Neil Ballantyne

The Open Polytechnic

This article presents an argument that the body of work known as actor-network theory (ANT) has considerable potential as an analytical framework for the conduct of research inquiries into human service technology applications. Especially so when these inquiries focus on tracing the human and technical factors associated with the adoption of a tech...

This research examined the impact of three successive New Zealand tertiary education strategies (2002-2007; 2007-2012 and 2010-2015) on how tertiary education institutions have developed their support for Pacific learners. It examines how the government strategy documents influenced the strategic thinking of tertiary education institutions in suppo...

In the past few years the risks associated with use of the Internet and social networking sites by children and young people have become a recurrent focus of attention for the media, the public, and policymakers. Parents, caregivers, and child care professionals alike are rightly concerned about exposure to pornography, pedophiles, and cyberbullies...

This chapter discusses the use of technology by social workers and community workers to support community development, community sustainability and community mobilization. Since technologies for community work are inevitably networked technologies, we set the scene by using a theoretical overview of the promises and pitfalls of the contemporary Int...

This chapter begins with an introduction to datafication and its societal implications, and then explores, using three short case studies, issues with the use of algorithms in government services. The chapter concludes by considering the strategies that social and community workers might employ to achieve data justice.

INTRODUCTION: This article discusses the findings from a project on enhancing the professional capabilities of newly qualified social workers. Existing capability and competence frameworks are reviewed, and components of a draft Aotearoa New Zealand Professional Capabilities Framework (ACPF) are outlined. METHODS: This phase of the research program...

This research brief discusses methods used to co-produce a professional capabilities framework as the final part of a larger programme of research on enhancing the professional capabilities of newly qualified social workers.This phase of the research programme began with a literature scan of five social work professional capability frameworks. We t...

The article argues that social work academics, especially critical and radical social work academics, ought to contribute to alternative, open and more collective approaches to academic publication. The prevailing problematic of price gouging, that is, for-profit publishers enclosing scholarly articles behind paywalls, is discussed, along with main...

This thesis is a case study of a policy and technological innovation in the New Zealand child protection system. It explores policy proposals associated with the White Paper for Vulnerable Children. In particular, it examines plans to create a digital information system called the Vulnerable Kids' Information System. Proposals for this new informat...

Across nation states, social work services have developed and implemented predictive assessment tools that utilize algorithms to calculate risk from large inter-linked databases. In this paper, we explore and compare the policy contexts for predictive tools in family and child protection services in England, Denmark and Aotearoa New Zealand. The de...

INTRODUCTION: Many social work professional bodies and regulators mandate regular supervision. Supervision is believed to support continuing development of professional skills, safeguarding of competent and ethical practice, oversight of the practitioner’s work for adherence to organisational expectations, and support for practitioner wellbeing.MET...

INTRODUCTION: Many social work professional bodies and regulators mandate regular supervision and professional development. Supervision is believed to support continuing development of professional skills, safeguarding of competent and ethical practice, oversight of the practitioner’s work for adherence to organisational expectations, and support f...

This commentary was published by the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers (ANZASW) on the occasion of International Human Rights Day, 10 December 2019. ANZASW invited the author to respond to several questions on the topic of human rights. In 2019, Neil was the inaugural winner of the John Fry Memorial Supreme Award for Quality and In...

Report Two: Readiness to Practise of NQSWs

Report Three: Professional Capabilities Framework

Report on Phase One: The social work curriculum from the Readiness to Practise project in Aotearoa New Zealand

Final project overview for the Readiness to Practise research in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Readiness to practise project: Report on phase one

This is a methodological article describing how a national social work education research project constructed a taxonomy of educational terms and used database and data visualization software to map the social work curriculum in New Zealand. Mapping the curriculum is difficult enough in the context of a single educational program, however, represen...

Social work education is a contested site in many Western countries, where neoliberal governments tend to privilege individual-focused rather than structural, rights-based welfare perspectives and expect curricula to reflect this preference. Over 2014-2015, well-publicised criticism of social work referred to graduates' lack of knowledge of trauma...

Field education and the supervision that occurs during this process cements learning and enhances preparedness for a career in social work. Graduate readiness for social work practice is however a contested subject in New Zealand with recent criticism focusing on the adequacy of social work education. This paper reports on findings from focus group...

This article reviews the political and ethical dimensions of technology applications in social work by focusing on a descriptive case study. The case study is of an initiative undertaken by the New Zealand government between 2011 and 2015 to develop an algorithm that would allow child protection services to predict future child maltreatment at the...

The readiness to practice of newly qualified social workers in Aotearoa New Zealand is a contested subject. In recent years, criticism by public figures including government ministers and the New Zealand government-appointed Children’s Commissioner have stimulated debate within the profession. Media critique of social work practice has highlighted...

"The world of social work has been shocked by the treatment of Palestinian social worker Munther Amira. The International Federation of Social Work has released a powerful statement demanding his release from Israeli prison (see: http://ifsw.org/news/release-social-worker-munther-amira-immediately-statement-by-ifsw-human-rights-commission/) and thi...

INTRODUCTION: The rise of social media has been associated with rapid growth in different forms of digital networking, debate and activism. Many studies have traced the role of social media in mobilising people to take action on shared issues of concern across the world. Yet, while networked public spaces offer many possibilities for professional e...

Editorial for issue 29(2).

A literature scan for the research project" Enhancing readiness to practice", social work education. Funded by Ako Aotearoa. Peer reviewed.

Editorial for issue 29(1).

Members of a closed Facebook group, established to discuss professional social work issues, were surveyed to explore what they valued about the group, the problems or issues associated with membership, and factors associated with participation or reluctance to participate. A non-probability, self-selection sample (N = 53) completed an online survey...

Technical report for the Enhancing readiness to practice project

Technical report About the development of the TISWEANZ Taxonomy

This issue of the journal marks a new stage in the continuing journey of Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work: this is our first open access issue and all journal content will now be freely available to anyone in the world from our new journal website (http://anzswjournal.nz). By taking this step we are contributing to a worldwide open access movement...

Technical report for The Enhancing Readiness to Practice project

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the growth in demand for social work field placements in New Zealand is outstripping supply and impacting on placement quality. However, to date, no systematic study of placement demand or supply in New Zealand has been published. Our study sought to identify the number of students placed during 2012, their placemen...

Actor-network theory (ANT) is a material semiotic analytical framework developed during the 1980s in the field of science and technology studies (STS). It is a constructivist perspective and can be considered a form of sociotechnical systems theory, but with a radical difference: it assumes that sociotechnical systems are heterogeneous networks ena...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the growth in demand for social work field placements in New Zealand is outstripping supply and impacting on placement quality. However, to date, no systematic study of placement demand or supply in New Zealand has been published. Our study sought to identify the number of students placed during 2012, their placemen...

Professional regulation, ethical codes, and codes of conduct are all a necessary part of protecting the public from professional malpractice in the modern world. However, they cannot of themselves enable social work practitioners to develop the moral fluency and practical wisdom they require to act ethically. Paying attention to the character of so...

Programmes of professional education for the human services in areas like social work, counselling, and drug and alcohol studies, have been relatively late adopters of technology-mediated approaches to learning. Learning for practice in the human services has been described as “high-touch” rather than “high-tech” and assumed by some commentators to...

The digital age has transformed access to all kinds of educational content not only in text-based format but also digital images and other media. As learning technologists and librarians begin to organise these new media into digital collections for educational purposes, older problems associated with cataloguing and classifying non-text media have...

This article reports on a study of a networked learning approach among remote social work practitioners in a large, rural local authority. The intervention was a blended approach that combined facilitation, face-to-face meetings, online communications and access to e-library resources. The intervention was focused on discussions of case management...

The digital age has transformed access to all kinds of educational content not only in text-based format but also digital images and other media. As learning technologists and librarians begin to organise these new media into digital collections for educational purposes, older problems associated with cataloguing and classifying non-text media have...

This article explains the rationale for the digitization of social work heritage material and the virtualization of an archived nondigital museum exhibit constructed by a Scottish Museum of Social Work. The project involved the “virtualization” of an existing social work museum exhibition on the migration of “Home Children” from Scotland to Canada...

The use of multimedia technology in social work education predates the web. Innovative social work educators have incorporated images, audio, and video into the curriculum to enrich and enliven teaching ever since it was possible to do so. This paper reviews the literature on multimedia applications in social work education, and places this work in...

Many programmes of professional education for human services workers require extensive periods of classroom based study to acquire the necessary underpinning knowledge for practice. At the same time educational research tells us that the integration of concepts and theories into practice remains a stubbornly intractable problem for many learners. T...

Learning objects are bite-sized digital learning resources designed to tackle the e-learning adoption problem by virtue of their scale, adaptability, and interoperability. The learning object approach advocates the creation of small e-learning resources rather than whole courses: resources that can be mixed and matched; used in a traditional or onl...

Research enquiry into the history of social work and social welfare is a vital and ongoing scholarly activity, underpinning our understanding of the past, and illuminating present day practice and policy. 'Memory institutions' like libraries and museums have a key role to play in preserving, and providing researchers with access to, original cultur...

This paper summarizes the results of an evaluation of students' perspectives comparing learning from a multimedia case­based learning object with learning from text­based case studies. A secondary goal of the study was to test the reusability of the learning object in different instructional contexts. The learning object was deployed in the context...

The Internet is here to stay. From its origins as an experimental US military project in the 1960s, this highly decentralised system of communication is today used by some 40 million people worldwide. Among them are a growing number of social care organisations, Neil Ballantyne explores its actual and potential uses in relation to child care issues...

Ballantyne, N. (1995). Diversion at the point of entry to the Scottish children’s hearings system: area team resource groups, in R. Fuller. and A. Petch (eds.) Practitioner Research: the reflexive social worker. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Ballantyne, N. (1989). Breaking down the barriers to collaborative practice, in K. Gill, and T. Pickles (eds.) . Glasgow: ITRC.