Proceedings ascilite Auckland 2009: Full paper: Young and Delves 1130
Expanding to fit the (blog)space: Enhancing social
work education through online technologies
Susan Young
Social Work and Social Policy
The University of Western Australia
Leitha Delves
Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Multimedia Centre
The University of Western Australia
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.
Keywords: Blogging, Social Work, community practice, social learning, digital literacy
Introduction
The place of blogging in education
Of the many social networking trends and technologies that have made their way into education, blogging
has been quite speedily adopted and has become a commonly used tool in the processes of both research
and teaching and learning practices. Evaluations of, and research into, the effectiveness of using blogs,
particularly in a tertiary education context, have been quite extensive and relatively unanimous in terms
of general findings. Many researchers have pointed out that so-called “transmissive pedagogies” seem to
have become the primary feature, and primary failing, of online learning, particularly with the widespread
utilisation of what are now considered traditional Online Learning Environments (OLEs) such as WebCT,
Blackboard, etc. (Farmer, 2006; Burgess, 2006; Farmer, et al, 2008).
In discussing the use of blogs in education, both James Farmer (2006) and Jean Burgess (2006), for
example, have stressed the need to “reconceptualise online learning,” that is, to move away from the
trends of simply delivering content through OLEs, or having learners produce static pieces of digital
media. For both authors blogging is seen as one part of a solution for both of these problems. For
example, Farmer sees the blog as providing a re-centring of knowledge communication within the
learner, de-emphasising the learning environment, and similarly Burgess sees the blog as a means of
contributing to the “reconceptualisation of students as critical, collaborative, creative participants in the
social construction of knowledge.”

Proceedings ascilite Auckland 2009: Full paper: Young and Delves 1131
New literacies
Blogging has become as much an important part of the digital literacy of academics and other tertiary
educators as it has of the literacy of digital age learners. The term “literacy,” or “literacies,” has itself
been heavily worked over as off-shoot terms such as “networked literacy,” “digital literacy,” and “new
literacies” come to the fore. Warlick (2007) points out that blogging has a very distinct relationship with
literacy, since it requires a reiterative process of reading, thinking, re-reading, commenting, evaluating,
reading more, and so on. Collectively these activities, brought together within the learning task of
blogging, become the new literacy, or learning literacy, of Prensky’s (2001) “digital natives.” Warlick
also contends that the teaching of literacy in a traditional sense can become more beneficial to these
learners if it is re-defined to include other contextual aspects such as “networked” literacy and the
information overload that characterises the online landscape within which digital age learners come into
contact with the world. Burgess (2006) seems to support this view, stating that blogs provide the means
and the opportunity for the learner to develop literacies that are appropriate to the “networked,
technologised” environments they encounter in various social contexts – school, work, community etc.
As a central component of these newly emerged literacies Burgess stresses the development of generic
competencies as an inherent benefit of using blogs in education, and as a strong rationale for their
introduction to courses. She characterises these competencies as critical technological literacy, creative
literacy, and the previously mentioned network literacy. The first of these, critical literacy, she describes
as the strong development of an informed understanding of online technologies and the social contexts
that define them. Creative literacy is the competence, and confidence, to play with technology for the
purpose of producing content that is appropriate to the online environment that houses it, and serves its
social goals. Network literacy, arguably the most vital to learning literacy, is the ability to manipulate
multiple technologies for the communication, collaborative construction, and sharing of knowledge.
Social learning
A key point evident in Burgess’ definition of network literacy is the social practice that both characterises
and directs the learning process. These social practices are particularly evident in blogging activities
which educators typically define as learning through conversation (Warlick, 2007; Farmer, 2006;
Burgess, 2006; Farmer, et al, 2008; Fessakis, et al, 2008). In a tertiary context, particularly in the
humanities and social sciences, learners have traditionally expressed their knowledge in the essentially
private context of submission of written work to a lecturer/tutor. As such, conversation in this context is
brief, non-reflective, and typically, on the tutor’s side, consists in large part of a small amount of
summative feedback.
The conversation conducted within a blog brings the learner into a new social realm, that is, a community
of learning, and of learners. This community clusters learners together and brings them into a vastly
expanded learning experience with elements of social participation that engages them in a conversation
about their growing knowledge. Farmer, et al (2008) point out that as part of this “reconceptualising” of
online learning we must acknowledge the limitations of other communication tools in comparison with
blogs. Email, for example, offers very little in the way of management of knowledge, while wikis,
although collaborative in nature, cannot generally be said to engage learners in a “conversation” around
learning. Likewise Burgess (2006) highlights the conversational aspect of blogging in the communal, or
networked context, with the emphasis on commenting, linking to external resources or even classmates’
work, discussion of each other’s work, and the integration of experience gained in other learning
communities. Downes (2004) quotes Will Richardson, of Weblogg-Ed, as saying that blogging “offers
students a chance to a) reflect on what they are writing and thinking as they write and think it, b) carry on
writing about a topic over a sustained period of time, maybe a lifetime, and c) engage readers and
audience in a sustained conversation that then leads to further writing and thinking”, thus encapsulating
the cyclic process that many educators now accept as being central to the pedagogy of blog use. In fact
we might even extend this further to say that the student blog is a dialogic work, in Bakhtin’s sense of the
term, within which a conversation is sustained within this environment with other “works” and “authors.”
With its capacity for the facilitation of higher order thinking and learner reflection, blogging as an
educative practice seems to have been firmly placed within the realm of social constructivism.
Social constructivists Vygotsky, Ferdig and Trammell are often quoted for their 2004 proposal of four
main pedagogical features of blogging (Farmer, et al, 2008):
1. Development of knowledge through reading, analysing and posting;