Tim's Blog

As if annually taking on a stage of the Tour de France hasn't been enough, this year, in celebration of his 50th Birthday, Bill Badham is taking on 'Le Triple Ventoux' challenge to raise money for the Maypole Centre. This from his Just Giving page:

There is a challenge organized by a French bicycle club (actually, a brotherhood) next to Mount Ventoux, a massive 2000 metre mountain in Provence in France. They say, “It is normal for a bike rider to try to climb Mont Ventoux at least once in a lifetime, but you are crazy if you do it again.”

There are 3 different routes you can use to go to the top of Mont Ventoux.

If you can climb all the routes in one day thats what Bill is going to do on July 6 2008 (starting from Bedoin, Malaucene and Sault), between sunrise and sunset, you are declared “Nut of Mont Ventoux.” Putting all that in perspective, to accomplish this feat Bill will climb 4500 metres. That's over half the height of Everest - the descending is another story.

DK from Mediasnackers has spoken to Hilary Mason from West Sussex Youth Service about her blogging over at UK Youth Blog and has put it together as a PodCast.You can listen to it here.

It's a fantastic 8 minutes of exploration of how social media tools can be used in Youth Work and informal education, and how just about anyone can pick up and learn the tools to make blogging work for them.

This is a post I've been wanting to put together for a while. Hopefully the phase 1 report from the Youth Work and Social Networking project I'm co-researching with Pete Cranston will be out soon (sending if off for formatting tomorrow...) - but as that looks like it will be about 15,000 words of literature review, survey and focus group write up, I thought it would be useful to put together a list of the literature that has most influenced or challenged my thinking.

First off, appologies for my lack of blogging of late. There's a lot to blog, but I'm having to put all my time into getting a few big projects rounded off right now.

However, I thought I should break blog silence to introduce the 31-Day Comment Challenge. It was the 31 days to a better blog challenge co-ordinated by Michelle Martin that really get my blogging started last year, and Michelle is leading the way in reflective learning again this year - this time with a focus on commenting on blogs and creating conversation.

You can join the challenge by following each of the daily tasks throughout May (you don't have to strickly work on them day-by-day) and it's a great way to more actively engage with blogs and blog-based community building.

[Summary: Reducing complex ideas to < 50 words and three frames... with an easy online tool]

The cartoon is a maligned medium (well, I've certainly been guilty of maligning cartoons in the past...). But I've recently discovered how effective a medium the basic cartoon can be for expressing ideas in an accessible way. Or to put it differently:

The cartoon above was put together in a few minutes using StripGenerator.com. It's doesn't quite allow one to achieve the lightness of touch of Dave Walker, or the visual feast of a Joe Sacco cartoon - but it does make it easy to create a quick cartoon online and get an image you can download and use.

[Summary: I like campaigning success. SRI a step closer for Oxford's Investments]

I spent a lot of my time at Oxford working on the University Socially Responsible Investment Campaign - trying to convince Oxford University and it's colleges to make sure their £2bn worth of investments were doing good in the world, and were not invested in weapons manafacturers and other companies with missions completely counter to the values of most of the University body.

Just before I left in 2006 we suceeded in getting a resolution of University Congregation (the top governing body of the University) to create a Socially Responsible Investment committee. We succeeded (long story... ask me about it some time...) and all went quiet.

On Monday I gave a presentation to the Ofcom/Oxford Internet Institute seminar on Social Networks about some of what we have discovered so far in the Youth Work and Social Networking research project.

A few people have asked me for the slides - so I've put them up on the project blog over here.

More results from the research will be available soon...

Update: a webcast of the presentation is now online here. My piece starts 59 minutes into session 1.

[Summary: you are invited to join in a free informal conference to talk about young people, the internet, opportunities, challenges, and change]

I've been struck again this week by how many people are thinking about young people's use of the internet, and the opportunities for engaging with young people online - but also by how disparate much of the action to move forward on those thoughts is.

More than ever we bring together the different threads of work to see if:

I've been thinking a lot recently about the role of technology, multimedia and social media in youth participation. How goes a video project really engage young people? What role does the video play? What about an online forum or a twitter-network? How can we make sure multimedia and social media really enhance the voice of young people in decision making? So, on a delayed train yesterday I sat down to sketch out the different ways in which technology and participation can mix.

The result was the 7 Cs of social media for participation.

Multimedia and social media can be used for:

There have been murmurs about a 'Youth Participation Resources Kite mark for a while now.

Whilst concerns about the quality of resources on Children and Young People's participation might be founded (I've seen quite a few participation resources recently which have made me somewhat concerned due to their lack of clarity or any clear understanding of participation...) - the idea of one group certifying those resources which are 'quality' or not simply doesn't work*.

Instead - we need a space where potential users of a resource can discuss it. In part that might be the People&Participation Library with comments switched on - but what I really have in mind is a version of Social Source Commons for participation.