Tim's Blog

[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: