I’ve done quite a bit more on this but I’ve stopped myself because I’m sure other people will be wanting some flexibility and opportunities to be creative over the weekend - so hopefully I’ve now got a clear brief but not too rigid to allow for some further innovation.

You can read the brief in the attached pdf. The first page gives an overview of the purpose of the Personal Development Report concept, and this is followed by some ‘case studies’ illustrating how different people might use the system. I had quite a few further examples but I think this is enough to give people a picture.

So now its a case of taking along these ideas tomorrow and hoping that there will be a few people interested in developing the idea further. If so I think one of the interesting debates will be about which model to use for sustainability and I think there are several opportunities towards this (but I’ll save the discussion for the weekend!).

So fingers crossed that I’m lucky enough to meet up with some enthusiastic talented people (well I’m sure I will but lets hope they want to work on this idea!). Personally I can see all sorts of potential and there is a strong need for a system like especially if we can make the use of what technology has to offer now. I can also see a system like this paving the way for many similar ones by various award schemes etc.

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Tags: Resources, soft skills

I think the first film I edited was in 1998. I’d used a (huge) Sony camcorder to film a watersports weekend that I’d taken some girls to from the youth club (it involved camping in a field near Holme Pierrepont much to the despair of the accompanying female worker I’d dragged along!). At that time I borrowed some sort of console and the footage was edited on my TV at home onto a video cassette! (The console in the pic is just an example I don’t think it was that fancy!).

When I started work on the Young Movers programme we decided that a film of each course would be a good evaluation method and that by getting young people to talk about what they intended to do following the training this would help with a bit of reflective learning. The Chief Executive was so keen on the idea he went straight out and bought a new Panasonic digital camcorder which he plonked on by desk the next day (in fact I think they still use it!). Back then I was a Windows user - we had no idea how to edit digital video, so a trip to Dixons (now Currys) and the helpful salesperson recommended ‘Dazzle Moviestar’.

Well what a bloody nightmare that was! Once I’d figured out how to use (more…)

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Tags: film, Resources, social media

I’ve been starting to pull ideas together for the Social Innovation Camp this coming weekend. I’m already starting to think the ‘Personal Development Reports‘ will be more of a ‘Soft Skills Plotter’ albeit the measurement of development over time is critical so hopefully a better name will come up in time.

For the concept to work there are two key factors - usability and credibility. Credibility will take some time but one of the main ways of achieving this will be through use so I’m very much hoping that over the weekend I’m lucky enough to get to work with technical people who are able to make very complex things very simple!

In terms of use I think those that will find the system most useful will be:

• Young People - becoming aware of their skills and feeling confident to talk about them
• Practitioners - measuring impacts of projects and comparing different the outcomes of different programmes and projects
• Employers & Educators - understanding what soft skills are and who has what

So we’ll need to understand what soft skills are too! And then having worked out what they are we then need to find a sensible way of helping people assess them over time (and in a way that they understand and enjoy).

This isn’t something new to me - our kind of work has far more outcomes in the soft skills area than anything else and its always been a frustration that its so difficult (and questionable!) to measure the ‘journey’ that people have gone on. If you ask yourself the question “what kind of a person was I five years ago and what skills have I developed during that time?” - its very difficult to answer other than in terms of hard skills & experiences “I was a Supervisor, now I’m a Manager” or “I completed my Diploma or I did a First Aid Certificate” - but this doesn’t give a real insight into the person you are and what you have to offer.

Anyway back to what those soft skills are. I’ve been building a list and (more…)

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

Five banners down, 40 new people, Five 3D maps cleared, 80 odd pictures and a sandwich spread later- and its only day one!

Myself and 3 volunteers began training in Letterkenny, Ireland today as part of a Leadership through the arts project. We will be running the one-day course for 3 days, with 6 new groups every morning, so we will meet and work with over a hundred different people! Apart from a slightly delayed flight and a forgotten driving license, we got off to a good start this morning with a new idea we were piloting.

The idea came from the current resource we use, prospective. Prospective aims to make participants consider and make a link between their community, the people and resources in it, issues those people face and opportunities which would allow them make a positive contribution. We decided to take a more practical approach to this method incorporating arts to have participants create a 3D sculpture for their map and then using a bit of social media by way of films to present the different aspects of their area. There were positive and negative aspects to this method in comparison to the resource so this has allowed us to identify what works best. Thats why it’s great we are doing it again tomorrow!

Due to the late arrival in Ireland and the extremely early start, unfortunately we haven’t had much time to enjoy Donegal, so hopefully tomorrow we’ll be more up for a mission! As for traveling out here alone, everythings gone to plan so far (apart from a few currency worries!!), so the long term planning and folders full of addresses, bookings, session notes etc paid off!!

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Tags: events, Resources, social media, soft skills, volunteering

I’m very pleased (and surprised) that an idea I submitted for ‘Personal Development Reports’ has been selected to be one of the ideas to be developed at the Social Innovation Camp next month in London. This convention has had a fair amount of positive publicity lately particularly on online media. It’s been mentioned numerously in passing in various forums with huge traffic, just a couple of days ago a long thread about this was posted on Pokerstars

You can read the details about what this is here (and please do add comments if you have suggestions for its use/development).

The concept is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and is based on the booklets we use (details here) and also the Youth Awards site that we’ve been developing for some time (and still have a very long way to go!).

The Personal Record Cards we currently offer aren’t designed to be an assessment of young peoples skills - their purpose is to try and make young people aware of their personal skills and qualities and also to encourage adults working with them to have conversations about these things.

Now in theory the booklets could also be useful as evidence of young peoples learning/development - but to use them this way depends on young people using them honestly (and understanding the various ratings), and the supporting adult keeping good records.

An online version can take the principle of this idea much, much further. First of all the questions can be (more…)

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Tags: Education & Skills, events, Innovation & Technology, Resources, soft skills

I’m in the process of updating our information sheets and along the way also giving some of our downloadable resources a makeover. We’re also making some of them free to download and heres the first one!

The ‘Group Rating Sliders’ are taken from a section on the Prospective Sheet. They are used for two reasons:

1. To help young people understand what the qualities are of an effective group
2. To help groups measure their own development as a group when involved in an activity or project

The download includes cards that groups can use to assess themselves at various stages during a project/activity. It also includes a facilitator guide that includes descriptions of the various qualities so that a facilitator can help participants understand the qualities when making their assessment.

The ratings are a self assessment and so can’t be compared (more…)

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Tags: res, Resources, soft skills, youth work

The Final Research Report based on the ‘Apprentice Trainers’ involved with the Young Movers programme is now available.

The Apprentice Trainer Programme was our way of training up young people to deliver the training on our courses. The programme was never originally designed to be led by young people - our focus was to provide good training courses. We started by using the model used on the adult programmes at the National Communities Resource Centre which is to tender out and bring in external consultants and trainers. As we ran courses this way we also started to get an interest from people wanting to volunteer for courses - so we took some of these on and then eventually there came a point where I realised we should be making better use of the skills that volunteers had. So we did this bit by bit and then we got to a point where I got the most involved volunteers together and asked them if they thought they were capable of running courses themselves. A small group of us led a few courses and then finally we got (more…)

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Tags: events, politics, res, Resources, soft skills, volunteering

The final version of the independent research report undertaken on the Young Movers programme is now available (copy attached at the bottom). I wrote a brief history of the Young Movers programme in a blog a few days ago.

The research was undertaken by the Institute of Political and Economical Governance and is in two parts - an overall report and a more focussed report on the Apprentice Trainer programme that trained up the young people who delivered the training on courses. YoMo evolved from the Young Movers programme and many of the young people that were Apprentice Trainers are still involved with us.

I’ve picked out some of the bits that I think are particularly interesting. Firstly that young people are willing to participate in their communities…..

“There was a willingness to get involved with community problems, just under nine in ten said they would like to be more
involved”

However they do view adults as a barrier to their potential participation:

“This included a lack of recognition of young volunteers, and a lack of opportunities to get involved locally. They also pointed to hostility and criticism of young people from adults. They felt that adults do not take young people’s views seriously, and did not genuinely listen. This was seen as a de-motivator for youth involvement, offering mixed messages to young people.”

And yet this is despite that young people feel (more…)

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Tags: adults, age, events, res, Resources, soft skills, volunteering