Surfing the World Wide Web and Social Work Practice in
Aotearoa New Zealand
Kieran O’Donoghue has been a member of the ANZASW Education and Training Committee since 1997. He is employed as the Programme Co-ordinator/Tutor for the Diploma in Social Work at the Waikato Institute of Technology. He is the author of the monograph Supervising Social Workers: A Practical Handbook and in November 1999 he established the first website in the world specifically focused on social work supervision. In January 2001 Kieran published the first site specifically designed for social workers and social work students web site URL is http://www.geocities.com/kieranodsw/ . Kieran's social work practice background has been in the Mental Health, Criminal Justice and Christian Social Service fields.
The 21st Century has been described as the knowledge or information age. This paper reviews the presence of social work on the World Wide Web (WWW) both globally and locally. The review will include the identification of major social work web sites both overseas and in Aotearoa New Zealand. Also, discussed is the potential use of the World Wide Web by Social Workers in practice. The author will also outline the steps he took in the development and publication of his own web site and will put a proposal for an ANZASW site which includes a description of the content and management of the site.
What
is The World Wide Web?
The World Wide Web (WWW) is essentially a document retrieval system, which allows a person seated at a personal computer anywhere in the world to access and download documents that are stored on special computer programs (servers or hosts) located elsewhere. It uses the Internet (which is a network of computers) as the vehicle that transports the documents (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2000).
The WWW evolved between 1989 and 1994 from the work of Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues on the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) (Leiner et al., 2000). HTTP provided a standard means of communication between the computer programs that request documents (clients) and computer programs that store documents (servers) on the Internet. It also led to the development of browser programs which allowed users to retrieve and view documents on their personal computers (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2000). The most common browser programs currently in use are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Each document on the WWW has an address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Since its infancy in 1994, the WWW has grown exponentially in terms of both the number of sites and the traffic visiting those sites (Leiner et al, 2000).
Social
Work on the World Wide Web
Globally
In this section the presence of social work on the WWW will be reviewed through identifying the number of sites on the WWW, and by reviewing a selected number of sites within specific categories.
The first social work sites appeared on the WWW between 1994 and 1995 and were created by individuals based in the USA. It is difficult to estimate how many social work sites there are because search engines list differing amounts. On 3 September 2001, the term “social work” was searched with the 6 major search engines. The number of web pages each search engine located are listed below:
· Hotbot 5,923,000
· Lycos 5,913,399
· Excite 4,472,470
· Google 3,460,000
· Yahoo 1,620,000
· AltaVista 15,331,695
Despite, the wide variance in the number of social
work web pages it is clear that social work is significantly represented on the
WWW. This significant representation
has resulted in various types of sites. The following is an attempt to classify
these sites:
·
Professional Association sites
·
Educational Sites
·
Practice sites
·
Publications
·
Networking sites
·
Agency sites
·
Search engines
Meta-links
Sites
Meta-links sites are sites where someone has
collected numerous web addresses and organised them under specific headings.
They have also created links (which are like two-touch speed dials on a
telephone) that enable the user to go straight from that site to the
information that is sought. If we were to apply the telephone metaphor further,
meta-links sites are like the yellow-pages directory, because they provides
easy access to useful contacts under predetermined subject areas. Some social
work meta-links sites on the WWW are:
·
World Wide Web Resources for
Social Workers (http://www.nyu.edu/socialwork/wwwrsw/)
contains an extensive number of links including Aotearoa New Zealand sites. It
also has easy navigation through its use of sub-headings. Dr Gary Holden,
University of New York, USA, compiled the site.
·
Shirley’s Social Work Resources
(http://www.uindy.edu/~kml/resources/socialwork/index.html)
was compiled by Shirley Bigna from the Krannert Memorial Library at the
University of Indianapolis, USA. It contains an impressive range of links over
a number of subject areas and is user-friendly to navigate.
·
Social Work and Social Services
Web Sites (http://gwbweb.wustl.edu/websites.html)
is compiled and managed by George Warren Brown, School of Social Work,
Washington University, St Louis, USA. It also contains an impressive set of
links on a wide range of subjects.
·
The Social Work Gateway (http://www.chst.soton.ac.uk/webconn.htm)
is a comprehensive site compiled by the Department of Social Work Studies,
University of Southampton, UK.
·
Virtual Social Work (http://www.virtualsocialwork.co.uk/)
contains an impressive number of links over a wide range of subject areas and
is well worth a visit. Conny Carnuth, a social work practitioner in the UK,
compiled this site.
·
Meta-Indices to Social Work
sites on the WWW (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ssw/eresources/meta-indices.htm)
is a links page to Meta-links sites. The University of Columbia, USA, compiled
it.
Meta-links sites provide a useful starting point for
people who have a clear idea of the subject that they are seeking information
on and can save time wasting using search engines.
Professional Associations
Social work professional associations have a strong
presence on the WWW. In general these sites promote membership of the
professional body and provide access to codes of ethics, journals, and
information about current issues that are significant for social workers and
their clients. Some sites provide information about the accreditation of
overseas qualifications, and job vacancies. Others provide members with an
opportunity to network with other members through bulletin boards and chat
rooms. The following are professional association sites that are worthwhile
viewing:
is a must to visit. It contains the recently approved definition of social work as well as links and email contacts to a number of the 76 member organisations.
is an excellent
site with useful information and easy navigation.
·
The National Association of
Social Workers (http://www.naswdc.org/)
is the site of the US association, which boasts 155,000
members. It has a lot of information, which includes a range of practice
standards and guidelines.
·
The British Association of
Social Workers (http://www.basw.co.uk)
provides a range of information and services. It also reveals a very
active professional body with pages of press releases, policy responses and a
parliamentary liaison officer.
·
The Israeli Association of
Social Workers (http://www.isassw.org.il)
contains the Israeli Association’s code of ethics,
publications, links to other associations and the 1996 Israeli Law of Social
Workers.
·
The Canadian Association of
Social Workers (http://www.casw-acts.ca)
contains the conference proceedings of the ISFW and
IAASW joint conference held in Montreal in July 2000.
was published in February 1996 and is an example of how one of the smaller Associations can have a WWW presence.
Educational Sites
The
are a large number of sites on the WWW that relate to social work education. A
search conducted on 10 November 2000 at www.google.com
found 18,300 web pages. In general, social work educational sites contain
social work course information, conference papers and courses for continuing
professional education. The following are four examples of sites in this
category:
·
The International Association of
Schools of Social Work (http://www.iassw.soton.ac.uk)
represents an international community of social work schools and educators that
promote social work education.
·
The School of Social Welfare at
the University of Kansas (http://www.socwel.ukans.edu/)
is where the strengths perspective originated. There is a very brief
explanation of the strength perspective and a bibliography of literature
written from the strengths perspective on the site.
·
Dr T.C Puckett, Faculty of
Health Sciences, Social Work La Trobe University, Australia, MSW IT Module (http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/socialwork/msw1.html)
is a Masters Level paper on information technology and social work. This site
provides access to the links provided to students (Puckett, 2000).
·
The ESRC-funded Seminar Series:
Theorising Social Work Research 1999-2000 (http://www.nisw.org.uk/tswr/index.html#seminars)
is a collection of papers on social work research.
Practice Sites
Sites related to fields of practice and practice
approaches are prominent on the WWW. The links below are a small sample of the above:
·
Narrative Approaches (http://www.narrativeapproaches.com/site_contents.htm#intro)
is a narrative therapy site published by the Narrative Community, which
consists of leading narrative therapists and authors.
·
Clinical Social Work.com (http://www.clinicalsocialwork.com/) is
one of the first social work sites on the WWW. It contains material related to
practice with people who have suffered abuse or violence and who have
addictions and mental health issues. The practice approaches espoused are
mainly from the psychodynamic school, however, the treatment page does contain
links from a wider range of therapies.
·
Brief Therapy Center (http://www.brief-therapy.org/frames.htm) contains both material and links on
solution focused practice which is also known as brief therapy.
·
Task-Centered Web Pages (http://www.task-centered.com) is
dedicated to Task Centered Social Work and includes a bibliography of
Task-Centered literature, a tutorial learning tool, and models of task-planners
for specific situations.
·
National Clearinghouse on Child
Abuse and Neglect Information (http://www.calib.com/nccanch/)
is based in the USA for professionals seeking information on the prevention,
identification, and treatment of child abuse, neglect and related child welfare
issues.
Publications
The WWW provides social workers with access to
publications. This is through accessing and downloading articles or by access
to journal abstracts. Also provided is the opportunity to purchase books online
either, direct from publishers or via online bookstores. The following links
are examples of this:
· NASW Press (http://www.naswpress.org/) is the
publishing site of the NASW. From this site books and journals can be ordered
· Allyn & Bacon (http://www.abacon.com/socwk/) is a
publishing house with a comprehensive catalogue of social work books.
· BUBL Journals (http://www.bubl.ac.uk/journals/soc/) is
managed by Strathclyde University, Glasgow. It contains the abstracts for a
number of social work journals published over the past 5 years.
· Brashears, (1995)
Supervision as Social Work Practice: A Reconceptualisation
(http://www.socialworkresearch.org/body/sv-articles/sv-reconcept.htm) is example of a journal article published on
the WWW with permission of the copyright holder.
· Critical Social Work (http://www.criticalsocialwork.com/) is
an online social work journal that promotes constructive interdisciplinary
dialogue in the interest of promoting social justice.
Networking Sites
Networking Sites
facilitate contact between social workers. Two of these sites are reviewed
below:
· The Social Work Café (http://geocities.com/Heartland/4862/swcafe.html)
aims to provide a forum for social workers and social work students to meet and
share ideas. It does this and much more. The site contains a bulletin board,
chat room, member home pages and a very good set of links.
·
All About Social Work (http://socialwork.about.com/)
is a very useful site to have book-marked. The site guide, Elizabeth Mitchell,
an experienced social worker from the USA is both welcoming and helpful. She
maintains contact with members through a free weekly e-newsletter. The site
contains excellent links, bulletin boards for discussion, and a chat room. One
of the bulletin boards is called the social work hot tub and is a forum for
social workers to let off steam. (Webeditor’s note: This site is now unavailable from
About.com and has been moved to http://socialworkworld.org )
Agency Sites
Internationally social work agencies use the WWW to
advertise their services and provide information to current and potential
clients. A couple of examples are:
·
St Lukes Anglicare, Australia (http://www.stlukes.org.au/) advertises their agency which works from a
client-centred, solution-focused competency-based philosophy, its innovative
resources or published materials and the training that they provide.
·
Social Work Solutions, UK, (http://www.social-work-solutions.co.uk)
is the site of a social work recruitment agency based in the UK. There are
large numbers of similar sites on the WWW.
Search Engines
Search engines are computer programs that seek out
information. Some search engines require pages to be registered with them. In
some cases, this signals that a human person approves their inclusion. Reviewed
below is the only specific social work search engine. The webmaster of this
site is a social worker from the USA. He both registers and approves the pages
submitted for inclusion.
·
Social Work Search Engine (http://www.socialworksearch.com/) is
specifically focused on social work. It also contains a discussion board and a
chat room. Also based on the site is the Social Work Web Ring, which is a list
of personal web pages of 89 social workers from all over the world.
Other alternatives for searching are the general search
engines e.g. those listed previously which all contain a large amount of social
work material.
Summary
This review of the social work sites on the WWW reveals
that the social work presence in cyberspace is considerable with sites from the
USA and the UK dominant. With this in mind, let us now turn to our local social
work presence on the WWW.
Aotearoa New
Zealand
This section will review how social work in Aotearoa New Zealand is represented on the WWW in terms of the number and types of social work sites. On 3 September 2001, a search was conducted with the term “social work” on the following New Zealand search engines:
· Searchnz (http://www.searchnz.co.nz) identified 500 pages, however, on perusal only about 15 appeared specifically related to social work. From that 15 the majority were social work education providers with the others being agencies.
· Australia and New Zealand’s Web Enquiry Research System (http://www.anzwers.co.nz) identified 20656 pages. The location of specific social work pages appeared better than the previous search engine, however, by the 80th entry they looked less and less social work related. Again the sites found were primarily social work education providers and agencies.
These searches reveal that the presence of social work sites is small and limited to the marketing of social work agencies and social work education programmes. Some examples of New Zealand social work sites are:
·
The Official Government Web site of
Child, Youth and Family
(http://www.cyf.govt.nz/) is an excellent
site, which provides information about the services, activities and
publications of the Department.
· Maniapoto Community Social Services (http://www.maniapoto.org.nz/MCSSocia.htm) is an Iwi social service that aims to deliver comprehensive social, welfare and health referral services for all of those people within the Maniapoto rohe.
· Surfing Social Work
(http://www.geocities.com/kieranodsw/) is the closest thing to a Aotearoa New Zealand Meta-Links site. It contains 19 pages of links related to social work in Aotearoa New Zealand.
· The Waikato Polytechnic, Diploma in Social Work (http://cceweb.virtualave.net./socialservices/dipsocialwork.htm) is the web page about The Waikato Polytechnic Diploma in Social Work.
· The New Zealand Centre for Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (http://www.rational.org.nz/index.html) is a site that both advertises training in REBT and provides free self-help and professional handouts. Wayne Froggatt, a qualified social worker and member of ANZASW operates this site.
· Converge (http://www.converge.org.nz/ngo_sites.html) is a site that supports the NGO and community organisations it hosts NGO sites, Maori Organisation sites and Community Organisations sites.
Despite the limited representation of social work specific sites in
Aotearoa New Zealand, there are a wide range of New Zealand specific sites that
can assist social workers, social work students and clients. Some of these will
be referred to in the next section.
The current use of the WWW in social work appears to be in the following areas:
· For client empowerment through access and provision of information.
· As means of personal support for clients.
· As a means through which social workers can access current information, professional reading, network with other social workers and publish material.
· As an additional practice tool for advocacy, direct practice and supervision (Geraty,2000).
Empowerment
of Clients
The WWW can be used for client empowerment through facilitating client access to information, e.g. parents who are unsure about how to deal with their children who are consuming alcohol might access or be offered material from the Alcohol Liquor Advisory Services Web site http://www.alcohol.org.nz/effects/parents/index.html. Or, a client with mental ill-health might access or be offered information about their illness, and treatment from sites like the Mental Health Foundation (http://www.mentalhealth.org.nz) or Health Information for everybody in New Zealand (http://www.everybody.co.nz). Other ways that the WWW can be used for client empowerment are through the clients accessing or being offered materials that describe either the practice approaches used with them or their rights when seeking help. An example of the latter is Palmer, (1994) who has provided a checklist for clients seeking or receiving counselling or psychotherapy.
Personal support for clients is another use of the WWW. This can occur through access to support group sites, chat rooms and email discussion groups. One example of this in Aotearoa New Zealand is the Miscarriage Support Groups site (http://www.miscarriage.org.nz). An international example is the All About ADD site for parents and people with Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder (http://www.add.about.com/). One further way that clients can access support is through online counselling. Currently in Aotearoa New Zealand, Relationship Services (http://www.relate.org.nz) and offer email counselling and email clinical supervision.
Social Workers
The WWW provides social workers, social work students and clients in Aotearoa New Zealand with excellent access to resources in the area of social and public policy through the New Zealand Government’s site (http://www.govt.nz). This site contains details of government consultation, agency contacts, Ministers speeches etc… There is a very good internal search engine, which locates information quickly. The site also provides an email subscription service. This service involves the government emailing its subscribers and informing them of its news and activities.
In the practice arena some of the guidelines produced by the Ministry of Health’s guideline group are excellent resources for social workers. Two examples are the Guidelines for Recognising, Assessing and Treating Alcohol and Cannabis Abuse in Primary Health Care (http://www.nzgg.org.nz/library/gl_complete/alcohol/index.cfm) and the Guideline for the Detection and Management of Young People at Risk of Suicide in Primary Health Care (http://rcnzgp.org.nz/Guidelines/YS/ys.htm). The WWW is also an excellent source of professional reading material for social workers. A prime example of this is a conference paper concerning family well-being written by Munford et al. (1998).
The use of the WWW as a networking tool through discussion boards and chat rooms appears to be an activity conducted more by social work students than social work practitioners (Message Index, 2000). The apparent benefits derived from this type of networking appear more akin to consultation rather than the development of any formal reciprocal arrangements. A further use of the WWW for social workers is as a means of publication for articles, presentations and papers. The author’s web page on Social Work Registration (http://www.geocities.com/registration.html) is an example of this.
WWW as a
Practice Medium
According to Geraty (2000) the WWW is already being used as a practice and supervision medium through both chat-room and email consultation. It is also being used as a method of client advocacy. These types of cyber practice have not yet emerged in Aotearoa New Zealand. Perhaps, the closest we have come thus far was using the WWW as tool to mobilise communities for action through the Hikoi of Hope Alerts (Peace Movement Aotearoa, 1998).
The reasons why cyber practice hasn’t appeared in Aotearoa New Zealand yet appear related to:
1) the limited presence of local social work on the WWW;
2) limited clients and practitioner access to the WWW due to financial cost;
3) and an under-developed imagination of the potential that the WWW has for both clients and social workers in their work together.
There are obvious challenges to cyber practice in social work particularly, the centrality of human interaction and interpersonal relationship in social work. In this global age with its increasing technologising of our society and social work practice the challenge for social workers is to ensure that technology serves people (clients and practitioners) rather than people serve technology due to an efficiency ideology (O’Donoghue, 2000). There is also a need to be critical of the globalisation discourse implicit in the WWW, particularly, the McDonaldisation of societies (McLennan et al., 2000). It is argued that social work in Aotearoa New Zealand needs to increase its presence on the WWW. To not do so is to potentially run the future risk of our unique professional identity and bicultural critical reflective practitioner model being threatened again from the dominant WWW discourse of the North Western Hemisphere cultures (McNabb, 1997).
Creating
a Website
One means by which social work in Aotearoa New Zealand can assert its professional identity and bicultural critical reflective practitioner model is through creating and publishing our own social work web-sites. The following brief explanation outlines the steps the author took to create and publish both his own site.
The first thing required to compose a web page is a composer programme. If there isn’t a composer programme on the computer visit http://www.netscape.com and download Netscape Communicator for free.
Then start building the web page. This was quite simple as Netscape Composer works on the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) principle. If MS Word 97 is loaded on the computer this provides the option of converting word documents to html (HyperText Markup Language) files. These files then open as web files virtually unchanged in Netscape Composer.
Once the page is designed there is the decision about where it will be published. Publishing a web page does not have to be an expensive exercise. There are a number of servers that will publish pages for free and some have programmes that help novices develop their page. The first place to consider is with one’s internet service provider (ISP). Some ISP’s provide free web page hosting. A free alternatives is to join geocities (http://www.geocities.com).
Uploading or publishing the web page occurs next. This is achieved through the use of a File Transfer Protocol programme (FTP). Netscape Composer contains this programme. To upload successfully all that is needed is the host’s address, which will start with ftp and a password. If the upload is to the local ISP it is likely that the password will be the same as the connection password. If it is to geocities it will be their membership password. The only thing left then is viewing and updating the site. Updating involves simply making changes to the web page on your computer and then uploading the amended page to the host.
This explanation hopefully highlights that the development and publishing of web pages and web sites can be relatively simple and inexpensive. Having outlined the above surely there is a strong case for an ANZASW national site.
The management of the site could be
undertaken through the Association’s Executive or delegated to a web board
appointed by the Executive.
Alongside the
establishment of a site the author believes that the Association needs to
establish or locate a working group within one of it current standing
committees to develop guidelines in regard to
following:
a)
the use of WWW and e-mail in
social work practice;
b)
the use of WWW in social work
education; and
The aim of this paper was to review the social work presence on the WWW both globally and locally, examine the use of the WWW in social work, outline briefly the process of creating and publishing a web page and put forward a proposal for an ANZASW site.
The key findings are:
1) That globally there is a significant social work presence on the WWW that is dominated by sites from the USA and UK.
2) That the Aotearoa New Zealand social work presence on the WWW is small and appears focused upon marketing social work education programmes and agencies.
3) That the WWW has significant potential to assist both clients and social workers, however, the use of the WWW must be to meet the needs of people (clients and social workers) rather than for an efficiency motive.
4) That social workers need to be critical in their use of the WWW, particularly in regard to the globalisation discourse and the dominance of North Western Hemisphere cultures.
5) That social work in Aotearoa New Zealand needs to increase its web presence to promote our unique professional identity and our bicultural critical reflective practitioner model.
6) That to create and publish a web page can be a simple and inexpensive activity.
The main implication that follows from these findings is that there is a clear need for ANZASW to develop and publish a site and to provide professional leadership in the area of the WWW and social work practice in Aotearoa New Zealand.
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