From the Editor—The Medium Is the Message: Integrating Social Media and Social Work Education

In his pioneering and controversial book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), Marshall McLuhan proclaimed that “the medium is the message” (p. 7). While there is still debate about what he meant by that phrase, he clearly envisaged that modern electronic communication would dramatically change social life, social norms, our sense of community, and the way in which we experience the world. Although the Internet and social media did not yet exist, McLuhan advocated for radical changes in education and suggested that people must be literate in many forms of media, rather than just print. Fast-forward to 2014: New technology and social media are quickly becoming indispensable in academia, for classroom instruction as well as for research promotion and development.

Social media refers to any technology that facilitates the dissemination and sharing of information over the Internet. Social media can be used for sharing long-form writing or blogging, such as WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger; short-form writing or microblogging, such as texting, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus; images, such as Snapchat, Pinterest, and Instagram; videos, such as Vine and YouTube; and audio programs or podcasts, such as iTunes and Stitcher. Social media also includes synchronous communication tools, such as Skype, Google Hangouts, and Second Life. A growing number of social network platforms target academic professionals, such as LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Vitae. Although these social media platforms are often considered individual-level tools, they are just as useful at the agency, community, and policy level (Young, 2012).

These social media platforms are not just means of communication. By virtue of having platform-specific customs (e.g., the use of hashtags [#] to organize information), rules for communication (to reply or not to reply, that is the question), and demographics, they have become new environments in which to communicate. Social workers have an ethical responsibility to attend to the environmental forces that create, contribute to, and address problems in living (National Association of Social Workers, 2008). Social workers also have an ethical obligation to appropriately integrate technological innovation to best serve clients (Malamud, 2011), and educators are responsible for preparing students to be able to perform this task (Coe Regan & Freddolino, 2008). Perhaps because of the newness of social media or the challenges associated with understanding and applying new technology (with the exception of online social work education programs), technology is integrated into social work education in an ad hoc manner. Some social work programs embrace new technology; faculty are provided with resources and encouraged to integrate technology into their teaching. Other programs might encourage the use of technology, but the integration is left to the individual instructor (usually someone with a passion for technology). However, yet other programs provide no administrative support for new technology. Only recently have social workers had the opportunity to discuss these challenges in a systematic way (Singer, Sage, Young, & Zgoda, 2013).

As with all technologies, the best use of social media is to help students achieve learning objectives and develop required competencies (Hitchcock, 2013). Although certainly not exhaustive, the following are examples of the ways in which social media can be used in social work education.

• To maximize the time students spend learning content outside the classroom, audio podcasts enable students to study on the go. Podcast episodes with transcripts can enhance learning for students who learn best by reading along with the audio.

• Due to the lag time in book publishing, it is not uncommon to find that information on policies and legislative agendas contained in textbooks is out of date. Using social media allows students to follow changes in politics in real time (Wolman, 2013). Instructors can have students sign up for Twitter and establish a hashtag for all class-related tweets (Hitchcock, 2013). Students can follow legislators and advocacy and policy groups on Twitter. They can retweet relevant information and share related hashtags to maintain real-time updates on policy developments. Students can also curate tweets and comment on their relevance to social work practice using platforms such as Storify.com (e.g., Young, 2014).

• Students often complain that classroom content is disconnected from real-world experiences. Social media can expand the audience for assignments from one (the professor) to many (the public). In the past students have relied on traditional media (print and television) to reach a wider audience (e.g., writing op-ed pieces for newspapers). Today students can become the newsmakers by posting assignments to public blogs, creating podcasts that can be posted to iTunes, or engaging in public Tweetchats (Hitchcock, 2014). They can also curate content on Pinterest about specific topics such as resources for survivors of abuse and human trafficking, which could be useful to clients or other providers.

• Classroom discussions of oppression and marginalization are often static. To make these conversations more relevant and meaningful in their daily lives, students can use mobile technologies (e.g., cameras in cellphones, location-marking apps) to document instances of oppression and marginalization as they encounter them. For example, a student who is waiting to get into a club on a Friday night may witness people being denied entry based on perceived racial/ethnic or sexual identity or class. The student can then post a tweet, a photo to Instagram, or make a Facebook status update marking the incident. This use of social media makes social advocacy real and provides contemporaneous content for the following week’s class.

• Traditionally, social work education has been limited by university/college and geographic location. To enable collaborative online learning opportunities, agreements can be developed across social work programs to create online discussions via Twitter, Google Hangouts, or similar social media platforms. Discussions on specific topics can include students from multiple schools and geographic locations and potentially give students a broader and more diverse learning experience (Armstrong & Thornton, 2012). In addition, experts from across the country and from around the world can be invited to speak to students via Skype or Google Hangouts (Sage, 2013).

• To provide students with experience giving legislative testimony, students can video record themselves giving mock congressional testimony or use synchronous video technologies to broadcast their testimony to students and professors.

• Developing professional use of self in 2014 requires an understanding of how to use social media in a professional rather than in a personal way (Lopez, 2012). To assist students in understanding how to separate the personal and professional, a class assignment might be to develop a social media policy that can be used by an individual or an agency (Reamer, 2011). It can address issues such as how and when to interact with colleagues and clients using social media, the limits of privacy and confidentiality, and the instances when these guidelines might be violated.

Faculty who teach in programs that can afford technologies such as WebEx, Blackboard, TK20, and Qualtrics might recognize that those products can do many of the things mentioned here. For example, WebEx enables Web-based meetings, and Blackboard allows for blogging and online discussions. For schools with smaller tech budgets, free social media can provide a low-cost alternative. For example, Google forms can be used to create and deploy school-wide surveys, and Google Hangouts can be used for video conferencing and group projects. These, of course, are just a few of the many uses of social media for education, and others will undoubtedly emerge as technology evolves. And although still in its infancy, social media is increasingly becoming an important tool for research as well. According to Alampi (2012), the networks gained in social media can be valuable throughout the research process in helping faculty learn about new trends and projects and develop resources for feedback on manuscripts and research ideas.

As Davis, Deil-Amen, Rios-Aguilar, and González Canché (2012) have noted, social media has already “transformed our thinking about our relationships, our connections with and affinity to others, and the influence and persuasive power of online communities on how we think, organize, and act politically” (p. 2). Not surprisingly, a study by the Harvard Institute on Politics (2011) found that more than 90% of college students have profiles on Facebook, one of the most popular social media platforms. Although younger so-called digital natives who have grown up with the Internet, laptops, and smart phones are the most likely to use social media for daily communication and building online communities, adults older than 30 are now beginning to embrace social media, too (Davis et al., 2012). For faculty members unfamiliar with the various social media platforms and associated terminology, a handy online reference is Miah’s (2014) “The A to Z of Social Media for Academia.”

Although there are a number of challenges involved in employing social media, its use is growing rapidly among people of all ages and demographics (Davis et al., 2012). The global village that McLuhan envisioned 50 years ago has become a reality, with social media connecting us to a broader social world than possible in the past. As Lopez (2012) noted, we have entered a new frontier of human experience in a rapidly changing world. As social work educators and social change agents, we believe that it is important that we adapt to “evolving human interaction in the context of technology that is constantly evolving itself” (Lopez, 2012, p. 36).

Susan P. Robbins

University of Houston

Editor-in-Chief

and

Jonathan B. Singer

Temple University

Assistant Professor