I never really bother with New Years resolutions. What I’ve always tried to do instead is decide on something new I want to learn, or to plan a big challenge/event. My favourite one of these was a couple of years back when I set out to learn the didgeridoo which after a few weeks of pain for our neighbours I eventually managed. Sadly, since I haven’t run many courses that involve campfires for quite some time its a skill now confined to being a party piece!

This year the skill will be something web related and relevant to plans for getting Digital Youth up and running. I haven’t decided which particular thing I’m going to focus on yet but it’ll be to allow me to develop applications from scratch rather than hacking away at other peoples work.

Just for fun though heres a few ‘resolutions’ and their probability for success….

I should probably add a few more re. my bad driving habits. The paperless office one I’m confident about now that I’ve got hold of a Fujitsu scanner (very impressive it is too!).

The cycle across England I’ve been intending to do since the last sponsored cycle across North Wales. Originally I was going to do it as another sponsored activity, but I’ve now decided I’d like to do one without having responsibility for other people, so fingers crossed I can get it together this summer.

The not agreeing to pointless meetings may sound a bit harsh. I read somebody elses advice about this a while back and nodded away about how much time is wasted agreeing to meet people who haven’t really given any thought to whether they can actually do any work with you - they just want to meet and maybe ’something could happen’. Well experience now tells me bugger all ever does, and giving time and ideas away for free is really pretty dumb. Instead I’ll try and meet with people that either I can learn from myself, or who are able to suggest a good clear agenda & purpose for meeting (so please do still get in touch but have a think about that agenda first!), (and actually if I’m honest there’s a couple of people I’d like to meet sometime this year but I don’t have any real purpose for doing so!).

PS if anyone fancies cycling across the English south coast for a few days get in touch

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We’ve finally finished moving house after much going backwards and forwards between Devon and Oxfordshire where we now are. At both addresses I’ve had trouble getting online and our new house is a dead zone for mobile signals! While offline I spent a bit of time designing a new logo for Digital Youth.

I’ve dropped the “work” from the original “Digital Youth Work”, partly just because its shorter and partly to broaden the appeal beyond the eventual programme being just a youth work programme. Initially my focus will still very much be to develop programmes for informal education, but now that my other resources are bing distributed to schools it seems silly to potentially alienate that sector too.

For the time being I’ve stuck up a holding page over on digitalyouth.org.uk The mailing list link isn’t up yet as there was a problem with the script I use for mailouts when I transferred domains, so I need to fiddle about with that and get it working again (very soon!).

Other than that not much progress has been made so far but I will be knuckling down to get some practical activity ideas up around early February time. Before that I’m developing a couple of new resources to try out with a group in January and I’ll get details of those up too sometime in the new year.

That’s the lot for 2008! Until 2009 have a brilliant Xmas break and enjoy the new year

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Film from recent training with Staffordshire Youth Action Council who are planning a campaign for improved transport and planning to use social networks to highlight it.

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You can see some thoughts from a few people in the slides and have a listen to DK’s hopes in the film about how Youth Work will use the web in 2009.

Thanks to Adam Sibley, Adam Fletcher, Carl Haggerty, DK and Tessy Britton for bravely putting forward their predictions/ideas/hopes. I say brave because of course in a years time we’ll be able to look back and see how close to the mark we were!

Overall there’s a sense of hope that Youth Work better embraces the web next year. I’ve slightly countered that with my more cynical prediction that still next year youth work in general will be slow to embrace the web. I started an online network for what was then the Young Movers programme in 2003, at that time internet access was a real issue for many of our young volunteers but even those without home access felt it was the best solution for being able to have a more ongoing relationship with us while back at their homes in various parts of the country. I felt then that what we were doing was maybe a couple of years ahead of the pack and that soon an online element would become normal.

Well 5 years later and things haven’t changed much! Except that young people are using the web prolifically - the social network explosion has integrated the web into young peoples normal social lives, but for all manner of reasons the services working with young people have largely been left behind.

I agree with DK’s thoughts that there needs to be so much more to developing the use of the web than trying to jump on board the social network train. For one thing the use of social networks is likely to change radically very quickly - my own prediction here is that there will be much more of a move towards open networks that allow people to take their data wherever they like and quickly move between networks instead of having all their films, photos etc. tied into facebook. If so this will provide some interesting possibilities for youth services online along with a few more challenges to overcome.

The use of twitter is mentioned a couple of times. This was something we’d considered with plans for OnTheUp - the idea of being able to get an instant evaluation from young people involved in projects is very appealing. I don’t think though that twitter is the solution to this though, at least not until mobile providers provide a free data plan as standard for mobile phones. What I can see happening is that it surely can’t be long before mobile phone services integrate sms, twitter and msn/instant messaging into one universal service - if this happens the instant evaluation idea could quickly become a reality, although there will still be the challenge of getting young people to be willing to do so (which may not be so difficult depending on how you approach it).

Despite my cynical ‘not much will change’ prediction I really hope they do - in fact I’m relying on it! I’m planning to throw myself into developing digital youth programmes in the new year and am very aware that as things stand there won’t be much of a take up. What I’m hoping is that as people like DK and Tim Davies spread the word and continue to inspire youth workers out there to explore the web I’ll be able to build on this and provide some nicely structured ideas for using the web in creative ways towards personal development and community involvement - so I really hope youth work does embrace the web next year!

So thats our thoughts - if you have your own predictions or have thoughts on other peoples please do add them in the comments.

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A trend I’ve enjoyed over the past 18 months is the use of online video to record conferences I can’t for whatever reason attend. The recent Conference for the Federation for Detached Youth Work have uploaded films on their Ning site. The films are a bit hard to follow as it seems nobody was actually operating the camera, but you can at least hear most of the speakers.

I downloaded the video from Mark Smiths session and listening to his views has made me wonder or not there actually is a place for detached youth work on the internet.

Theres been a few discussions over recent months that detached youth work may provide a good model for online youth work. If you view the internet as a space with areas where young people ‘hang out’, then reaching into those spaces may be the same as the detached youth work approach of engaging with young people where they are, rather than seeking to bring them into a youth centre.

Much of what Smith discusses however suggests that detached youth work is fundamentally against Read the rest of this entry »

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Heres an Animoto film from the recent training Kirsty & Maria organised with Staffordshire Youth Forums….

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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 Read the rest of this entry »

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If you have a negative number and you want to make it into a positive one you need to add a larger positive number to do so: -10 needs +11 to make it =1

I wonder if the same applies to other aspects of life. For example if you have a negative image of young people do you need a larger positive image to redress the balance? If so I wonder then on the wisdom of the Barnardo’s Children in Trouble Campaign.

The campaign includes a very well produced film showing hunters hunting down children while narrating comments that adults have apparently actually said about children. They’ve had a brilliant publicity launch - I heard Barnardo’s Chief Executive discussing the campaign on Radio 4 this morning, and even this lowly blog was sent pre-publicity well in advance with links to the survey findings, film and so on.

So a very impressive and well put together campaign - and one with a message I very much agree with. But somehow it doesn’t feel comfortable. Obviously its not designed to make you feel comfortable - you should feel uncomfortable thinking that adults speak so negatively about children and young people, but that’s not the cause of my unease. Instead I wonder whether actually this kind of negativity can reinforce further negative attitudes, hence my maths lesson at the start! -10 + -5 = -15, not good!

A more practical example can be heard in the short Radio 4 interview with children from Birmingham about their reaction to how adults view them having seen the film. You start to get the sense of a battle between children and adults. Undoubtedly there is a battle, and always will be, but how do you best go about bridging the divide - positive activities to bring people together? or hard hitting campaigns showing how bad the other side is?

What I think is really sad about this isn’t that some adults do feel this way (and it is only some if you consider that the 2021 people that took part in the survey accounts for 0.003% of the actual adult population in the UK), but that because of the way the media drives our society a large charity acting in the best interests of children feels the only way they can get good publicity for their cause is to try and shock.

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