Dr Amanda Taylor-Beswick talks about how social work students are being prepared for the digital world and what can be done to improve this
Social work largely went digital during the pandemic. Non-essential visits were conducted online. Meetings went online. Our lives largely went online to stop the spread of infection.
However, digital learning is not at the forefront of social work education. It forms a negligible component of the curriculum, if it is present at all. It is almost expected that students develop their understanding of how to use digital technologies alongside their academic and practice learning rather than within it. With digital technologies likely to remain central to social work going forward, this issue is not going to go away.
In this episode I speak to Dr Amanda Taylor-Beswick about her research on digital learning. Amanda is in the process of setting up the University of Cumbria’s first Centre for Digital Transformation. Until recently, Amanda has been a social work academic at Queen’s University Belfast. Her interests and research focusses on the digitalisation of the social world and how social scientists respond to this.
The full text of the paper can be accessed here:
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