Jul 03
Posted by mas

Youth Story Animations

society  

Here’s a couple of films from the brilliantly talented people at Bold Creative…..

The first is  ‘Dillons Story’ - a young boy living in poverty.

The second is ‘It Ain’t Disneyland’ - quite an inspiring story about young people in Tower Hamlets taking the lead in trying to rebuild their community.

You can see more of their stuff over on their site. I hope they do more animations soon!

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Jul 01
Posted by mas

The bigger problem - knives or the media?

society  

I enjoyed watching the first of the Disarming Britain series on Channel 4 last night, although I didn’t so much enjoy the first programme of the evening ‘Kids, Knives & Broken Lives’. I shared the feelings of Wallace over on the Disarming Britain blogs who says

“what I seen last night was a bunch of wannabe gangsters who watch and copy American Gangs……I was expecting more up and close talking with Gang Members from around Britain but what i seen was not actual gang members but some groups of boys who dont claim to be in a gang, but talk about gangs and hang about their street”

The programme itself rang true with quite a lot of what we see on courses from groups who discuss gangs and weapons - lots of talk from people who are apparently in the thick of things, yet little of any substance or that comes across as truly believable.

Thats not to say there aren’t problems, of course there are, but if you’d taken away the moody gangster music what you’d have mostly seen Read the rest of this entry »

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Jun 17
Posted by mas

Guidance for Youth Work Online

social media  

Alex sent me a message over on UK Youth Online earlier asking if we had a model policy for ‘interactions with young people online’. We have lots of model policies that you can download from the main YoMo site here…. but none to do with our online work.

It is something I think would be very valuable though - we all know the difficulties many local authority groups have in simply Read the rest of this entry »

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Jun 17
Posted by mas

Get Together for UK Youth Online

social innovation, social media  

If you haven’t already, get yourself over to UK Youth Online and join up! Tim Davies has set it up as a space to share ideas and info for people interested in online work and using online technology with young people.

The aim is to have a get together in London sometime in September but even if you can’t make that its worth joining in with the online discussions. I know Tim has been keen for a long time to try and create some sort of network for people interested in this stuff and the site he’s set up has already kick started some interesting ideas.

There’s also a good discussion about the 4 possible themes that Tims proposed for the get together including a discussion about Youth Work 2.0 (& 3.0! but more on that another time)

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Jun 16
Posted by mas

Boozing or Voting?

society  

Apparently in Scotland they’re about to announce that under 21 year olds will be banned from buying alcohol from off-licenses - you can hear the news item over on BBC

I’ve noticed for a while in supermarkets they say you have to prove your age if you look under 21, and recently there were suggestions it might become if you look under 25 - but you still have the right to buy it if you can prove you are 18.

I think it would be interesting to see a poll for 16 - 25 year olds to ask how many would want the right to buy alcohol at the legal age and how many would like the right to vote at 16 and compare the results!

Actually I’m listening to that BBC interview as I write and somebody’s just made the point that its ‘absurd’ that people old enough to vote won’t be able to purchase alcohol. It seems to be yet another inconsistency in deciding at what age young people actually become adults. Although of course its already accepted throughout the world that you don’t need to be an adult to have sex (see this post).

So soon the running order in Scotland for taking responsibilties will be:

  • Have Sex
  • Vote (a couple of years later)
  • Buy booze from the local shop (3 years later)

Actually now it makes perfect sense - I can see that in Scotland soon no young people will be drunk so they won’t have irresponsible sex and they’ll take a greater interest in politics! Or has nobody noticed those drunk kids in the park on Friday nights aren’t actually 18 anyway?!

Having made the comparison between wanting to vote and wanting to drink, I wonder for how many people they felt the first time they were legally allowed to drink in a pub was their transition to adulthood and how many felt it was their first vote?

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Jun 11
Posted by mas

Youth Work 2.0 - how to do it?…..

social innovation  

Tims stuck a few thoughts down over on the NYA blogs about ‘Youth Work 2.0‘ and Hilary mentions in her blog that they are looking into ideas for a ‘Virtual Connexions Centre‘

I’ve been thinking about the concept too but haven’t yet come up with any ideas as to how an online youth service might actually look. Its easy to see how lots of information can be stuck online and lots of ways to support young people to access that information - whats not so easy though is to think of how a ‘virtual service’ could support young peoples development through their actions ie. not just digesting information but actually motivating and supporting them to do things that are self developmental, and of course being able to record those experiences and developments and attribute them to the online service.

The challenge that really interests me is in the use of the web as a ‘positive/purposeful activity’. Years ago when I started designing training courses for young people it was a challenge to convince people about the use of leisure/recreational activities within training courses and how these could be the most effective medium for getting young people involved in community activities. Looking back now it seems relatively simple but I was thinking about how I’d approached that as a challenge and whether a similar approach could be used here.

So very quickly I drew up some challenges that an online youth service could set out to achieve: Read the rest of this entry »

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May 29
Posted by mas

Youth Service 2.0 - the future of Youth Work?

social media  

There are all sorts of discussions recently about the role of Youth Work and the web. Tim has produced his interim report ‘Youth Work & Social Networking‘, back in February a YoungScot report concluded that “Youth groups risk losing out to social networking sites like MySpace unless they rethink how best to attract teenagers” (a pretty dumb perspective in my opinion), and a discussion on the CYP Forums asks if social networking is a threat or an opportunity for Youth Work?

Add to that the ongoing discussions (and events) about how best to support young peoples ‘online safety’ and more positively how to effectively take advantage of the opportunities presented by using social media technologies.

Well all this earlier got me thinking about whether we’ll ever see a ‘virtual youth service’?!

Read the rest of this entry »

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May 23
Posted by mas

I’m clever, ugly and unpopular :-/

society  

Well according to facebook anyway! I have the highest IQ of my ‘friends’, I’m in the bottom third of attractiveness and according to my latest notification X amount of people are more popular than me - even more insulting given that I never added the applications that are apparently rating my ugliness & unpopularity!

One application I did have for a while (and swiftly got rid of) reported to me that not many of my ‘friends’ wanted to sleep with me. This I didn’t feel so insulted about given that the majority of my ‘friends’ are young people we’ve worked with, male, or family members (which narrows down the minority who apparently did want to sleep with me - or at least I hope so!).

Frankly though I’m bored of facebook and Read the rest of this entry »

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