Tim's Blog

What are the analogies you are using to help you and others in making better decisions about social media?

In talking about new technologies I find I often turn to analogies to help in:

1. Explain how a technology works and what it can do (e.g. describing wiki's as similar to a whiteboard in this guide)

   and

2. Exploring policy responses to new forms of technology (e.g. in thinking about how youth workers should interact with social networking)

When talking with youth workers, two of my favourites for exploring social networks are:

To help with clearing the 'To Blog' list before the Christmas Break - here's a quick round up of links that may be of interest...

(Welcome to any new subscribers who have arrived since the flurry of one page guides earlier this week. There will be more of those in the New Year - for now the blog returns to it's general eclectic focus linking youth participation, social change and social media.)

Youth Participation and Youth Work

• The newly launched Young Researcher Network are making use of their new blog to ask for your responses to their Everyday Ethics research questions. Q1. What have been the ethical dilemmas you have experienced doing research?
  
• The NYA have published a new report on young people's access to transport, plus a literature review unpacking Positive Youth Development models for youth work programmes for an English audience (which I co-authored... more on that soon....)

Ok. I promise this is the last one page guide I'll post this week (possibly this year...) - and this one isn't strictly about a social media tool.

I don't own a car and I don't drive, hence I rely heavily on the UK rail network. And to make that as straightforward as possible, I rely heaving on the fantastic traintimes.org.uk created by Mathew Sommerville (ok, I realise I've raved about this before... which to non-uk-train-travelling readers is possibly slightly odd... but I'm not going to let that stop me). And so that others can benefit from the sheer brilliance of traintimes.org.uk and its bookmarkable URLs (and so they can use if to find cheaper rail fares), I've put together this one page guide to using Traintimes.org.uk.

These two one page guides were written very specifically for the Young Researcher Network launch conference and look at online video editing and using the voicethread tool for collaboratively narrating slide shows and presentations.

I was introduced to VoiceThread by Al Upton and the miniLegends during the 31-days to a better blog challenge this summer. It's a really interesting tool, and so, with this one page guide my aim has been to offer an introduction to VoiceThread, but to leave open to discussion it's possible applications. I'd love to hear stories from those who have used VoiceThread in any consultation, participation or youth work contexts.

These two one page guides were written for the Young Researcher Network launch conference where they were used as part of a session introducing social media tools for young researchers.

I've always found geographic and mapping visualisations to be really helpful in participation projects (as in this series of workshops on the local offer), and so these two guides explore how Google Earth and the My Maps feature of Google Maps can be used to add an online dimension to community mapping projects.

I wrote this one page guide on running an online survey in response to a suggestion from Damien at ChangeMakers Virtual Volunteering programme, and to go towards a section on online consultation and participation I've been putting together for Participation Works.

You can download the guide for printing here (PDF), or for editing here (Word doc).

Another post in the one page getting started series. This time taking a look at the humble wiki.

From the document:

A wiki page is a bit like a whiteboard. All you need is a marker pen and you can change the content of the whiteboard. On a wiki page, just search for the edit link and you can change the page contents directly from your web browser.

Unlike a whiteboard, however, a wiki will store a history of page changes so you can see how a page has changed over time, and can bring back an old version if you want to.

A wiki website is build up of interlinked wiki pages. It is easy to create new pages. Wiki pages are usually created in plain text with special ‘markup’ to indicate links and formatting.

This is the next in my series of one-page getting started guides - and the first of quite a few to be posted this evening.

The concept for these guides is fairly simple, although one I'm still experimenting with.

The goal is that each sheet should take someone from not knowing what a particular social media tool is, nor how they would use it - to at least having taken the first steps to using it in a sensible and sustainable way. And it should do that in no more than one side of A4.

So - attached to this sheet is a getting started guide on 'Finding and Reading Blogs'.

You can download this as a PDF for printing, or a word document to edit and adapt for your own use.

A quick pointer to two interesting sets of online videos that could be useful to youth workers and participation workers:

Youth-led media makers Catch 21 Productions have a YouTube channel where this week they've shared some short 'newsbite' video inputs on current policy issues. Nothing flashy. Just a really well scripted video perfect to introduce the issues in a group discussion. Here's their newsbite on sex education...