Keynote presentation at 2019 Social Work Distance Education Conference in San Antonio, TX, April 10, 2019 by Melanie Sage, Laurel Iverson Hitchcock and Nancy J. Smyth.

1. What role will social
workers choose in
shaping the digital future?
Melanie Sage @melaniesage
Laurel Hitchcock @laurelhitchcock
Nancy Smyth @njsmyth

3. “… for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the
learners' souls, because they will not use their memories, they will
trust to the external written characters and not remember of
themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to
memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth,
but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things
and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and
will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having
the show of wisdom without the reality.”
– Socrates, 895AD, on writing

5. “At night the children often lie awake in bed restless and fearful, or
wake up screaming as a result of nightmares brought on by mystery
stories… “they have developed the habit of dividing attention
between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and
the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker.”
- Gramophone Magazine Editor, 1936, on radios

7. ADOPTION CURVE

8. Where is the profession of social work, generally,
on the technology adoption curve?

9. "Suppose tonight, while
you slept, a miracle
occurred. When you
awake tomorrow, what
would be some of the
things you would notice
that would tell you that
social workers were
shaping the digital future?"

10. Where would you need to be on the curve to do
shape social work’s digital future in the areas you
imagined?

12. Speculative Futures
Take us just past our current reality
related to Virtual Reality (VR) into the
realm of science fiction.

14. Cross-disciplinary collaboration
Cross-cultural language
Co-designing solutions

15. UB’s Cross-Cultural
Disciplinary collaboration
between Social Work and
Business Schools:
Lessons Learned (2016)

16. @DrDesmondPatton

17. Cross-
cultural
communication
Knowledge
of vulnerable
populations
Evidence
about
what
works

19. San Diego example

20. Robot characteristics
Based on the results of the six-month long community design process, the researchers identified a number of
characteristics and design guidelines for robots to support dementia caregivers and people with dementia:
•Robots should help redirect conversations when repetitive questioning becomes burdensome
•Robots should be integrated into everyday objects that the people with dementia are already familiar with, or
borrow features from those objects. For example, one caregiver wanted her husband to get messages through the
TV, which he spends a lot of time watching.
•Robots should be able to adapt to new situations and to the behavior of the person with dementia. This is
particularly important because dementia is a progressive disease and each stage brings new challenges for
caregivers. In addition, patterns of progression vary from person to person and as a result are almost impossible to
predict.
•Robots should be able to learn from end users, and customize and personalize their interaction and responses.
•Robots should have human-like components. That is not to say that they should look human. Rather the machines
could, for example, use a real human voice or face. “When caregivers wanted robots to take active roles in
persuading people with dementia to do something, they designed robots with more human-like features,” the
researchers write. Related to this, caregivers wanted robots to include features that would help build trust, such as
looking like a friend or clinician.
Moharana, S., Panduro, A., Lee, H., and Riek, L.D. (2019). "Robots for Joy, Robots for Sorrow: Community Based Robot Design
for Dementia Caregivers". In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI).

26. What will you do when you
get back to work to carve
out your role in shaping
the digital future?