Tim's Blog

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.

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.

Last week I met up with Alice Casey from Involve for a short chat about all things participation, and we quickly got onto talking about the role of social media in connecting the many participation people working in different areas of the country, the world and the web. In the conversation Alice mentioned that she'd been thinking of starting a blog... and would give it more thought again.

Well - true to her word, she has - and a it's great to welcome a new blog to the participation scene. Here's what Alice say's in her opening post on 'Cased'

One of the 7 reasons I gave for getting youth workers blogging was to foster reflective practice. Michelle Martin offered her reflections in the comments about the role of blogging for professional development:

Two of the reasons I gave in my recent post '7 reasons why youth workers should be blogging' were to share resources, and to build networks.

Well, following some blog-based networking and discussion sparked by that post, I've just logged on to find Mas from the the YOMO Breakfast Society blog has drafted a fantastic 'getting started guide' for youth work blogging resource. And DK from MediaSnackers who has been taking advantage of his speaking gigs around the country to encourage youth service blogging is proposing a video intro as well. Blogging and collaboration in action.

This is cross-posted from 'Tim on Youth Work' over on the C&YPN blogs. If you want to leave a comment, that's probably the best place to head to.

On the back page of this months Youth Work Now Michael Bracey highlights the lack of engagement between youth work and new technology. Search online for 'Youth Work' and you find very little from anyone outside of the world of youth ministry. And I've not yet managed to find a single one of the 27,000 statutory sector youth workers out there blogging about youth work!*

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.

I'm back from my annual pilgrimage to the Greenbelt Festival (official website) and I've got six hours left till the end of August and the 'deadline' for the 31 days to a better blog challenge.

So, it seems like a good time reflect on the month of blogging, what I've learned, and to see if I can tick off any of the remaining tasks on Daren's task list.

The learning journey so far

Late night updates to Tim's blog inspired by the 31-days-to-a-better-blog challenge seem to be throwing up more problems than they're solving as a tinker with the blog website. However, after a brief spam-related outage, comments are working again and I've been catching up on a few of the 31-day challenges. Details below...

Taking part in the 31-days-to-a-better-blog challenge has got me reflecting on why I'm blogging and how I should approach writing a blog post. So, as an aid to that exploration, I've tried to set out 6 principles for this blog - which are listed below.

What do you think of these principles? Do you have any written, or unwritten, rules or principles that you use to guide your blogging?