Transcript for EP104: Social Work in an Online World

Announcer:
This episode is sponsored by Connect to End COVID-19.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
From the National Association of Social Workers, this is Social Work Talks, and I'm your host Elisabeth LaMotte. Today I am delighted to welcome David Wilkerson and Liam O'Sullivan to talk about their excellent new NASW press book, Social Work in an Online World. I'm holding it up here for our viewers.

David Wilkerson is an associate professor and he's the director of the Office of e-Social Work Education at the University of Indiana School of Social Work in Indianapolis. His work integrates teaching, research, and practice with a focus on the use of technology to enhance social work practice, and education.

Liam O'Sullivan is the CEO of Care Alliance Ireland, which is an award-winning umbrella of more than 95 non-profit organizations supporting family caregivers throughout the Republic of Ireland. Since 2004, Liam O'Sullivan's work with Care Alliance has among other things, involved setting up an online support group for family caregivers that is supporting the thousands of users.

David Wilkerson and Liam O'Sullivan, welcome to Social Work Talks.

David A. Wilkerson:
Thank you.

Liam O'Sullivan:
Thank you. Thank you, Elisabeth. Good morning to yourself and good afternoon from Dublin in Ireland.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Yes, good afternoon in Ireland. Could we start out with the two of you telling us a bit more about your backgrounds and also how you came to collaborate on this book?

Liam O'Sullivan:
I think age before beauty, David, or is that beauty before age? I always get these wrong.

David A. Wilkerson:
Well, thanks Liam. Then as you mentioned, Elisabeth, I'm a associate professor at IU School of Social Work and the director of our e-Social Work Office of Education and Practice. In terms of my background, my focus has been on advancing technology use for social work education, and practice.

One of the things I've been focused on is infusing digital social work practice into the social work education curriculum. In 2015, I led a group that developed three tele-practice courses for our school, and then in 2019 we developed, I think it's the first graduate certificate in tele-practice that's been offered by a school of social work education. Then my research is focused on digital practice for caregivers and with a focus on support and psychoeducation.

Liam O'Sullivan:
Yeah. I'm born and bred in Dublin, Republic of Ireland, and grew up with a lot of privilege, but also an interest in injustice and inequalities. I guess that manifested itself throughout my adolescence and was inspired to go into social work profession by my late Aunt Bernie Rohn. That was, what, 25, 30 years ago. Spent most of my professional career in the not-for-profit world, really enjoyed the work and I have a real interest in how technology can be utilized to serve our clients more effectively through a lens of social work practice.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
You both had this background and this interest in the use of technology to enhance social work practice in education. How did you come together to collaborate on the book?

Liam O'Sullivan:
Yeah, I can speak to that, David. I read an article, I like to read journal articles. Some were easier to read than others, and the ones I'd come across that David had written were easy to read. I picked up the phone and said, "Hey Dave, I like the work you're doing. Let's talk." That was 2017, and six years on we're still talking, working, collaborating, written a book together. Not quite sure what else we're going to do together, but yeah.

David A. Wilkerson:
It is a great example of how technology facilitates connections. Part of my research had to do with, we were creating a application for crowdsourcing and friend sourcing to support caregivers. I know that touched your interest, Liam, and I think the other piece of this, and we can talk about this a bit, had to do with COVID-19 and how both of us responded to shutdowns, lockdowns. Liam, could you talk a little bit about what you did with...

Liam O'Sullivan:
Yeah, I guess we'd always dabbled in the idea of using online interfaces to support, in our case, family caregivers. We had a very small, modest connection intervention through the Facebook platform, an open group that people could comment on. It wasn't moderated and we didn't give it a whole lot of thought, to be frank. I can talk about this in terms of one of the chapters I wrote about how COVID inspired us to really up exponentially the extent to which we were using technology. We were using private a virtual online group to support family caregivers in the Republic of Ireland.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
We certainly do want to go in depth, into details about that group. First, let's zoom back a bit to talk about the map that the two of you created in terms of how to explore this important topic of social work in an online world through a comprehensive lens. For our viewers, Liam is sharing the actual map, but for our listeners, we will describe it for you now so that you can understand how it frames the concepts in the book.

David A. Wilkerson:
I'll describe it for the listeners. What we're seeing is, it's a Venn diagram and it has overlapping circles that contain categories of concepts, or groups of concepts. The first one is digital social work practice, and we have six locations for practice, support, identity, community action, psychoeducation, psychotherapy, and education. Then another group is digital equity, and the third group is data justice. In our book, we illustrated each of these practice locations with chapters. We also have chapters that illustrated the commonality between digital equity and digital practice. That's all about focusing on ensuring equitable access to digital resources, digital opportunities. I think one of the chapters I'm particularly impressed by, it deals with best practices in facilitating technology for children and adolescents, marginalized groups. It does a wonderful job of detailing how in this particular intervention they created a digital inclusion platform.

Then the data justice and in practice, is illustrated also in some of our chapters, and that has to do with ensuring protection and data privacy, especially for marginalized populations and groups.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
That data justice and digital equity are the concepts that overlay all of the spheres that are explored in the book. You spoke about how digital equity relates to the chapter with students, and if you could say a bit more of that chapter, because some of the statistics in there were just absolutely stunning to me. For example, about how many young people are doing their homework on phones rather than on laptops, which I did not know that the numbers were as bad as they are. I think, is it 45 percent? I will look it up here. Yeah, 45 percent of youth in the US are unable to click complete homework because of lack of computer access, and 35 percent are using their cell phones to do their homework.

David A. Wilkerson:
Well, just so happens that I was just having a conversation yesterday with our web developer. One of the things we talked about was here at Indiana University, what we're looking at is a new group of students that are going to only use their phones to complete online coursework. One of the things we were taking a look at, well, I was interested in, what are we going to do about PDFs or documents and readings? But they have an answer to that so that it's mobilely compliant. I think that probably those students that were referenced in that particular chapter are not really unusual at all. I think we're moving as a population toward simply using web phones rather than broadband computers.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
How would you tie that into the concept of digital equity?

David A. Wilkerson:
Really, when we look at marginalized populations, it may not just be digital access. It can also be not having access to computers, not having had an opportunity to develop digital literacy. I think one the important aspects that Elswick and colleagues identified was that those folks can experience certainly some stigma about being able to develop digital literacy. They're themselves as outsiders not able to connect.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
I think the term that was used, which I found so powerful, was digital immigrants. I think that's the term they use versus digital natives. I think if you're fortunate enough to be a digital native, meaning that you just have all this access, it's hard to fully grasp the impact of what it means to not. That term really was quite powerful in that chapter. I agree with you. It's one of many very important chapters in the book.

If we could, since we started out touching on it, Liam, could we talk more about the chapter that focuses on the online caregiver support group that you developed through Care Alliance Ireland?

Liam O'Sullivan:
Sure. Yeah. It's been a whirlwind three years, to be frank. The day, it was March 16th, 2020, if you recall, the world was literally shutting down. Our own head of government I think was over in DC just pre St. Patty's day visiting your president at the time and there was a question mark as to whether or not he could come home. I think he made an address to the nation from Washington, and we just saw that social services across the board were being shut down. Daycare, respite, schools, everything. Suddenly we'd had a cohort of hundreds of thousands of family caregivers across Ireland who had gotten used to a level of support. Not to say everything was hunky dory, but there was significant provision and suddenly it was closed.

We just, myself and my colleague, Zoe, we weren't going to stand by and let that happen, or at least not respond to it in a way. Thanks to Zoe and my, I suppose, both our interests and passion and the support of my volunteer board of directors, we set up a new platform, opened up a closed group, a private Facebook group, and within days, we were having hundreds of people join each day, literally to the extent that we were blocked by Facebook because they thought we were spamming people.

It's evolved over three years. We have nearly 6,000 family caregivers, a whole suite of interventions. They're a mix of psychosocial, educative fun. It's quizzes, book clubs, gardening club, crafty carers, virtual drop-in cafes, as well as the more traditional, I have a worry, a query about my caregiving. They post it up, it's approved, and then peers, their tribe give their experiences, their thoughts, some suggestions. That's the power of the group and people understanding where they're coming from and sharing experiences with what's worked to support them through their, what can be stressful, caring. Through COVID you can imagine, caregivers, they were more isolated. They already have a high vulnerability to isolation, but services were shut down. To be frank, it's taken...

Elisabeth LaMotte:
They didn't have the additional supports that had been essential. It just sounds like being able to connect with your group could be a lifeline. Can you see what...

Liam O'Sullivan:
Some of them said they were. It was a lifeline, and for some we were sending them small care packages and it was like Christmas for them. It was almost embarrassingly easy to make an impact as they describe it. We get the feedback through posts, through comments. Just to be clear, 99 percent of these people we'd never met before in person. But sorry, you had a question, Elisabeth.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Well, that speaks to the power of social work in an online world and what you can do. On the one hand, nothing replaces being in a room together, but on the other hand, the reach of this and the depth of options for the users. I was curious to hear a bit more about how the posts were approved and the moderators, because that's something that comes up in the chapter that is interesting.

Liam O'Sullivan:
Sure. From a social work background, I'm very aware and familiar with the idea of teamwork and collaboration and team meetings or case conferences we might call them. A group of social workers will tease out an issue and maybe agree on a plan and collaboration with the client ideally. We are going, how do we replicate that, to a degree. What we've done is, and to this day we still have it, is another group which we call the mod involves group. It's a private group made up of approximately 15 volunteers and two or three staff. We tease our practice dilemmas on that group. Say there's a post that someone is looking to submit and we're not quite sure will it add value to the group, does it breach privacy, is it relevant? We might share that post with the group of volunteers and go, "Guys, we're not quite sure. What do you think?" In some ways it's public practice in a private setting, but we're sharing our thoughts or experiences as social work practitioners, perhaps and volunteer caregivers.

Then we try to come to a considered informed opinion, and then more than likely, we'll approve the post. We might assign posts and someone to a service, or we might ask them just to tweak the posts so that it's better received by the audience or more likely to result in an impactful response.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Then how has setting up and being a part of this group impacted you as a social worker, and as I would say, a real leader in this field, Liam?

Liam O'Sullivan:
I don't know how to answer that. For months we were working day and night. Obviously that wasn't sustainable. I guess soon enough we needed to get support from the state from philanthropy. To be fair, they stepped up and provided that support, such that now we have essentially a well-funded project that we're not worried about its security, its sustainability. I've very much stepped back, but still provide support, consulting to the project worker.

Look, it's enthused my work, my enthusiasm, and perhaps enthused David's interest in the whole area because he's always had a longstanding interest, longer than I have, in terms of the power of online groups through friend sourcing and other mediums to support caregivers and other cohorts, be it parents who have kids with challenging behavior or others. I guess it's inspired and enthused, and it's nice to talk about something you're proud of and you have evidence to demonstrate its meaning and it's impact on people's lives.

It's almost quite humbling the amount of messages we get from people going, "I may not post or comment at all in this group, but I find it's been a lifesaver." You go, wow. When we talk about engagement, I think we don't always know that people are engaging, but they're watching, they're listening, they're getting something from it. Just because they don't click like or don't post a comment, we have to be careful on how we measure that, and sometimes the risk... sorry, go ahead.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
You mentioned that on page 51 of the book, you talk about the 90 to nine to one rule, which I think is very interesting and has other applications when you look at social work in the online world. Can you just describe that for a moment?

David A. Wilkerson:
... lurking in online groups and I discovered what's known as the 99-1 rule. According to the rule, in terms of when we look at social media and we look at what folks say in terms of ratings about restaurants or ratings about whatever, the 99-1 rule applies. Basically in that social media environment, approximately 90 percent of people do not participate, don't contribute. They don't participate in terms of contributing content. They may be there, they may be reading, they may be observing, and then 9 percent intermittently contribute content. Then it's only 1 percent that contribute that content that we're reading. One of the issues there has to do with bias in terms of what we're reading, that we're reading the content primarily of 1 percent.

I think the issue for online... I'm thinking about psychoeducation groups, and a lot of times you may see social groups that they can voluntarily join. The issue there is how much contributions are really coming from 90 percent of the members versus really 1 percent. Some of the research that we can cite also demonstrates that 99-1 rule also exists in social care groups, as well as, say the social media we might look to learn about, oh, do I want to go to this restaurant or not.

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Elisabeth LaMotte:
That one loud voice may stand out but may not necessarily represent the overall impact or the pulse of it. You mentioned psychoeducation, and that is a chapter you wrote that concludes the book. From reading the chapter, I understand that this is a difficult concept to define, but could you define it for our viewers and listeners and say some more about that chapter?

David A. Wilkerson:
Sure. The reason I wrote the chapter was that I think that there's a gap in the psychoeducation literature regarding the contribution of group to psychoeducation. Typically when you read about what's the evidence for psychoeducation being effective, generally what you're talking about is the training component. As important as group can be in terms of delivering support, shared experience, the group itself is primarily identified as a means of delivering psychoeducation, not as a intervention that can also exist separately. Psychotherapy and group psychotherapy, we all recognize those as being really different propositions. But when it comes to group psycho education and psychoeducation, it's not really represented in the literature.

Then when we come to delivering psychoeducation online, the definitions are really even further limited. A lot of times when they describe psychoeducation, it's described almost as like bibliotherapy. What I've developed as a model that I've researched that looks at the contribution of the group in terms of group work and in the ways in which it facilitates the web training itself. Shared experience is important. We all know that one of the things that we love about groups is they're high in support, high in confrontation, but one of the things that I was interested in is looking at how the group itself contributes to learners' education, learners' participation in the training itself. That's the nuts and bolts of what I've looked at in this particular chapter.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
How does that translate into the online world?

David A. Wilkerson:
The online world. In this particular chapter I did describe a case. It was a family that, mom, dad, a teenager, and I had been seeing in family therapy, individual therapy. They drove a long distance and we really weren't particularly effective. I referred them to the digital psychoeducation group that I was running, and they participated, or the mom and dad participated, and this conflict that was really pushing their teenage son's difficulties, their own conflict, they resolved the conflict in the group. I was really surprised by it. Then I began to look back at their conversations and really trying to understand what made the difference.

In this chapter, I begin to break down some of the things that I observed, not only with them, but with some of the other participants. I had a sense of discovery from that.

I think another piece of this is when I had done some other work with students with this particular model. One of the things I was surprised about was when they had participated, they had identified that being in a group increased their learning in ways that they would never have imagined. I think that we just have to understand that the group contributes to the psychoeducational training in ways that we may not have observed even in the on ground psychoeducation world.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Absolutely. The power of the group is so difficult to measure. I think part of what your book communicates so well is that the power of an online world has all of these ways it can amplify the power of the group, for sure. As we're discussing this, I am thinking about the beginning of the book and chapter one, where authors, Kristen Funk and Dale Fitch, write about and reference to an extent, artificial intelligence, which I think we can't fully have this conversation without touching upon it. They write, and I'll quote, "Technology can facilitate relationships, but it cannot replace them. It can convey feelings, but it cannot understand them. Technology can only serve larger human goals. It can never supplant them." Then how does artificial intelligence, how does ChatGPT filter into what we're talking about here in terms of the importance of what social work can do online?

David A. Wilkerson:
I think we're still learning about it. I think what they say is, is the fact is that ChatGPT, artificial intelligence, really, it can't convey emotional comprehension. It can't understand human emotions. It can't represent empathy, intuition. This whole issue of, or not an issue, but the importance of shared experience when we meet together, that's something that can't be replaced by artificial intelligence. I think one of the things that we have yet to learn about is how our clients are going to use artificial intelligence in order to communicate their concerns to receive support. I think we need to be aware of that.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Do you think that artificial intelligence can ever replace a moderator or a group leader?

David A. Wilkerson:
No.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Liam?

Liam O'Sullivan:
You can see how the Facebook platform is tweaking their platform so often and occasionally they create these new pieces, and we really don't want them, to be frank, because we want to hold onto the human part to it. I think that's what people want, so I would say no.

I'll give you an example maybe to your earlier question. I've downloaded ChatGPT and I tried out, we're doing some CEUs for the book. I took a small part of the chapter, put it in saying, can you create some multi-choice questions? Look, it generated all sorts of questions, but they weren't very helpful. They weren't the right questions that you would put forward for appropriate CEU. It didn't save time, it didn't add to insight or efficiency. I think that's your answer in terms of where ChatGPT is at the moment.

Now in five years time, maybe, let's see. But even the research isn't suggesting that the social work world will be annihilated or threatened by AI. I think there's a whole range of other professions, perhaps accounting, legal, and others, where if I was in those professional roles, I'd probably be a little bit more concerned.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
I agree. It almost seems like the human elements of social work are all the more important if ChatGPT is taking a big role in the way that things are accomplished. But I am thinking as we talk about this, about what research we have about online psychotherapy, because that is a concept that was generally quite resisted until the pandemic. Then so many of us private practitioners, social workers and others, moved right online. There's not a lot of research about it, but your book does a very good job of quoting what research we have and describes that with CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, you could make the case that the online therapy is more effective, especially if you account for access to care and how difficult it can be to travel to a session and how there are documented lower cancellation rates when online, even if the travel isn't far.

With CBT, your book describes the effectiveness of it, but what about us private practitioners in social work and other fields who don't do CBT and who perhaps have an approach that does emphasize the relationship more, what would you say about that?

Liam O'Sullivan:
I guess I would like to see more and more research published out there. I think that's probably, there's a lot I imagine in print that we will see in the next 12 months. Your point around transportation cancellation rates, in our own group, we have in excess of 90, 95 percent retention engagement over 12 month period. Those type of rates are unheard of in traditional group work where the dropout rate is... perhaps the wrong word, but it can be in excess of 50 percent, and particularly for clients whose time is precious. We also think well, a practitioner's time is precious, but actually often your clients as well. If we have unpaid caregivers living in a remote area and them being invited to come to a group an hour away, spend the hour there and come back, who's going to care for their loved one?

There's also the issue of privacy, and if they can do it online, there's an element of not sharing their life with the local community because they may not want to. They're sharing it to a degree with moderation, with their tribe who are other caregivers. I think that's a more ethical, appropriate, useful and gentle way of doing it because they're so much less likely to be judged or to be negatively commented on. For those reasons, I think the more research out there, the better. I look forward to seeing more, I guess the CBT stuff is there because that's the most probably prevalent intervention and it has a history. But I think I look forward to reading that material in the future.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
I do as well, and just emphasizing what you're describing, one of the things, Liam, in your chapter about the caregiver support group is it references that at this moment, 46 percent of those surveyed said that their most important group in their world right now is online.

Liam O'Sullivan:
Yeah, it's almost scary, but it's also an amazing opportunity to be available for people who heretofore and again, more than upwards of 80 percent of those we serviced hadn't engaged in direct face-to-face caregiver support before. Not only are we reaching a large group, we're reaching a large group who heretofore, we feel we're underserved by existing services.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
I want to make sure we talk about chapter four, advancing data justice, which references not only the use of AI, but the concept of ADM, which is automated decision making, to support health, welfare and criminal transformation. That chapter has three case studies. David, can you share with us one of the case studies, whichever one you want to talk about today, in terms of, first describe what automated decision making is and then the case study?

David A. Wilkerson:
Sure. I wanted reference the fact that Neil Ballantine is a researcher in New Zealand who has expertise in this particular area and has done a lot of research himself. Maybe let's talk about PredPol. That's one of the case studies. PredPol was a predictive policing project in Los Angeles, and it used historical crime data. It identified crime type crime location, timing of crime, and then made predictions about where crime might occur, not that crime had occurred, but where it might occur. The result was, it set up a really a feedback loop that just centered on low income neighborhoods and then created over policing. Even individuals were given risk scores.

You can see videos on YouTube and it describes folks talking about their risk scores and they don't understand how in the world did I gain this? I think the interesting thing about this particular part of Neil's chapter is it talks about, really, we can look at something that in chapter one, cyber feminism. That's the intersection between feminist theory and digital technology. One of the goals of that is to enhance support and empowerment of marginalized peoples. We can see cyber feminism in a sense at work in a group called Stop LAPD Spying. This particular coalition was community members that took on a role of data citizenship, along with researchers, and as a consequence of their work and the work of others, this PredPol project was stopped. The predictive policing was not... what it revealed was algorithmic bias, was what it acted upon.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
The cyber feminism initiative was what challenged it and demonstrated that it was not effective. Yes, thank you. I wanted to make sure we did touch on cyber feminism because it's a term that's used throughout the book. Anything else you want to say about that term?

Liam O'Sullivan:
I might say Elisabeth, first there in chapter four there we also talk about some other initiatives that in a sense miss sell the power of the use of data to effectively assess risk in terms of child protection, to effectively assess the risk of income fraud for people with disabilities in Australia. There's several examples where I think technology over claims, under delivers, and has largely unintended consequences. I think thanks to civil society and not-for-profits, they've challenged some of the findings, some of the absolute-ism that sometime the technocratic approach says we'll deliver, we will save you billions of euros on welfare fraud. We will ensure children are safer.

Social work doesn't... the reality things are nuanced and grayer and messy in social work. I think we have to be proud and own that. It's not about absolute. It's about assessing risk and reward and the rights of people, as we've mentioned, to digital literacy, digital equity, and an understanding of where their data is going, how it's being used, and/or potentially misused.

In terms of cyber feminism, I think David's more familiar with that and the chapter authors articulate it much better than I could. My guess, my understanding is that it's a bit challenging, those inequalities that can be perpetuated with the lens of, well, hold on a minute, is there a gender and ethnicity class bias, and to standing up to that to include that, how we collaborate with a client such that we're not telling them the medium. We're going to be able to say to them, "How would you feel about a session through Zoom? Or is your strong preference to meet in person?" If we can acknowledge their preference, I think that empowers them. That probably improves the likelihood they're going to benefit from the session. It might challenge us as middle class practitioners, but that's not a bad thing.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
But the essence of social work is to be where your client is. That's such a powerful example of it. Exactly. I do want to ask you, and it's partly connected to the conversations that we're having at NASW on the private practice committee about how much of private practice is going online and has remained online. I'll say I do give the choice, and that has worked very well in this chapter of 2023, here we are. I am curious from the experience of compiling such an important book for our field, what would you say to agencies who still have their paperwork not online and who are not online?

Liam O'Sullivan:
I'd say go for it. You can't live without taking risks. You have to push the boundaries, and that's what COVID did. My understanding of it in the US, the HIPAA stuff kicked in pretty quickly because there was such an overriding. In some of the work we're doing, you have to push the boundaries and shake things up a little bit, and sometimes you'll get them a little bit wrong. Then if you're a reflective practitioner and you've controlled and supervision in place, it will become apparent that perhaps you've gone too far. Sorry, David, I interrupted you.

David A. Wilkerson:
No, I was just thinking. What I was thinking about Elisabeth, was that I teach a course, it's called Foundations of Digital Social Work Practice. When I taught it in 2019, there were a few of the students that had much understanding about digital social work practice. When I taught it last fall, and I hadn't taught it between those two periods, I was amazed at how many of the students were a part of agencies that were using telepractice and that were familiar with telepractice, wanted to know more about it.

Then I can also attest to the growth from the fact that from our course courses, the enrollment in courses around digital practice, that's really grown exponentially over the past few years.

Liam O'Sullivan:
David's being modest. You set up that course, didn't you? I know I did, it was an Introduction to Technology for Social Workers or something to that effect.

David A. Wilkerson:
Yeah, we have...

Liam O'Sullivan:
You have what, in excess of 10,000 students completed it?

David A. Wilkerson:
Yeah, we've had over 10,000. It's free.

Liam O'Sullivan:
You really should have charged for it.

David A. Wilkerson:
We've had had over 10,000 the last time I checked. We set it up due to COVID, due to the lockdowns. We wanted to support practitioners and educators. I think as of a few months ago, we had over 10,000.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
I have another question because many, if not most of our listeners and viewers are social workers, as are we. Liam, in the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned your Aunt Bernie. She's one of the people that the book is dedicated to. Can you tell us a little bit about her?

Liam O'Sullivan:
Oh wow. Bernie was just an amazing woman. Grew up in the north of Ireland, emigrated as many people did. Went over, did her social work training in South Hampton in the UK. Came back, found a wonderful man, got married, had five wonderful children, and went on to be a social work practitioner in fostering, adoption, child protection, volunteered in marriage guidance, and as her son said at her funeral a year and a half ago, she's just the nicest woman, the kindest woman you could ever meet, and we miss her dearly.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Yeah. Well, this book is such a powerful tribute to her and to our field. Any final thoughts before we conclude this conversation?

David A. Wilkerson:
I think that we were fortunate to have a wonderful group of social work practitioners and researchers that contributed to the book. I think this is a great contribution for the field. That's because of the authors that participated in this. They did an amazing job.

Liam O'Sullivan:
Absolutely. It's enjoyable fun to work with David. Two years of a journey and we got it over the line. I encourage people to go out and buy it.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Have you met in person? Have you met in person? Very last question, since we're talking about an online world.

David A. Wilkerson:
We met in 2019. I had come over to Ireland to participate in a, it was world bullying, I don't know, convention is not the right word... conference. It was in Dublin, so it became an opportunity to meet Liam and his family. My wife traveled too.

Liam O'Sullivan:
I met Dave and Mary Jane came over, had lunch. Yeah, we've met and it's lovely to meet and it'd be lovely to meet again, but our work will continue and we will continue to collaborate virtually.

Elisabeth LaMotte:
Right. To think that you created this book and you've met one time is really the essence of what we're talking about here. Liam O'Sullivan and David Wilkerson, thank you so much for joining us. The book is Social Work in an Online World, available through NASW Press. Thank you for this conversation and for writing this book.

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