Mediated World
On April 11th, Melanie Sage, Ellen Belluomini, and I presented at the 2019 Social Work Distance Education Conference in San Antonio, TX on a topic that is beginning to get some traction in social work – the future of social work education for practice with technology. Technology is profoundly shaping the world, especially in the delivery of education. Concurrently, services like telehealth, predictive analytics, and technology aids (i.e. Fitbits, apps and home listening devices) affect service delivery. Given these changes, how do social workers promote social justice and support privacy and equity? And consider needs of the vulnerable while harnessing technology for good? How does social work redefine the profession in the face of algorithmic solutions to human problems? Our goal was to introduce a dialogue about what’s happening, where are gaps in social work education, and how programs might reinvent in a rapidly-changing environment.
If you were not all to make the session or didn’t attend the conference, we are sharing information from the presentation, to make the content more accessible to all and to help promote more discourse among social workers about the future of the profession.
Here are the slides from the presentation:
Teaching & Learning in Social Work by Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
