Expanding to fit the (blog) space

Enhancing social work education through online technologies

Abstract

Social Work education has for some time laboured under the tag of being somewhat behind the times in relation to the use of elearning, and at the University of Western Australia (UWA) this idea rings true. One reason for this is that pedagogies within Social Work tend to hold true to the people-oriented nature of the discipline, and it has been difficult to see how technology can replicate this aspect of the field. Nevertheless, the problem exists that Social Work students are very often lacking in some of the digital literacies that are increasingly becoming important in the workplace, and as in other discipline areas, it is incumbent upon educators in this area to provide their students with opportunities to develop such competencies. The challenge, then, was two-fold: find a way to introduce technologies that are of relevance to the discipline, and overcome the resistence Social Work students show toward such technologies in general. Blogging was trialled in an upper level Social Work unit at UWA which focussed on the development of communities and community practice and, despite uniformly negative feedback from the students on the perceived “difficulty” of the technology, the blog entries and comments themselves showed clear evidence of the students having developed as a community of learners. This paper describes the degree to which the students used the blogspace as it was intended - as a common, owned space for expressing, reflecting, sharing, collaborating and supporting – and shows the depth to which an online communication tool can have relevance to Social Work education beyond the attainment of generic skills.