Developing Ethical Guidelines for Creating Social Media Technology Policy in Social Work Classrooms

Abstract

This paper will discuss social media technology in the context of social work education. While social media technology is prevalent in social work education, most discourse about ethical use of social media in the classroom has taken a prescriptive and overly cautious approach that neglects the context dependent nature that social work educators teach in as well as the overwhelmingly positive potential of social media technology in the classroom. This paper utilizes social constructivist theory and the Competing Values framework to guide the development of an ethical decision making framework for social work educators to use in order to create dynamic classroom policies related to social media technology. The authors strive to make a modest contribution to the existing literature related to social media technology and social work through the development of this new ethical decision making framework and discourse related to social media technology, ethics, and social work education.

Keywords

• Social work education
• Social media
• Information technology
• Ethical decision making