For the past two years, Iriss has supported students of social work at two universities to embed the use of social media in their practice. While we know it can support education – provide them with a whole new world of information and networks – it is the support it provides in the transition from university to professional practice that we’re really interested in. We believe that the earlier these skills, as well as a culture of experiential learning can be fostered in individuals, the more they can bring to their professional roles.
We’ve been working with the University of Strathclyde and University of Dundee to provide online social media learning to their First Year and Masters’ students respectively. The two courses have just completed and both had a good level of engagement.
The course was run over six weeks and covered an introduction to Personal Learning Networks, Twitter, Diigo (a social bookmarking tool), Evernote ( note-taking tool) and Scoop It! ( a news aggregator). The final week is dedicated to personal reflection.
Each course module involve mixed media – video, audio and written texts – with weekly forums for discussion and questions. The mix of media was welcomed by the students and quite a number commented positively on audio – how they hadn’t thought of listening to material for learning before.
The majority of the students saw the benefits of Twitter – it is probably the most social of the tools, providing easy ways to connect with people, and so really appealed. Some students preferred particular tools over others. It was interesting to see how some students embraced Diigo as a way to save and manage their favourite websites, while others just didn’t recognise its benefits, but really warmed to Evernote or Scoop It! As well as learning about social media, the main purpose of the course is to encourage exploration of the web and develop the individual’s confidence in self-directed learning; there’s no onus on the students to come away using all of the tools that they learn about.
Here are comments from students who participated:
“The use of social media tools as we see nowadays has become important within education and workplace learning because it allows for sharing of ideas, information and knowledge, collaboration, engaging with communities.”
“As social media is often seen in a negative light…, it is helpful to highlight how the use of this can be something of great benefit to ourselves and others.”
“I think social learning can be beneficial in today’s workplace where there is multi-agency working as it is an easier and less time-consuming way of sharing information and learning from other professionals from different organisations and locations.”
“Hart’s podcast has inspired me to use my Twitter account to follow and read more about social work, hopefully learning and challenging myself along the way.”
“I had previously believed that social media was mainly used for personal use and had never believed it had its benefits relating to our own personal learning, development or had information relating to our current practice.”
If you want to try out social media for yourself, sign-up to our 6-week ‘Grow your personal learning network’ course.