• Tom Gaskin – blogging at Virtually Detached all about his experiences of running an award winning local website for young people in Norfolk, and acting as a detached participation worker for the web.
• John Holmes – who has been researching the impact of the risk discourse about young people’s use of the web for a PhD in Leeds. His presentation on the true facts on online risk was well recieved at Saturday’s event.

Tom and John join a growing number of youth work bloggers – and I’m hoping after the 2008 APYCO (Association of Principle Youth and Community Officers) conference we’ll be able to tell of a number of youth service leads also joining the youth work blogosphere. It’s great to be able to see so many conversations emerging between fired up informal educators and participation people.

In other interesting posts from the Youth Work web:

• Jon Jolly has shared his reflections on UKYouthOnline, but more importantly, has put together a great post on Tagging and using social bookmarks to pull together content of interest to youth workers and to support collaboration. (Get tagging with infed and ukyouthonline tags)
• Mike Amos-Simpson has been prolifically posting over recent weeks, not least to share his questions about measuring soft skills and to invite others to join him in developing an open digital youth work strategy and programme.
• Katie Bacon has been sharing her notes on creating a social network site policy for youth work.
• Getting away from the focus on new technology, Andy Smith has continued his series of regular round-ups of life as a front line youth worker in Essex. A more varied week you would struggle to find…
• Substance have set up a new Ning network for conversations about Monitoring and Evaluation – the great M&E debate.

I’m sure there has been loads more going on that I’ve missed. But I’ll leave you with this clip recorded by Katie Bacon about running a Social Network Site in a youth service.

It’s not a polished recording – just five minutes of fantastic shared learning on informal education – and the sort of quick video it would be great to see a lot more of.

Find more videos like this on UK Youth Online

The competition is offering between $30,000 and $250,000 for innovations in participative learning using digital technology. The deadline is tight (October 15th) but it would be great to see UK youth sector groups putting in proposals.

I would be happy to offer free support to any UK based groups thinking about putting in a bid – just drop me a line.