Social Media in Social Work Education
First published in 2014 by Critical Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright Tarsem Singh Cooner, David McKendrick, Jackie Rafferty, Amanda Taylor, Liz Thackray, Denise Turner, Joanne Westwood
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-909682-57-3
This book is also available in the following e-book formats:
MOBI ISBN: 978-1-909682-58-0
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-909682-59-7
Adobe e-book ISBN: 978-1-909682-60-3
The rights of Tarsem Singh Cooner, David McKendrick, Jackie Rafferty, Amanda Taylor, Liz Thackray, Denise Turner, Joanne Westwood to be identified as the Authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
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List of illustrations
FIGURE
TABLES
BOXES
Meet the authors
Tarsem Singh Cooner @Alkali
Tarsem is an Associate Director of CEIMH at Birmingham University where he is a lecturer in social work. Tarsem has used Facebook to teach students about professionalism and social media. His research interests include the use of mobile technologies in professional education. He recently published the Social Work Social Media mobile app. Tarsem has received several awards in recognition of his contributions to teaching and learning in higher education.
David McKendrick @bonkelsoul
David is a lecturer in social work at Glasgow Caledonian University. He is interested in using Social Media to support a range of teaching and learning activities. Most recently he established the Twitter chat @swinduction an online forum that supports students making the transition to studying social work at university.
Jackie Rafferty @Jaxrafferty
Jackie Rafferty held a professorial level director role at the University of Southampton before she retired in 2012. As Director of the Centre for Human Service Technology and the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Social Policy and Social Work she has been involved with the use of technology in social work education and practice since 1989. Currently Jackie is helping the Joint University CouncilSocial Work Education Committee to communicate with its members through technology and is on the planning group of the Joint Social Work Education Conference.
Amanda Taylor @AMLTaylor
Amanda is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work at the University of Central Lancashire. Amandas previous employment was as a social worker in the fields of psychiatry, mental health and deafness and as a specialist social worker for children with various degrees of deafness; all set within the Northern Ireland Integrative Health and Social Care Structure. Amanda has been nominated and won a number of teaching and learning awards for her teaching innovation and is well known for the development of a National Book Group.
Liz Thackray @lizith
Liz Thackray was employed for nearly 20 years as a social worker and manager in both voluntary and statutory settings before taking a career break and retraining in information systems. She became interested in the uses of social media when working as an e-learning consultant with the Sussex Learning Network. Liz recently completed her PhD at the University of Sussex, where her research explored problematic aspects of the special needs domain and the use of systems approaches as a research framework.
Denise Turner @DeniseT01
Denise Turner is a former social worker and a Lecturer in the Department of Social Work and Social Care at the University of Sussex. Her PhD research concerned parents experience of professional interventions following sudden, unexpected child death. On-going research includes professional narrative accounts of involvement with sudden, unexpected child death; autoethnography and methodological innovation; psychosocial perspectives; sensitive and taboo topics; and the provision of death education and training. Denise is interested in how academics, practitioners, and service users can be encouraged to support and learn from each other and her interest in social media stems from a drive to build communities of practice which nurture and sustain.
Joanne Westwood @jlwestwood
Joanne trained and worked as a social worker in statutory and voluntary/community sectors. Joanne teaches child welfare, childhood theory, and communication and interpersonal skills. Joanne was awarded her PhD in 2010 and she undertakes research in social media as a tool for teaching and learning in higher education and research related to the promotion of children and young peoples participation and their welfare. Joanne is a co-director of the Centre for Children and Young Peoples Participation based at the University of Central Lancashire.
Foreword
It is a real pleasure for me to welcome you to writing which will stimulate whether you are an educator, practitioner, or student. Its only very recently that social media has started to have an impact on social work education and this book makes a timely contribution to these developments. It signals a sea change in how we utilise the benefits of social media and learning technologies more widely in social work education and in practice.
Social work is about people not computers. This is an accurate statement but sometimes it can be the technology that brings people together. At the Joint Social Work Education Conference (JSWEC) in Manchester in 2011 I thought I might be the only person tweeting from the conference but there were two others; @georgejulian, whom I had never met, and @markwatsonCK whom I had known since the 1990s. Mark knew George and pointed her out to me, we made face to face contact and now have a relationship that enriches me both professionally and personally but is mainly through Twitter.
At JSWEC 2012 Jon Bolton put together a list of people on Twitter talking from and about the conference www.twitter.com/jonbolton/tweeters-at-jswec-2012/members 52 in total: professors, lecturers, practitioners, policy people, publishers, journalists, students, and service users. But it was also at this conference that during one workshop the proceedings were stopped by someone who objected to my rudeness of using a smartphone whilst the speaker was talking. I was tweeting the speakers key ideas to those who were unable to participate physically in the conference. If I remember correctly this was in a session about the use of technology in social work education, led by Tarsem Singh Cooner, one of the contributors to this book. Whereas in 2011 using technology to disseminate knowledge on the fly was so unfamiliar, and such a minority activity, nobody noticed; by 2012 the growth of the use of social media use within the conference challenged the traditional norms.
