Consciously Connecting and Proactively Collaborating: The CoActEd Learner Mapping Tool in #SocWorkEd

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jun 11, 2019

Editor’s Note: Amanda Taylor-Beswick is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work, Care and Community at the University of Central Lancashire.  She is also an author of the book, The LearningWheel Book, whichprovides educators with a model for helping students and practitioners develop digital literacy skills.   In this blog post, Amanda describes one of the tools from her book, the CoActEd Learner Mapping Tool. She tweets at @AMLTaylor66.

From the moment a social work student steps into the educational environment, they are engaged in a socialising process that involves exposure to, familiarisation with, and the development of professional norms. Through this carefully crafted learning experience a student’s Professional Learning Network (PLN), amongst other things, begins to form; professional relationships with academics, with practice partners, with practitioners and with student peers are built. This professional network is primarily local, largely institutional and generally geographically bound. However, digitisation means that the professional network no longer needs to be so rigid, so limited or so confined. The availability and affordances of social technologies (those that are #GDPR compliant) offer opportunities for social work students to connect outside of their direct or more natural community of learning.  They can engage with the global social work community which, in previous times, may have been out of reach. The use of a medium through which to map and to therefore build connections forms the basis of this blog.