Twitter Project for HBSE Course

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Dec 12, 2014

Dr. Becky Anthony

Ms. Bobbi Arrington

Dr. Becky Anthony (@becky_anthony) is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Work at Salisbury University and Ms. Bobbi Arrington (@bobbielle) is an instructor at School of Social Work at Monmouth University.   In this blog post, they write about how they developed and managed an assignment using Twitter in their Human Behavior and the Social Environment Courses.  In another post,  Ms. Arrington interviews Ms. Nadia Jeter, a BSW student who completed the assignment.

As professional users of Twitter, we understand how social media can be utilized to share knowledge, resources, and information.  As professors, we wondered would students be able to gain similar professional benefits if they utilized social media, specifically Twitter, in the classroom.  To help us answer this question, we created the “Twitter Project” for our Human Behavior and the Social Environment (HBSE) students.

Based on the course design where the content of each week is about a specific diverse community, we assigned students into groups and gave each group a specific diverse community. These communities included: religious communities, people with disabilities, social classism in the United States, African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and LGBTQ populations. Each student was asked to post, using our classroom hashtag, two tweets per week about their assigned community. They were encouraged to post about news, current events, and advocacy opportunities, focusing on examples of social and economic injustice. Learners were graded based on writing two posts (or tweets) per week.  The assignment was worth eight points.  A student received a point each week they posted two tweets that advocated on behalf of an issue that affected their particular population.

Follow-up to 10/28 #MacroSW Twitter Chat

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 7, 2014

How do you get social work students passionate about policy issues?  Jimmy Young and I have an answer for you – live Twitter chats!  We were overwhelmed with the response from social work educators and students to our live Twitter Chat last Tuesday, October 28th.  My best estimate is that close to 200 people, mostly students from at least six universities across the country, participated in our one-hour chat about income inequality.  You can read a copy of the transcript from the chat here.  What I observed during the chat was that students were engaged in open, thoughtful and respectful conversations about the problems in our country due to the wide income gap between the rich and poor.
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The chat was hosted by the #MacroSW Chat folks who graciously allowed Jimmy and I to co-moderate a discussion about the film Inequality for All.   When organizing this event, we targeted to social work students in social welfare policy and macro practice classes. Click here  to read about how we set up the chat and developed an assignment using Twitter.

Many thanks to #MacroSW Chat, especially Pat Shelly (@PatShellySSW) of the University of Buffalo School of Social Work and Karen Zgoda (@karenzgoda), Instructor at Bridgewater State University, who sponsored and promoted our chat.  And a big thanks to everyone who participated in the chat – including social work students and educators from Appalachia State, Bridgewater State University, California State University – Long Beach, Tarleton State University, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Buffalo School of Social Work, and the University of Nebraska Kearney.

How to cite this post:

Hitchcock, L. I. (2014, November 7). Follow-up to 10/28 #MacroSW Twitter Chat[Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2014/11/07/follow-up-to-1028-macrosw-twitter-chat/.

Is social media “creeping” into field education?

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 22, 2014

Social and digital media are creeping into social work practice. This is how Mishna and her colleagues (2012) describe the development of online communication technologies in social work practice (including the use of email, texting and social networking sites such as Facebook).  In their qualitative study, they interviewed 15 licensed social work practitioners about their use of online communication tools with clients and discovered that social and digital media tools appear to be changing how social workers interact with clients, for better or worse.  One of the more significant themes they reported was that digital communication is being driven by client need/demand and that ethical boundaries may be crossed before a social worker even realizes what happened.

If social media and other online communication tools are creeping into social work practice at the agency and community levels, then it must also be creeping into social work field education. How? And more importantly, how are we as a profession managing it in field education? I don’t teach social work field education, but I am always interested in how my courses inform and help students transition to field education during their last semester of BSW education. Specifically, I want to understand how social and digital media are becoming a part of field education and how are students, field educators and field agencies using these tools.

For the past few semesters, I have incorporated a Twitter assignment into my macro practice course which students in our program take the semester before their field placement.  Every semester I observe how they carry their newfound knowledge and skills with social media into their field agencies.  I recently wrote an article for the Field Educator about these observations, which range from deleting their Twitter account to creating and managing a Twitter account for their field placement agency. While I am a sample size of one, I talk with field educators every chance I get, asking what they are doing with social media.  Recently, one field director told me she had her students ask their field instructors about the agency’s social media policy (a statement about who can post what on social media related to the agency) on the first day.  If the agency doesn’t have a social media policy, then the students were required write a  social media policy for the agency and present it to senior management as part of their learning contract.  She said it has been a very successful task for both the students and their field agency partners. We also talked about the possibility of students writing their own social media policies, a statement that looks a lot like informed consent where a student articulates when, how, where and why they will or will not interact with clients or communities via social media.  This step helps the students articulate their ethical boundaries in advance, before they find themselves in the middle of an ethical dilemma with a client or agency and not sure how they got there.

AL/MS 2014 Social Work Education Conference

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 10, 2014

This October day finds me in Tuskegee, AL presenting at the 2014 Alabama-Mississippi Social Work Education Conference. The purpose of this post is to provide supplemental information for today’s presentation. My session will focus on how social work educators can incorporate social media into their pedagogy.

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

#MacroSW Live Twitter Chat on 10/28/14

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 3, 2014

Jimmy Young (@Jimmysw) and I (@laurelhitchcock) have designed a social media assignment for social work students that involve students watching a documentary and then participating in a live Twitter chat. The assignment is meant for a policy or macro class and involves students watching the documentary Inequality for All, and then participating in a live Twitter chat on October 28^th at 9pm Eastern Standard Time. We have partnered with the wonderful folks that conduct the #MacroSW chat for this special event and will be using their hashtag #MacroSW to facilitate the live chat.

We are interested in piloting this assignment in classrooms across the country and hope that other social work or human service educators might participate by including the assignment in class and providing feedback. Of course if you would rather just join the Live Chat only, that would be wonderful as we hope to have many individuals participate.