Hello colleagues!
I know you are likely as disappointed as I am for the cancellation of the BPD 2020 conference. For me, it means missing a treasured opportunity to share and learn about resources and research from social work educators.
For faculty and student presenters at BPD 2020, I you worked hard on your presentation, and it should still find an audience! Since BPD is not planning to provide a virtual space to share our work, presenters and creators need to adopt open sharing practices to create our own virtual conference!
Open sharing practices, like the options listed below, are not just useful in a disaster. Rather, they should be incorporated into every in-person conference you attend. Conference attendance is structured by geography, income, race, disability status, contingent faculty status, among many other inequities in social work education. Sharing your presentation and its associated resources publicly and openly ensures that anyone with an internet connection can find and use your scholarship to better social work education and practice. Otherwise, your audience is limited to the people privileged and lucky enough to end up in the conference room for your presentation.
As a service to the BPD community, myself and Kimberly Pendell, the social work librarian at Portland State University, plan to signal boost #BPD2020 scholarship on our website, OpenSocialWork.org, as well as our Twitter accounts and social networks. We aim to create a virtual representation of #BPD2020, celebrate faculty and student scholarship, and foster open sharing practices into how faculty and students share their work at conferences.
I’ve created a few examples of open sharing based on my presentation with my colleague Dr. Kerry Vandergrift on Textbook cost burden in social work students. Our presentation covers how much social work students in Virginia pay for textbooks, the stress associated with these costs, and their impact on food insecurity, academic performance, and social equity.
Options for sharing your #BPD2020 scholarship include:
- Sharing a conference paper or preprint (via SocArXiv, a personal website, or university repository)
- We shared a preprint of our paper on SocArXiv.
- Sharing a video (via YouTube or Vimeo)
- We shared a 20-minute presentation on YouTube.
- Sharing your slide presentations (via SlideShare or Google Slides)
- Here are the slides from our presentation.
- Sharing a blog post (via Medium, the New Social Worker, or a personal website)
- Sharing educational resources like activities or case studies (via repositories like OER Commons, MERLOT, or Prof2Prof)
Virtual spaces you might share your #BPD2020 scholarship include:
- The BPD listserv
- Twitter (use the hashtag #BPD2020)
- Your personal website
To make sure Kimberly and I see your work and can catalog it on our website and Twitter account, please email us at openswresearch [at] gmail.com with the following information. We would appreciate if you shared this with us by June 1st, so we can share your work over the summer as faculty have time to work on professional development and course design.
- Title
- Presenter names, emails, and Twitter handles (if any)
- Abstract and learning objectives
- Keywords
- Embed code (preferred) or links to your presentation and associated resources (e.g. video, slides, papers)
If you need help working with open platforms, sharing your work, or open licensing, please don’t hesitate to reach out to myself or Kimberly and we’ll help you as best we can. Please don’t let COVID-19 erase the incredible scholarship that our community worked so hard to create for #BPD2020.
Thanks for reading!
Matt
Matthew DeCarlo PhD MSW
Assistant Professor of Social Work
OER Committee Chair
Open Textbook Network Campus Leader
Radford University School of Social Work
Open Social Work 