Professionalism, social work and the connected age [BLOG POST]

My initial interest in digital technologies arose out of a need to keep in touch with my family and friends when I left Ireland in 2008 to pursue a career in social work education in England. I experimented with a number of platforms and apps until I found those most suitable for maintaining my connections back home. At that time choices were fairly limited. I used Email, Facebook and Instant Messenger (IM). My usage was largely dictated by both my communication requirements and the functionality of the tools. It wasn’t long however, having ‘felt’ the benefits of these tools, before my mind drifted to the affordances of new technologies for teaching and learning in social work education. I began to notice how conscious I was becoming about my ‘presence’ (Rettie, 2003) online. This shift in my awareness was, in part, due to my role as a social work educator, tasked with the responsibility of professionally socialising students for contemporary social work practice. I became increasingly curious about professionalism, linked to the digital shift and began to explore human existence more broadly within the context of place and space (Hubbard and Kitchin, 2010). More recently my attention has shifted, to concerns about why it might be that an increasing number of colleagues are being called to account by the professional regulator for behaviours on social media (Schraer, 2014; Stevenson, 2014; McNicoll, 2016, Stevenson, 2016) that weaken the credibility of the profession and threaten public trust.