Councils need to join social media revolution, Scottish Expo told
Local authorities should get up to date and allow their employees to take advantage of the social media tools available, a session at Scotland’s Social Services Expo heard.
Looking at social media as an effective learning tool, David McKendrick, Lecturer in Social Work at Glasgow Caledonian University, said many authorities blocked their workers from accessing social media such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
"Local authorities need to get on course and just embrace social media – everyone else has. It makes a person more able to do their job, so not to encourage that is a strange thing to do," he said.
"If difficulties do arise, then they'll just have to look at them sensibly. Most people use their own technology such as mobile phones when they are at work anyway and many use it as a personal learning network."
Mr McKendrick said a lot of his students use social media as an important part of their learning.
He said: "There's quite a healthy social work academic community on Twitter and our students are very positive about the encouraging messages they get. Blogs can help students understand philosophical and academic concepts, although some push their own work.
"I would like to see more practitioners using social media. It's important to be able to get that expertise from people who are practising every day of the week and they tend to be more accessible than academic blogs."