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 less obvious about what the skill is they relate to and so make the assessments more genuine. The previous responses can be hidden from view meaning that the actual developments over time should be more accurate (doing it on paper tends to make people feel as though they should give themselves a higher rating each time).

The ‘overtime’ feature means that young people can input ratings at the start and end of their involvement in a project or activity, and also some times in between. What this will do is allow the actual developments made, to be attributed to whatever project or activity they were involved with at the time (providing good evidence for the benefits of programmes and activities).

A brilliant addition to my thinking was inspired by Kate who contributed to the comments on the sicamp site – this is the addition of a ‘weightings’ system that will allow young people not only to rate themselves, but also their peers (and potentially adults to contribute too). A flexible ratings system would mean the ‘administrator’ can set up a ratings system with a bias either towards peer assessment/self assessment/tutor assessment depending on the programme.

Together this is the key functionality as I see it. The final ratings would be averaged out to provide a final report showing the changes in different skills/qualities over the time of a project. The real power of this would be that this final report can be used by young people to help them confidently talk about how they benefited from their involvement in a project and it will support them to explain to potential employers/educators about the ’soft skills’ they have.

There are lots of potential ‘add ons’ – one of the main ones I see is the ability to provide recommendations to young people based on their final reports. These might be potential activities they could consider doing, potential roles they would be effective at or even potential careers they may be interested in.

I think the key to how well this will work will be its usability – its going to be crucial that the system is as clean and simple as possible and that it feels intuitive to use both for participants and administrators.

What happens now is that the people at sicamp put together a team of people to develop the idea and next month I’ll join them to see what can be put together over 48 hours. I’ve never attended an event like this and am very excited – both to see how the idea develops and to see the event itself. What I really like about the idea of the event is that theres a collection of different people coming together to try and create ideas and solutions – this makes a very nice change from the very drab conferences in the youth sector world that so often preach the same old messages, reel out the same old faces and often have negative undertones – lets hope that sooner than later the youth sector can follow the example of people dropping their ‘jobsworth’ attitudes to try and come together to find solutions!

There are 5 other really good ideas being developed at the ’sicamp’ – you can read about them here!

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