HEA Project: using twitter in social work education and research

This project began with a fabulous event last year: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/2013/19_Apr_CLL_Birmingham

Follwing this event the HEA provided funding for several project. the project I ran was developing short instructional films and workshops for  social work academics to learn about how they could use Twitter to contribute to and support their teaching.
I convinced three students from UCLan  School of Media http://www.uclan.ac.uk/schools/journalism_media/index.php to make the two films. Webster, Alex and Tondurayi worked on these as their final year projects. The films were piloted at a session with 9 social work academics in May 2014 along with two linked workshops which supported participants to develop their skills in using Twitter.  The feedback from the workshop at UCLan was really promising and a few tweaks were made to the films following those sessions. In addition the workshops will be presented at JSWEC on Wednesday 23rd July 2014, I am hoping that these will attract SW academics who are interested in Twitter but a little cautious.

It is clear that Twitter and otehr SNS's are here to stay and here @UCLanSocialWork we are keen users of this medium, engaging with each other, our students and colleagues in other institutions and in  countries across the world. It does take time to build up profile and find a balance in using Twitter, but once you start to engage and collaborate you will see the benefits and potnetial. Here's tomany more of these initiatives!

Social Media in Social Work Education

The proofs of the book arrived a couple of weeks ago and I have read them and corrected them. I have to say it was enjoyable to read through the chapters again. I still can't quite believe that we managed to get this project turned around in such a short timescale. The front cover looks great, Critical Publishing and OOH have done a great job with the text making it look like and feel like a real book:
 http://criticalpublishing.com/index.php/browse-by-subject-1/social-work/social-media-in-social-work-education.html

We are launching this at JSWEC on Thursday 24th July in the Windsor Building : http://jswec.net/2014/agenda/ we are looking forward to telling people about our experiences of working together on ths project and promoting the projects we discuss in the book.  We will of course be tweeting about the launch on the day as well, for people who can't make it to JSWEC this year.