Tim's Blog

After being encouraged by Steve Bridger's post to ask what Fair Trade 2.0 might look like - I've found myself responding to Mike Amos-Simpson this evening on Youth Work 2.0.

You can find my sketch of possible options for Youth Work 2.0 over here - and I promise that's the last Something 2.0 post here for a while...

Just a quick pointer to the Interim Report of the Youth Work and Social Networking project I've been working on with Pete Cranston over the last few months.

This turned into a far longer report and piece of work than I'd anticipated - but I hope it sets out some clear foundations for the next phase of research - working on the practical 'How To' of moving from where we now, to a place where an effective youth work perspective and practice in responding to online social networks is in place.

You can read more on the project blog over here.... and I'd really welcome any feedback or reflections through the comments or by e-mail.

Over at the newly arrived 2gether08 website Steve Bridger has been musing about what Fair Trade 2.0 might look like.

The FAIRTRADE Mark changes peoples behavior by giving them information about the products they are buying. When you buy a product with a FAIRTRADE Mark on you know that the producer has been paid a fair price for their work, alongside a social premium to be invested in development projects in their community. But the Fair Trade movement is not just about changing people's buying decisions in the abstract - it is also about re-forging the connections between producer and consumer that get lost in a globalised market-driven world.

Whilst my jar of Fairtrade Coffee might provide me with a story about one of the producers involved in the co-op that made it - the social web could do a lot more - and that could bring on Fair Trade 2.0.

On Friday Ofcom published their Media Literacy Audit on UK children's media literacy (thanks to Jackie Marsh for the link). As I was reading the Executive Summary, one paragraph in the section on content creation and online social network sites caught my attention:

Among many [young] social networking site users there is a lack of awareness of, or concern about, potential safety and security risks. Many feel that they are immune to any potential risks, and that even if they were to have problems, they would be able to deal with them.

It's worth just picking that apart briefly:

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.