Apologies for the crap title but hopefully a better name will emerge as this develops. Thanks for the comments in the previous posts following the weekends UKYouthOnline event. The summary of my learning from the event is that I think there needs to be more debate/consideration about using the web as a practical tool for supporting young peoples development (and also for youth practitioners to work more effectively and efficiently).

With that in mind I said that I would start getting some ideas up for planning a ‘digital youth work strategy’. I’ve already thought about how to approach this and wanted to get early thoughts up, so here goes……

The ’strategy’ itself is going to involve developing an online programme using a ‘positive development’ approach. Once I’ve laid out my own ideas I’m going to explore methods for inviting people to contribute and collaborate into the programme along the idea of creating an ‘open source digital youth service‘.
So here’s the early thinking for the strategy:

• Develop a rationale for the programme
• Develop the practical programme
• Identify relevant online tools & resources
• Develop delivery methods including consideration for supporting practitioners to use the tools
• Invite collaboration to refine the programme
• Consider evaluation methods & methods for user involvement
• Promote and publicise the programme
• Ongoing evaluation and refinement

Now some things to keep in mind:

1. The programme itself will be (more…)

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   Tags: digital youth work, Education & Skills, Innovation & Technology, Participation & Citizenship, Resources, youth work 2.0

Kirsty spoke at a couple of Participation Works events last week. For those people that attended here’s a copy of her presentation (and of course have a look if you didn’t attend too!).

The new YoMo site is almost complete and includes a simpler downloads section for information sheets and leaflets etc. I’ve also been doing some much needed updating of just about all of our Information Sheets. If you want to be notified as soon as the new site goes live sign up to the YoMo Mailing List

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Tags: events, Resources

I’ve been using delicious for a long time for storing bookmarks (web addresses), mostly because of how well it integrates with the firefox browser.

Well here’s an alternative social bookmarking service - Reddit. With Reddit you can now create your own ’sub sites’, so I set one up for Youth Participation/Citizenship which you can see here.

So far its a bit top heavy with stuff from this blog but theres a few other links too. If anyone can be bothered you can sign up to Reddit too and then add your own links to the site. To do so Reddit offers some buttons that you can add to your browser so that when you visit a site you think is relevant all you need to do is click it!

Please do feel free to add all the relevant content from your own blogs and sites and anything else you find along your travels!

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Tags: Resources, social media, youth work, youth work 2.0

I hadn’t heard of ‘Beatbullying’ before but had a look at their new website which you can find here

Slightly annoyingly on most pages on the site a video automatically plays of some person or another talking about bullying (especially irritating when you see the same film several times as you navigate through!)

What I couldn’t find on the site was a definition of what bullying actually is. There are descriptions of things to look out for that may indicate if a child is being bullied or is a bully but I couldn’t find anything to define bullying.

I’m interested because it seems like one of those terms that gets thrown around that we all know is a bad thing - but what is it?! I do wonder too where the line is between unnaceptable ‘bullying’, and behaviour that actually its quite important for children & young people to learn to deal with?

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An opinion piece I wrote for Children & Young People Now has been published this week - you can read it online here.

The basic points I was making are:

• Online technology isn’t just about doing cool stuff with young people - its something youth workers should be looking to use as part of their own productivity
• There’s massive potential for collaboration within the sector - however this requires more people to make better use of online tools and of course to seek to interact

A few months back DK at Mediasnackers, Tim Davies and myself started planning a campaign to find the first statutory youth work blogger. As it turned out the campaign wouldn’t be needed as DK had already done enough on his travels to inspire Hilary Mason to give blogging a go - something she continues to do very well.

Theres been a few more pop up since, and assuming this continues to grow, there should soon be a youth work blogging wilderness, albeit a sparce one. This is great to see and very interesting to read about peoples experiences and opinions, but I think we also need people to start looking to go a stage further.

I’m not sure if ‘Open Source‘ is a term yet understood by the average person - assuming its not, a basic description for ‘Open Source Software’ would be that (often very skilled) people decide to create a piece of software, and rather than sell it in the conventional sense, they put it online for free. They don’t just make the software free, they make the code available too. This means that other people around the world can play with the code themselves and adapt it for their own needs. What often happens is that people who make improvements to the code share their additions and then begin to collaborate with others doing the same. This then expands further with people then developing ‘add-ons’ or new versions and so on.

People do this for free - or in terms more familiar to youth work - they volunteer their time to contribute towards an online community.

So what would it take to get a version of ‘Open Source Youth Work’? Quite a lot I expect (more…)

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Tags: innovation, Innovation & Technology, Resources, soft skills, youth work

I think I’ve spent more time in London these past 6 weeks than I have in the previous 10 years. Yesterday I went along with Ana (who’s working on the OnTheUp development) to the Innovation Exchanges Festival of Ideas.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect - the idea I’d submitted over on their website was OnTheUp which we’ve been developing further since the Social Innovation Camp. The ‘Festival’ was held at Amnesty International HQ and basically involved bringing together various people in the young people/youth work world along with potential commissioners and funders, and then encouraging them to talk to each other and see who might be interested in who.

It was good to meet up with David Wilcox again who was busy making more live films streamed from his mobile phone - besides capturing my ‘pitch’ he also got some of my thoughts about this kind of event (below). I’m a big fan of this more open approach to bringing people together and sharing ideas, experiences etc. - for me it has considerably more benefit than the alternative and more traditional conferences that in my opinion are rarely good value for money and usually involve familiar faces preaching familiar messages.

The theme yesterday was supporting ‘excluded young people’ and of course to be doing so in innovative ways given the agenda of the organisers. I think perhaps the audience wasn’t diverse enough to truly (more…)

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Tags: events, innovation, Innovation & Technology, Resources, youth work

We’ve just made a second resource available for free download and given it a makeover too!

Know Your Group Cards is a card based discussion activity designed to help groups discover the skills and qualities of members. The activity works best for groups that either already know each other or who have recently formed but members have some knowledge of each other.

The activity involves a self assessment sheet that allows each participants to rate their own various skills. There are then two sets of cards and the first set is placed in the middle of the group. Each member takes it in turns to take a card and then without anyone else seeing whats on the card they give ito to the person they think most appropriate.

After all the cards have been dished out the process is repeated with the second set of cards. When all cards have been allocated participants can look at the cards they have been issued and then if they wish they can choose to pass some on if they think they’re more appropriate for other members.

The activity is designed to provoke discussion and needs good facilitation, especially to be able to deal with situations where some members receive no cards (usually an indication this person isn’t well known rather than they have no skills!). The main purpose of the cards is to help groups consider what skills members have so that when they’re allocating tasks during activities and projects they put the skills available to the most effective use.

Know Your Group Cards can be downloaded for free from the Resources section.

Please note that to receive the free download you need to ‘checkout’ - you will then be sent a download link (please make sure you’re logged in to the resources section when you click the link).

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Something thats been on my todo list for a long time is to write up some lesson plans for how to use some of our resources. I’ve now taken it off my list - not because I’ve done it but because I don’t intend to for the foreseeable at least.

It was towards the bottom of my list anyway, mostly because I wasn’t sure how much value they’d actually have - afterall each resource already has a written guide on how to use it. The lesson plans would have been more along the lines of helping people see how the use of the resources fit within whatever curriculum they were using it within. But having seen some of the teaching resources my wife has had available during her teaching practices I now thinking writing lesson plans would in some ways be supportive of something I’m in principal against - the accreditation culture. (more…)

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