The people over at Social Innovation Camp have selected the ideas to be developed at their camp next month. Ideas include something to sort out junk mail, a way to find out who’s on holiday and where, so you can get them to do useful stuff like finding a plumber to fix the drains at an orphanage (I can’t even begin to explain how unlikely that could be of any use to any of the orphanages I’ve seen), a site to help you navigate your way around places with consideration to ability needs or escorting young children, an idea to get people out jogging to drop in and visit elderly people and run errands for them (seriously!), and an online marketplace for people who grow local produce. Also potentially shortlisted is something to include staff in making their company carbon neutral, a (ridiculous) idea to make setting up a social enterprise a one click process, an online system to help you make preparations for your death, and a scheme to help people join together to share the costs of investing in renewable energy.

Of all of them its the vegetable marketplace idea (called Vegsy) that I can see some real use for although getting enough people signed up to make it useful seems highly ambitious.

For most of the others I’m bemused as to what the perceived social benefit will be or how realistic it is that they can actually be of use. What I took from the last Social Innovation Camp was that to be successful you need a very simple idea. The last winner was Enabled by Design which aims to link the needs of people who use adapted equipment with designers - technically its the sort of thing that could be put together in just a few days, getting it used of course is a harder challenge and I assume that’s what has taken (more…)

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Tags: innovation, Innovation & Technology, Society & Issues

If you’re reading this what I’d really like you to do is to think of 3 - 5 things that are your predictions for how Youth Work will use the web in 2009.

Maybe you think more youth orgs will use particular social networks. Maybe more practitioners will blog or maybe blogging will die a youth work death? Maybe there will be more events like the UKYouthOnline gathering in September - maybe these events will replace mainstream conferences?

Perhaps we’ll see our first online ‘virtual youth work conference’? Maybe young people will campaign against youth services and educationalists using SNS to impose on their personal web space?

You get the idea!

What I’m hoping to do is put together various peoples thoughts into a nice fancy slideshow which I’ll then stick up on slideshare and you can share and embed it as you see fit and we can all look back in a years time and see what progress is being made along the youth work online journey!

Please DON’T write your predictions in the comments (and spoil the surprise!) - instead please email them to me at info@yomo.co.uk

in the subject write ‘PREDICTIONS”

list your 3 - 5 predictions

please also send over a photo (either of you or your logo etc.) and your name/job/organisation and also if you want a link back to your own site or blog.

As soon as I have enough predictions in I’ll draw something up - so no closing date but the sooner you send in your ideas the more likely they’ll be included in the main slides.

Finally a reminder……

what are your 3 - 5 predictions for how youth work will use the web in 2009?

(& feel free to use a bit of license as to what you think youth work is)

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Tags: digital youth work, dyw, Education & Skills, innovation, Innovation & Technology, youth work 2.0

In the last post on the digital youth work programme I mentioned that I’d be looking to develop it along the lines of an ‘open source youth work’ approach. I’ve talked about this before but I don’t think I’ve specifically described what I actually mean. So in an attempt to do this I’ve created a ’slidecast’ to explain how I think an open source approach to developing a youth programme could work, and also to look at the overall aims for creating this initial ‘digital youth work programme’.

As I was working through those slides I did realise theres considerable potential to fail, mostly because for open source to work it needs a strong community, and really the youth work online community is still pretty weak and also somewhat guarded I think. Still, everything has to start somewhere so hopefully we can build on the few people who’ve already shown interest and in time we may get to the point where theres a strong enough online community to use the open source approach seriously in developing future programmes & projects with young people.

I’m not sure that I actually did explain the concept that well so if you’re still confused please say so!

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Tags: digital youth work, dyw, Education & Skills, innovation, Innovation & Technology, youth work 2.0

Thinking about this weekends upcoming event UKYouthOnline has got me thinking again about OnTheUp. OnTheUp was the idea that came out of ‘Personal Development Reports‘ that I originally submitted to the Social Innovation Camp earlier in the year. I haven’t yet managed to dedicate the time to developing the idea further as I’d have hoped, and in retrospect I think that perhaps the Social Innovation Camp experience slightly hampered development in that what started out as an attempt to develop a tool to support informal learning became more focussed on being able to somehow develop this into ‘the next big website’.

I do think online technology could be a brilliant tool for ’solving’ this problem - but it needs a bit more thought than just banging out a site. So I’ve gone right back to the start to have a think about what that problem actually is.

I first became aware that there was a ‘problem’ quite early on in the development of the Young Movers programme. Young Movers was initially based on a loose remit of creating a programme for young people in citizenship. My take on this was to try and develop a programme that would help young people to become ‘good citizens’ - this meaning they would be the sort of people any community would be proud of and who would (more…)

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Tags: dyw, Education & Skills, innovation, Innovation & Technology, soft skills, youth work 2.0

I was reading this discussion about ‘Using Technology in Education‘ that includes a list of gut reaction responses by educators as to what their fears are about using technology. Some of the things I picked out from that list include:

• I feel like a dinosaur in a world of eagles.
• Not knowing the next step without assistance.
• The kids will know WAY more than I do.
• Not being able to troubleshoot when the kids run into glitches.
• Can’t figure how to do things.
• Biggest fear when things don’t work especially when the kids are flying along, it is so deflating.
• Not knowing how to do a task.
• Looking stupid
• My ineptitude will be revealed to the kids

So can you teach something without being an expert in it first?

That reminds me of conversations we had in the early days of supporting young people to deliver our training. By far the biggest concern young Trainers had with us was that they wouldn’t/weren’t taken seriously - particularly by adult youth workers. This was for a mixture of reasons - the obvious factor of age (very young people being asked to ‘instruct’ much older and sometimes elderly people), being inexperienced, and also because very often young Trainers would end up running a session that wasn’t within their normal expertise.

(Its probably also worth making a point that another factor was the attitudes from some Youth Workers who would make it very well known how ‘qualified’ and ‘experienced’ they were - an attitude I found bewildering given the purpose of their employment!)

How we supported young people to overcome this was to explain they should never assume they are more knowledgeable than the people in their sessions (young or old), and that actually this was not important. What was important was that they were experts in how we did things - they understood the course programme, the structure of the sessions, and our approach to delivering training. Their role was not to ‘educate’, but to facilitate a process through which participants would share knowledge and ideas (and therefore learn).

Everyone who’s ever done any teaching/training/coaching will be very aware that the teacher learns a considerable amount themselves through putting together and delivering teaching.

So I wonder how many of you that are involved with educating feel that in order to educate young people you have to first be an ‘expert’ yourself? Do you need to understand all aspects? or do you instead need to be willing to give things a go, experiment, explore and go on a learning journey with young people? Afterall if you’re not prepared to give something a go because you don’t understand it what sort of example is that?!

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Tags: Education & Skills, innovation, Innovation & Technology, soft skills

I borrowed the title from Arthur C Clarke as quoted in this presentation. If you’re interested in the use of technology with children and young people this film is fascinating. The first couple of minutes, less so, but watch on and see what happens when you stick a computer in a wall and leave it for a few months for children living in poverty to play with!

Also very interesting is the idea of one computer for many children being beneficial - rather than what I think most of us would expect - one computer per user. Lots in here to give thoughts for anyone involved in supporting young people to understand and use technology - and examples of peer education in its purest form.

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Tags: innovation, Innovation & Technology, poverty, social media, youth work 2.0

Heres a short film about the making of  ‘Hectors World’. You can see the Hectors World films on the thinkuknow website, set up by the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre.

Whether theres any plans to create something similar aimed at young people I don’t know but I always think its a good strategy to target children as young as possible for stuff like this so that it becomes second nature. The thinkuknow site also offers a downloadable ‘Hectors World Safety Button’ that ’swims’ in the top of the screen and if a child sees something they don’t like they can click the button which will cause the screen to be covered ‘until they get some help’. What the likelihood of a child using that button is I’m not sure as I’m pretty sure its in most childrens nature to be curious about everything!

The buttons only for Windows OS which seems a bit sloppy (can it be that hard to do the same for Macs & Linux?!)

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Tags: age, Education & Skills, film, innovation, social media, social networks

I’m working on our new website at the moment and playing around with Slideshare to maybe embed some of our stuff on the new site.

While playing I found the slideshow below and thought it had some relevance - not only to anyone confused by ’social media’, ’social networks’, ’sns’, ‘web 2.0′ and so on, but also relevance in relation to the ‘get on board message’ that it really has, for those involved in youth work.

Theres a lot of talk about the use of social media with young people, I tried to expand on the potential the web has beyond this for practitioners in an earlier post, this slideshow also made me think theres also an overall need for youth organisations to start seeking dialogue rather than monologue through their online presence. Perhaps this could relate back to better ‘accountability’ too - youth services provided by organisations that encourage young people (and their staff) to engage online rather than just giving out information and opening times?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialmediamarketing marketing)

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Tags: dyw, innovation, Innovation & Technology, social media, social networks, youth work 2.0