[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 275 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, Melanie Sage, Nancy Smyth, and Laurel Iverson Hitchcock tell us how to write a book with people you met on Twitter.

[00:00:17] Production credit: Produced by Innovate Learning. Maximizing Human Potential.

[00:00:26] Bonni: Hello and welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. I have three phenomenal guests joining me on today’s episode, Melanie Sage, Nancy Smyth, and Laurel Iverson Hitchcock. Starting out, let’s hear about Melanie. She’s an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo School of Social Work. She loves teaching with technology, innovating in the classroom, and inspiring learners to take healthy risks.

She is the co-author of the text Teaching Social Work With Digital Technology and is director of the UB Institute on Healthy Engagement and Resilience with Technology, iHeartTech for short. As a child welfare researcher, the focus of her work is on ways that technology can best support foster youth, including understanding the skills they need for digital resilience and healthy online relationships.

Nancy J. Smyth is a licensed clinical social worker, professor, and dean at the University of Buffalo School of Social Work. Smyth first began thinking and writing about technology and social work, education and practice over 30 years ago, including integrating digital technology in teaching practice. However, in the last decade, she’s been more systematically exploring the uses and implications of digital technologies for social work practice and education through her role as dean.

Finally, Dr. Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is an associate professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She completed her PhD in social work and MSW at the University of Alabama and has a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has been a licensed independent clinical social worker in Alabama since 2000. Dr. Hitchcock has over 10 years of experience as a social worker in the areas of healthcare and community mental health.

Please see the show notes at teachinginhighered.com/275 for even more information about these three phenomenal individuals. Let me begin by welcoming them to the show. Melanie, Nancy, and Laurel, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:03:07] Melanie Sage: We’re so happy to be here. Thank you so much for having us on the show.

[00:03:11] Bonni: I first got connected with you through Melanie, so thanks to Laurel and Nancy, I don’t feel quite as close in bond. Someone on Twitter, Melanie said that we were similar. I don’t know if you remember that.

[00:03:23] Melanie: I did. Somebody said our voices sound alike, so I asked Laurel and Nancy to listen for that.

[00:03:27] Bonni: Okay. It’s so nice to be connected. I know one of the things we’ll be talking just a touch about is the opportunities that Twitter has to connect us, but you have lots more to share with us today, and we’re going to start out looking at how this relationship between the three of you emerged because you’ve done some incredible collaborative work. Melanie, share a little bit about how you three got together and started doing this thing that you do.

[00:03:54] Melanie: We have a really fun origin story, and we’d love to tell people about it because we all met on Twitter, and we lived in very different places. I was in North Dakota, Laurel in Alabama, and Nancy in Buffalo, New York. We met just online and decided we were going to work together. We wrote a book, and we wrote a little bit about this in our book, and I would just like to read you this first paragraph, if that’s okay?

[00:04:19] Bonni: Absolutely, yes, I’m looking forward to it.

[00:04:22] Melanie: Okay, it goes like this. We have no idea how many book collaborations begin on Twitter but ours is probably not the only one, but let’s back up. Before there was a book, there were a few social workers hanging out on Twitter and figuring out how to get connected to each other. Most were on Twitter, at least in part because of our shared interest in technology and its potential utilities for social work. Most of us did not have colleagues in our own schools who are interested in this intersection. Some of us had been playing with technology and social work for many years, like Linda Grobman, editor of New Social Work Magazine.

Some of us were innovating with new technologies such as Jonathan Singer who hosts the Social Work Podcast. Fewer deans of schools of social work, such as Nancy Smyth, many of us were junior faculty members. Most of us were trying to figure out the potential of this medium, and we found each other. One part of our story here that we really enjoy sharing is that Twitter had sort of a democratizing impact across our ranks in that the small group of us that were pretty interested in technology and social workers showing up in this space spanned assistant professors, junior faculty, to deans like Nancy.

We wouldn’t normally meet up in conference receptions because these aren’t our natural order of ranking groups but on Twitter, we were able to develop our knowledge about shared interests and working styles and ethos and approaches and realized that we just really enjoyed the way that each of us were able to communicate and collaborate across that medium, and that brought us into real life spaces.

[00:06:02] Bonni: Which one of you has been on Twitter the least amount of time? Do you know?

[00:06:07] Melanie: I think that’s probably me. Nancy has been our innovator.

[00:06:12] Bonni: Actually, any of you could answer this question, but what do you remember about that first feeling of going up there? It’s not a super complicated thing, but sometimes just the language of Twitter can be pretty intimidating. What do you remember about any of this like, “Whoa, I don’t quite know what I’m doing up here at first.”

[00:06:34] Laurel Iverson Hitchcock: I would say that was exactly it. I got involved with Twitter initially because a librarian at our school had talked me into a new assignment for my social policy class. I was looking for a way to jazz it up, and he said, “Oh, get on Twitter and let’s do this with students.” I said, “Okay.” I just got on, and I really had no clue what I was doing at all. Halfway through the semester, the students started interacting with policymakers in DC and nonprofit agencies locally. I, all of a sudden, realized I could connect with these people too. That’s when I found Academic Twitter and started reaching out to my colleagues.

We have a hashtag that we use. It’s #swtech. That has really brought us together as a community in technology and social work.

[00:07:29] Nancy Smyth: The other thing I was just thinking about as you were describing that, Laurel, and this is Nancy, by the way, is I know I was there for a while, but I don’t think I really knew what to do with it. I was following people but mostly just reading. At some point, I started to stumble across a few social workers. I think the way I figured out how to use Twitter was by modeling myself after Dorlee Michaeli who, at that point, was an MSW student in a social work program in New York City, but she was an older returning student, and she’d actually worked in marketing for a decade before she went back to get her MSW, and she had been an MBA.

She just had an amazing blog where she was talking about her experience as a student but also just blogging about social work ideas. I just watched how beautifully she integrated things from other areas, from websites, and from her blog, but really did it in a relational sort of focus that I was able to start to figure it out by watching her. In return, I was mentoring her as she was new to the field of social work. We just developed a relationship early on, which was a little– When I think about the democratizing parts of this, that was really where it started to cross some of those boundaries because I was hanging out with her dean and, at the same time, she and I were working together.

I ended up hiring her here at the school to coach some of our staff and faculty on how to use Twitter. It really was finding somebody who knew what they were doing and sort of saying, “Okay, this, I can do. I didn’t get that you could do this.”

[00:09:02] Bonni: I feel so much there’s tension that emerges when people share about their experiences. Some of them have fears that are very valid. All of our fears are valid, but you know what I mean. Of course, I’m going to judge them and decide that their fears are valid in the sense of, there can be toxicity, there can be bullying, there’s trolling, doxing. There’s all kinds of trouble up there but then some of that, I don’t want to say it’s not valid, but I just wish for people in their lives that they could push through that that vulnerability that we need to have to make the connections that you have made.

Then once you’re there, you just say, “I never would have had this,” without just being willing to look foolish. I still remember a colleague, although I can’t remember exactly who it was, but someone, the first time they were up on Twitter, they accidentally acted, as in tagged, if you will, Ken Bain. One of the wonderful higher ed authors. They thought that, “Oh my gosh, I’m so embarrassed. I’m never going to go up there again.” I said, “He just got on Twitter.” At the time, this is years ago, but he just got there himself, and we could go back through his tweets.

We get up there, and it feels clumsy and sometimes we are clumsy. If you can push through that, there’s so much beauty and richness and intimacy that I find. I forgot who mentioned not having this at your institutions, but probably all three of you could. The connections that it affords us to really tightly network and build things with people that we share such things in common with.

[00:10:37] Melanie: Yes. We talked about this a lot in our work. Like, how do you do relational Twitter? What is it that holds people together? It’s really about having that back and forth but connecting with people’s humanity. So many people when they first get on Twitter, want to do the announcement thing. Like, I wrote a journal article, here it is or I’m giving a lecture, here’s my book. That like okay, that’s sort of interesting but that’s not how we connect with people relationally. We talk a lot about what does it mean to be connected as humans across technology?

I think once people get that, it really informs and reforms the way that they think about having colleagues and developing relationships via technology. Technology is just a tool. We’re just trying to do relationships like we would do in any other space.

[00:11:27] Laurel: This is Laurel. We go to conferences together quite frequently now. People will come up to us, other attendees and will ask, “Well, how did you get on Twitter? What did you do?” They’ll pull up their Twitter account and I’ve got my Twitter account. I was like, “Let’s start following each other.” I’m going to tweet you and then I want you to tweet me back and it’s building that relationship. Once you figured out how to do it the first time, which I was able to do with Melanie and Nancy, then it’s very easy to begin to do that with other people.

Building that relationship means supporting their work, tweeting out their work, talking, asking questions, being vulnerable at times like you talked about Bonni.

[00:12:10] Melanie: Also talking about sometimes, how cute your dog is or having really good creative use of means that demonstrate your personality or the emotion behind what you’re trying to say. We say all the time, it’s about showing your humanity. That’s kind of what leads to connection and relationships, just like it does in a reception hall at a conference.

[00:12:35] Nancy: This is Nancy. We have been talking a lot about what does it take to get people into Twitter and using it in the ways that we have? I have to confess that I think I’ve made a lot of mistakes with it. I’ve tried to work with our faculty here to get more people in. Mostly, I try to work with a model of attraction and not forcing anyone but supporting them. I think that one thing that I didn’t really understand was that people would naturally go in really in some ways the way I started, which is just treating it as a news feed and reading things.

Then maybe just then broadcasting their stuff and not understanding more the importance of being human and being vulnerable. I think Bonni, you said something that caught my idea that we feel incompetent here. That’s the challenge of technologies that changes so fast that even if you feel competent in one space, when you go into another one, you don’t know what you’re doing initially. As academics, we felt that way as students, but we quickly get to a place where we feel like, experts in the things we know. It’s easy to forget that feeling like you don’t know what you’re doing is an important part of the discovery process when you’re headed into new spaces.

Technology really does challenge us to do that. When people start with like, “Well, why do I do there?” and say, “Well, it’s really okay to say gee, I’m new. I feel clueless in this space. I would welcome any suggestions anyone have for how to get started?” That’s the best way to start because people want to help. They want to help someone else get into the space as opposed to going in and acting like, I know how to do this already.

[00:14:12] Melanie: We so much are taught and maybe taught is the wrong word. We think that in our disciplines, in our academics, we’re just molded to say, “We know all this stuff.” We know the stuff in our little myopic world here, but we better command that. We go to conferences, we have to wear the armor because we’re going to get– Or if we’re going and writing our dissertations or whatever. Yet, it’s not really a great way to live because there’s two real flaws. I’m sure there’s more than two, but I like to just keep my number of points I’m going to make to a minimum, so I don’t forget them.

I probably already I’m forgetting them right now. The first one would be that we don’t get to learn then because Nancy, if I just think that as a dean or as a faculty member, I’m supposed to know all this stuff than I just shut off that source for more learning. Then I did forget what the second point was but I’m sure one of you can find it for me. I can’t learn if I’m not willing to do, “Oh, no, I know what it is. I came back, I circled back, gained my confidence back.” We missed the empathy we could otherwise have for students. We forget what it is like to feel completely out of our elements.

I just got back from a HSI, Hispanic Serving Institutions training. I’m just once again recognizing the importance of helping our students feel, “You belong here. Yes, I have these high expectations. Yes, you can do more than you could ever think is possible. We’re not going to lower those standards, but we’re going to let you absolutely can do this.” If we don’t know what that feeling is like, to go, “I don’t belong here. I don’t know what I’m doing. This is embarrassing,” we’re not going to really be able to serve our students as well. Anyway, I’ve opened it up for anyone else who wants to share about that. That vulnerability and that being becoming a student again.

[00:16:06] Nancy: Absolutely. We talk about that a lot that we ask our students to be vulnerable and to be okay with not knowing. When students get too perfectionist, stick on us, we go like, “Get over it, you’re learning. You’re here to learn.” Then we’re not so good, always that modeling that experimenting and playfulness. I think that this is one of the things you really have to embrace when you’re teaching with technology. That we’re just going to fumble around and try something new out and see what we can make of it and see if we can make this useful to us.

I tried to model that going into the classroom. I say, “We’re going to make podcasts this semester. I’ve never done that with students before. You guys are going to help me work out the kinks. We’re going to play and maybe turn out some wonderful things and maybe some not so good things. You’re going to come away with some skills but also with knowing what it feels like to try something thing that you feel really out of your element with. That will be a good lesson even if you never use this stuff again. We’re all in it together.”

[00:17:10] Bonni: The three of you wrote a 700-page book together. Laurel, you’re going to tell us about some of the technology tools that you used in that endeavor?

[00:17:21] Laurel: We used so many different types of technologies. We started off with those very traditional ones, Word processing software. We quickly set up a crowdsourcing folder using Dropbox. For Word processing, we used Microsoft Word. Early on, I think one of the key things we did for this 700, yes, it is 700 pages, this book, is we used a mindmapping software called MindMiester. The thing that was great about doing this is that we quickly realized what needed to go into the book and what didn’t need to go into the book?

When we talk about technology in social work, we really were thinking about it in two ways. One, how do we use it to teach and train social workers? The other one was how do we use technology in actual social work practice? Once our mind map got a bit, it had like 150 things on it concept-wise, we decided really quickly that we were going to focus on education only. It was a great tool to help us visually think about what we wanted to use in the book. Then we began writing, and we put the proposal in, and they accepted it. We moved on to the different chapters and things like that.

We started meeting bi-monthly, every other week via a video conferencing software. We started off with GoToMeeting, which was what my institution was using. I was considered the administrative person of the book, so I organized us. Then we transitioned on into Zoom later on. We started video recording those meetings initially. We thought, “It’d be great. We can capture everything, and we can go back and look at them.” We never did, so we quit doing that because who really wants to see a video of themselves in a video meeting? Nobody wants to hear it see that. We stopped doing that.

We now consistently even continue to meet this way as we work on other projects. We’re working on other articles and other things that we’re doing. We just have it in our calendars. It’s there every two weeks. Sometimes we met a little bit longer than our hour and a half, sometimes a little bit less. Some people came early. Sometimes we had to skip occasionally depending on what we were doing, but that really worked out well for us. I continue to use that with other colleagues, which is probably one of my favorite things. We truly built a relationship when you can talk to each other and see each other.

I think one of my favorite things was later on in the meetings when Melanie took her new job at the University at Buffalo, and we were all on Zoom, and I said, “Hey, I got to go. Do you guys want to stay on Zoom?” Nancy said, “No, I think I can walk down the hall and talk to Melanie.” [laughter] Real quickly not to belabor this. Some of the other tech that we did use. We did use a Qualtrics survey instrument to initially crowdsource some information in our book. Part of our book includes a very hefty assignment compendium.

We have over 50 different assignments grounded in technology. All the way from using Twitter to using Google Docs to using Second Life, and we used Qualtrics to collect that information from folks. We also crowdsourced some information using Google Docs and Twitter. When we had questions we couldn’t quite figure out what we were wanting to do, we decided to go out to our online community that we had built up online. We send out tweets. We have a couple of Listserves in social work. We sent out email notifications, and people responded. When we came to writing a few things, we used Google Docs in a very specific way to help crowdsource some of that information.

Anytime we got stuck, we’d send out tweets to get case study ideas and things like that. I think then the other thing that we used technology for in a very creative way, I’m going to credit Nancy for this because it was really her idea, is we’ve used Creative Commons license with some of the content that we didn’t necessarily want the publisher to have complete control over. We would put it on my blog using a Creative Commons license. Then we in turn, gave permission for the publisher to use that information. If folks aren’t familiar with Creative Commons, this is an online copyright process that you can use. You can put this on anything and my blog contains a Creative Commons license for everything.

It was a really nice way to help manage some of the content. I will say too that we also did a lot of conference presentations around the work as we were writing the book. While we were at conferences, we encourage people to tweet what we were talking about. We wrote blog posts about every conference presentation and put that on my blog using SlideShare to share the slides in QR codes as well to get people quick access to that information. I think that’s most of the tech. Am I missing anything, Melanie or Nancy?

[00:22:34] Nancy: We have a texting group. GroupMe is an app that lets you create groups of people to connect. You just have to send it to one number instead of sending it to a whole bunch of emails. We have that now to stay connected. Then when we all went to Dublin for a conference with a lot of social work tech people, we ended up setting up a temporary GroupMe there, just as a way of everybody connecting. It was just a nice simple way to keep out of email, which can be a sinkhole.

[00:23:06] Bonni: I appreciate what you’re saying about the temporariness of those things because I was thinking about– Sometimes those things, we start meeting, and we don’t really have a reason to meet anymore but we’re still doing it. We just kind of get locked into that, but it sounds like you have just this constant entrepreneurship that keeps that going that it’s valuable for all of you. That this temporary GroupMe also says, “This is just for this time for this season. Because we’re in Dublin, we can connect here,” but that needs to go away, so you don’t just have the constant distractions as well.

[00:23:38] Melanie: Right. We decided we really liked working together, and we’re a pretty good work team. Laurel is really good at keeping us organized and on task and together. Nancy, she’s got all this really rich background and brings so many interdisciplinary perspectives to our work. I don’t know what I do. I just say, “Let’s do something else. Let’s do one more thing.” [crosstalk]

[00:24:04] Nancy: Incredible creativity [crosstalk] things and the titles too, right?

[00:24:10] Melanie: Thanks. We did some things meaningfully as we started writing the book. We said, “We are in spaces and academic spaces that really demand that we do– We had a more traditional academic publishing. This book will be fun to do, but it’s not going to get me tenure. How can we use some of the things that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about to move it to the next phase of working toward those more academic publications?” We just said, “Let’s hold our schedules together to keep doing that every two weeks so that we can move on to build upon that work in different kinds of ways.”

This was really important to keep the calendar dates on the dean’s schedule because she gets booked up very far in advance. If we want to keep collaborating, we need to keep a dot on her calendar.

[00:24:58] Nancy: Yes, as soon as the book was done, my assistant was asking, “Okay, can I have that time slot now?” I’m like, “No. It needs to stay there.”

[00:25:08] Bonni: Before we go on to the recommendation segment, I certainly don’t want to miss out on asking each of you, starting with Nancy, about the digital technology that you’re using or Nancy, your faculty are using in teaching social work.

[00:25:23] Nancy: Our faculty are all over the map on this honestly because we’ve tried not to force people to use technology if they don’t want to. In fact, we have online degree programs here, masters in social work and now a practice doctorate. There are a faculty who declared that pigs would fly before they would teach online. Actually pigs are flying now because it turns out some of those folks are now teaching online.

People really are all over. Some are approaching things a little more traditionally with videos and discussion boards. Then we have people who are much more comfortable moving into doing connected learning communities, where people are practicing things together in live video and in chats. Where students are bringing in new things that they’ve discovered and faculty are learning from them.

It’s less about the actual tech. Although, I will say that our new DSW program, we’re actually moving into virtual reality and experimenting with that. I’d love to tell you more about that but honestly, we’re figuring it out even as we speak. We’ll, probably in the next two weeks, be going in together the faculty and testing out up a virtual reality classroom. This will be a way for us to keep our students. It’s not a large program. It’s 15 students but will keep us connected together with a sense of presence and connection in a much better way than I think some other technologies will allow us to do.

We’re also hoping that the students can then get a sense for how these technologies might be used in social work practice as they develop their expertise. I can’t tell you that’s not working well. We haven’t started it. We’re literally launching it even as we speak because Oculus shifted from the go to a newer model, whose name I can’t remember. We’re moving in with a new model because it’s supposed to be an easier one for students to learn with.

[00:27:11] Bonni: As of today, which we are recording this before, well before this is actually going to air, there is an episode that will have aired by the time people are hearing our voices, Episode Number 270 with Jaime Hannans. Sorry, Jaime, if I got that last name wrong. It’s wonderful looking at some of the work that the California State University is doing. I think you’re going to love that one, Nancy. Great time for [crosstalk]

[00:27:35] Nancy: I just wrote that down to my to do list. Then I also know a lot of faculty here will be excited to have a chance to listen to that.

[00:27:42] Bonni: What I love about what Jamie does on that episode, which is very much what you all are doing right now, is she can really speak and challenge us with the theoretical and the principles. Then she can also go down to brass tacks and be like, “This is the tool. This is how it works. This is what you need. Here’s how much it cost.” It’s wonderful, more holistic, but also down to like okay, now that we have the holistic, how do we actually do something with these ideas? I think you’re going to love that one. I’m excited. All right, other technology tools you’re using in your teaching. Should we go to Melanie, next?

[00:28:14] Melanie: Sure. I’ve become a big fan of FlipGrid. I know that you’ve done whole episodes around FlipGrid too. I think they market themselves mostly as a K-12 product. It just works really well with the college classroom as a replacement for traditional discussion boards, which I think hardly ever work really well. I’ve just had students who have reported to me that they got all kinds of unintended benefits out of using FlipGrid. Like being able to give a good elevator pitch and getting more comfortable with talking out loud or telling about what the main points of an idea is more succinctly.

It’s just basically a real easy to use video tool and app, where students can record a discussion board via video and voice instead of typing it all out.

[00:29:10] Bonni: Laurel, how about you?

[00:29:12] Laurel: Well, Melanie stole mine FlipGrid, but I will say that Melanie and I have been using Marco Polo as a way to communicate. Marco Polo is an asynchronous app that you can share videos. People can watch it but can’t actually speak to you while you’re videoing. Melanie and I use this with one of our colleagues, Ellen Bellamy, to create a conference presentation, which was a lot of fun because we couldn’t find a time to meet.

My standard go to tech that I use in the classroom is always going to be Twitter. I had such wonderful experiences with students early on. I continue to use it in almost every class that I teach. I asked students to be vulnerable and lean in and work on setting up a profile on Twitter. I asked them to create those public Twitter lists around a particular topic that they’re interested in. If I have a social worker who’s interested in child welfare, they might create a list of agencies and people interested in child welfare.

I also ask my students to participate in Twitter chats. There are several social work Twitter chats that are available, and they can communicate with professionals, with other social workers, other social work students around the country and around the world. I’ve just found it to be a really easy tool to get them thinking about their professional presence, a professional identity, and really learning what’s out there in the community before they actually get into their practice or practice semesters.

[00:30:48] Bonni: You’ve each shared some interesting tools and we’re going to continue along those things, although perhaps not around technology. This is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations. Melanie, we’re going to start with you. What do you have to recommend today?

[00:31:01] Melanie: All right. I am going to recommend a Nespresso machine. I just got my espresso maker. They had one in the hotel room at the conference we went to last year in Dublin and the coffee was so good. I’ve just been thinking about it for a year and it felt too indulgent. Finally, I found one on sale. I just convinced myself that if I can be indulgence in a way that doesn’t harm me too much, it’s just really not over the top to enjoy a pretty nice glass of coffee now and then. I’m really feeling good about biting the bullet on the espresso maker right now. My message is, don’t undermine the idea of a little indulgent self-care. We all need a little bit that.

[00:31:52] Bonni: Spoken like a true social worker. I love it. All right, Nancy, what do you have to recommend for us today?

[00:31:59] Nancy: I’m going to recommend a podcast for people who have problems sleeping. One of the downsides for me of my job in the many pieces is sometimes I wake up middle of the night and then you start thinking about things. I can’t get back to sleep easily. This podcast is called Sleep With Me, which sounds a little racy, but it’s not. It’s really just bedtime stories to help grownups fall asleep at night. Think he says in the deep, dark night, but mostly it’s a guy who goes by the name of Scooter, and he tells you stories in a very circuitous monotone.

It’s the perfect thing to listen to that doesn’t make you so interested that you want to keep listening. The kind of person if they were at a party telling you a story, you might be nodding off. It’s been a lifesaver for me recently, I’ll have it going sort of low. I play it through my Alexa device, but you could just play it off of a phone. Then it can actually move through the entire list of episodes if you’re having problems sleeping, you could get through many of them in a particular night.

[00:33:01] Bonni: I’m trying to picture this. I’m so curious now. I have to go check that out. Alright.

[00:33:05] Nancy: Go check Sleep With Me, it will come up. [laughs]

[00:33:07] Bonni: Laurel, what do you have to recommend for us today?

[00:33:10] Laurel: I’m going to take a slightly different turn. I’m going to recommend the book that Melanie, Nancy and I wrote, which is called Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology. I’m going to recommend this on behalf of all of the people who contributed to this book, who wrote with us and supported us along the way. There are numerous people who provided case studies, who contributed their assignments. It’s a book that we really feel the community of #swtech helped us write. It’s not just for social workers, even though we have a social work perspective on it. If anybody is teaching anything via technology, there is something in there for everybody.

[00:33:56] Bonni: Thank you, Laurel. I’m going to take the last recommendation this time. One of the things that’s come up on the podcast before is that there is no such thing as not being political. Having said that, I am not endorsing a candidate. At this moment, I am going to share an article that has to do with Elizabeth Warren, but not her necessarily as a political candidate, although there’s elements of that, but her as a professor.

David Gooblar had on August the 7th, I’m going to link to this tweet thread that he has. He’s linking to an article on the cut.com called Talking Teaching with Elizabeth Warren. He’s read it and just dissected it. I’m going to read a little bit of what he had to say. I’m quoting him now. “I want to urge you to read rtraister’s extraordinary piece on Elizabeth Warren as a professor. If you, like me, are very interested in both the future of this country and the discipline of teaching and learning, it’s more than worth your time.”

He just goes on, one of the things it’s not surprising that when she taught in law school that she used the Socratic method. It goes really beyond that, of which ways has the Socratic method been weaponized to continue to have systemic racism in our classrooms and to have discrimination in our classrooms and that she thought so deeply about that. On the surface level, you could say, “What she’s doing there is the Socratic method.” If you go a little deeper for her, she had a TA, for example, who was set up to make sure that she was calling on students who hadn’t spoke very much in class.

While she did use that, in general terms, she’s using it as a means for advancing social justice and for her making sure people got a voice that didn’t otherwise have one. It’s just so much fun whether or not you are team Warren in this presidential election, or whether you just want to think deeply about teaching and the approaches that we take. It’s a great read both the article as well as David Gooblar’s tweets about it. It was so funny because I was so tired when I was reading it, but I couldn’t turn off the thing because I was like he’s so good, has so much richness and what he had to say. I highly recommend this to anyone listening.

I want to thank the three of you for coming on Teaching in Higher Ed. It’s so nice to get to spend this time with you and to have you sharing in the community this way.

[00:36:20] Nancy: Thank you for [crosstalk].

[00:36:21] Laurel: Thank you, Bonni.

[00:36:22] Melanie: We’re super grateful. Like I said, I’m a big fan. It’s so fun to be on the podcast that I’ve been recommending to all my friends for the last year. Thanks again.

[00:36:31] Bonni: I’m grateful as well.

[00:36:32] Laurel: Thank you, Bonni.

[00:36:37] Bonni: What an absolute joy it was today to get to speak to Melanie Sage, Nancy Smyth, and Laurel Iverson Hitchcock. Thanks to all three of you for sharing about how you wrote a book with people you met on Twitter about collaboration, about teaching, and about creativity. I really enjoyed our conversation. I enjoyed having each one of you listen. If this is your first time listening, welcome to the show. You picked a good one to listen to. If you want to subscribe to our weekly updates and haven’t done so yet, you can go to teachinginhighered.com/update. Nope, it’s teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. My brain is going a mile a minute after talking to these three women. teachinginhighered.com/subscribe, and you can get the show notes and a weekly update and stay plugged in with Teaching in Higher Ed. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.

[00:37:30] [END OF AUDIO]

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.