Tim's Blog – Page 41 – working for social change; exploring the details; generally quite nuanced

Youth led media: getting the distribution right

Film is powerful. But to have the strongest impact it needs to be used in the right way and seen by the right people. That's why thinking about distribution needs to be a key part of youth video projects.

A great video about the challenges young people face in a local area, that is never seen by those who are responsible for the decisions that could improve things, is an opportunity missed. Identifying who should see your video, and inviting them to watch and respond to it, is an important part of any change-making video project*.

A lot of videos miss getting the audience they deserve. Social media and online distribution have a big role to play here. Beth Kanter has remixed a version of the Social Media Game for Documentary Film Makers. The social media game can provide a great starting point for exploring the opportunities presented by new technologies for reaching wider audiences.

Distribution in action:

As I was preparing this post I came across this story from Youth Media Reporter which shares an account of how young film makers in Baltimore made sure their work was well distributed and created conversation. The group realised their their videos, shown on local Public Access TV were not getting enough viewers, so they turned to the Internet and social networking sites to build a bigger audience.

But, as well as sharing video online, the group looked to showings in the local community, and have created their own do-it-yourself distribution guide including a focus on community screenings. A short quote:

Montebon explains the importance of community screenings in this new approach: â€œThe reason for a screening is, you can [sit at home and] watch something on TV… but it takes another step to have a type of forum. I think what the community screenings are supposed to serve, is a platform where people can start a sort of discourse.â€ Airing a youth-made TV episode in a community context, such as a public park, museum, or neighborhood event, creates a potential for dialogue. It is easier for people to talk to one another about youth-led issues in a group setting, as well as engage with youth media makers on the issues they raise.

How do you make sure your video projects start conversations and create change?

Not just video:
If a video has been created to lobby for change (for example, to get a local authority to provide cycle lanes on a route to school, or to call on a local leisure company to make their activities affortable to all young people) then it is also worth thinking carefully about other tools that will be needed to create change. A video is one of the most effective tools for getting decision makers to understand a problem – but will everyone who is in the meeting that makes the decision you want to influence have seen the video? And have you provided a clear proposal along with your video stating in words what you want changed?

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*I don't want to suggest that all video projects have to be externally focussed. All art-froms can be effective tools for individual and group learning as an end in itself. However, where a change making impact is within reach, then I would always encourage its pursuit…

Comments working again

Just a quick note of appology in case you've tried to add a comment to Tim's Blog in the last 48 hours and come up against error messages. Comments should now be fully working again.

The server hosting Tim's Blog fell foul of a number of systems trying to post comment-spam all over the place which a) brought the server to a grinding halt, and b) caused me to try and up the defences, messing thinks up so no comments at all could be posted.

I've since un-messed-it-up, and am looking at other ways to keep the spam at bay.

A third side to the media-box

With more funding that ever around for video and multi-media projects with young people, is the focus of the funding spot on, or missing a trick?

Media box has Â£6m of government funding to give to "creative media projects involving film, television radio, online, print and multi-media". Government is talking about these projects as ways of addressing the negative media portrayal of young people, and often we hear about how they equip young people with skills for jobs in the media. However, if we really want to support young people to challenge negative stereotypes in mainstream media, and to participate as citizens in an ever more networked world, we need to do more than to create one-off videos or to train a small group to work in media jobs. We need to focus the core of our funding on building media literacy*.

Media literacy is "the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create messages in a variety of forms" (Aufderheide, 1993; Christ & Potter, 1998 in Livingstone, 2004). Sonia Livingstone (in the 2004 journal article Media Literacy and the Challenge of New Information and Communication Technologies) explains "Learning to create content helps one to analyze that produced professionally by others; skills in analysis and evaluation open the doors to new uses of the Internet, expanding access, and so forth". She goes on to say:

"In advancing policy, it would clarify matters to disentangle three arguments: [(a)] the pedagogic argument that people learn best about media through making it; [(b)] the employment argument that those with new media skills are increasingly needed as the information sector expands; and [(c)] the cultural politics argument that citizens have the right to self-representation and cultural participation." (Pg 7. Letters added and not in the original)

It seems that Media Box and other recent projects are strong on (c), and have a focus on (b) but are missing enough of a focus on (a), on how supporting young people to make media can help build their literacy for future access, analysis, evaluation and creation of media. (a) doesn't just happen. Really good learning about the media through making media needs space to be created for reflection as well as action creating media, and it needs to be focussed on process as well as product. I don't doubt that many projects with Media Box funding do have an implicit element of learning about media through making – but making sure all projects have this 'third side of the box' could, I believe, really enhance their long term impact in young peoples representation in the media*.

*I realise there is a piece of this story missing. How does increased media literacy lead to more positive portrayal of young people in the media? Another post to come soon on that question – particularly looking at how social media literacy in a world of user-generated-content is a key element.

My principles of blogging

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?

Principles for Tim's Blog (Draft version – August 2007)

1) A space for focused sharing
One of my key motivations for starting this blog was to provide a space to share reflections, resources and content that I come across or create in the course of my work. The aim is not, however, for it to be a brain dump, or a virtual equivalent of that pile of papers and articles on my desk that I thought someone-or-other would be really interested in. The aim is for shared content that supports thinking and action in relation to social justice and young people's empowerment.

I'll be seeking to make sure that, where I have relevant information, resources or reflections that could be useful to the audience of this blog, I take the time to post these in an accessible and useful way.

2) Not too much on technology
It's very easy in the blogging world to write about technology and social media in particular (I suppose many writers write about writing a lot, so it seems relatively natural). However, this isn't a space for me to reflect on the latest and greatest new technologies I've just come across unless those technologies link to the youth participation and social change elements of this blog.

3) Seeking solutions not problems
I approach the world with a very 'problem-solving' approach. I'm always looking for constructive solutions. However, the key to problem-solving is understanding the problem. That can mean that quite a bit of a blog post is taken up explaining problems – things that are wrong and need fixing.

I'll be seeking to ensure that the emphasis in these posts in on exploring solutions and positive change – and I'll working to escape the temptation to spend all my words ranting about problems.

4) Recommending and reflecting
At times, I recognize that solutions are not easily in reach, and what is needed is not a recommended recipe for resolution, but open reflection on possible ways to respond to a problem or challenge (whether with action or not).

I'll be seeking to have a balance of reflective posts that leave threads and ideas hanging, awaiting more thought – and other posts that seek to weave threads of thought together into something more of a solid thought process that leads to take-away-product of some form.

5) Engaging in conversation
This blog is not one-way publishing. I don't want to just stick content online and leave it there. So I'll be seeking to make sure I use this as a space both for hosting conversation, and for responding to conversations elsewhere in the blogosphere and beyond.

6) A personal blog
This is a personal blog. I have a relatively introverted personality. However, as these posts are shaped by my thinking and interests, I need to be transparent about these and to avoid the comfort of anonymous abstract writing in favor of an honest and open style.

I'll be seeking to strike a balance between relating everything to some personal story, and being clear that as the writer, I am part of the posts I write and shouldn't edit myself out of them.

31 Day Challenge – days 11 to 14

I fear I'm falling a little behind on the 31 days to a better blog challenge. August is certainly a tricky month in which to strike up a regular patern of activity.

However, I have been trying to look at each of the tasks, if not getting time to consistently blog about how they are going.

Firstly, I should note my attempts to plan my posts for the week ahead (task 7 from last week) have woefully failed – as you will notice from the lack of posts this week. This can, however, be attribed in part to exciting work-related developments which mean I shall hopefully have more time to spend on reflective learning and it's blog-post-related spin-offs in September. More on that soon – and, Saturday's train journey permitting, more blog posts coming up next week.

Now, onto the tasks:

Stats

On day 11, challenge-setter Daren suggested digging into your blogs statistics. I run google analytics on most of the sites I maintain, which provides incredibly useful and detailed stats. Tim's Blog is still just starting out, so the 'sample size' to base any full analysis on is relatively small, but I'm watching use and search engine statistics with interest.

Stats

Daren suggests digging into statistics to see which keywords are sending traffic towards my blog. I've found checking up on search engine arrivals at both this blog and other sites to be invaluable not only for seeing which key words lead people to this site, but for discovering which key words people just don't search on.

In the past I've been working to optimise sites for search engines, and have found other sites I run turning up high (first result or first page of google) in the rankings for the key words I'm optimising against. And yet when I've checked the logs for those existings high-ranking sites, I've found not much traffic from those particular keywords. Implication: those key words are not the right ones to be optimising for, as they're not the most used by those searching. The search phrases that seemed obvious to me are not the same as those being used 'in the field'.

On introductions

Day 12's challenge was to introduce myself to another blogger. Since starting this challenge, I've become a lot more willing to leave comments, drop e-mail and generally interact with other bloggers. It has really helped me to understand that the social web only works when the social is brought to the fore. As day 3 of the challenge (search for an join a forum) has seen me aiming to interact more in a variety of forum and Community of Practice spaces I've also been reflecting on the value of introductions.

An introductions thread in a discussion forum or on a mailing list can be key to building community. Yet I often find it tricky to offer the right sort of introduction – preferring to wait until I see the style of introduction set by others before jumping in (Does this forum like informal introductions? Should I provide a bio? Should I talk only about work related content? Or should I just wait and see what others do?). Would examples of introductions offered through the community welcome e-mail / welcome web-page help here? Or would these be too restrictive. I'm tempted to explore when working on some community building later this year.

On affiliate programs

Buy a phonebox The challenge from day 13 is to Search for an Affiliate Program that Fits Your Blog. An affiliate program allows a blogger to take a commission on purchases made through links to specific e-commerce sites provided in blog posts. In my younger days of web development, I found the idea of 10% commission just for providing a link very appealing – but wasn't going in for spending my time on lots of little links – so tried a bit of niche marketting with this tounge-in-cheek site (note, embarassing online presence from an earlier age circa 15 years old approaching…). Alas I never made a sale, and have never since dabbled much in affiliate programs. So I've skipped this day of the challenge for now…

On blogging competition

For day 14 Daren suggests looking at 'competing' blogs to learn from them. I'm still trying to work out exactly what the focus of this blog, and thus who is companion/competitor bloggers are. However, I'm going to take a good look through the questions Daren suggests asking of other blogs – to see what I can learn from others and I'll be reporting back soon.

On other non-31-day-challenges

Hopefully this blog post will make it onto the web. Right now I'm battling against spam-generating-computers which appear to have picked on the server hosting Tims Blog and turned it from relatively-nippy to treacle-speed. I've taken the web-server down for the moment whilst I try and up the defences, and I'll hopefully have things playing again properly in the morning.

Update: relatively-nippy server has returned for now. However, if you find you're having difficulty getting to this blog anytime during August, I'd be really grateful if you could drop me a note (twitter / e-mail) – as I won't always be at the computer and it'll help me diagnose what exactly is going on…

What participation workers could learn from the mini-legends…

I want to start this post by welcoming the newest participants in the 31 days to a better blog challenge. All 29 of them.

Screenshot of alupton.edublogs.org/mini-blogs

The miniLegends co-ordinated by Al Upton are all members of a year 3 class in Adelaide, South Australia, using individual blogs as part of their learning environment. Al is also exploring how blogs can be used in connecting classrooms locally and globally through the Connect Edu Blog.

Al has seen how blogs can provide a really empowering platform for individual and connected learning.

Effective youth participation work involves taking learning, building on empowerment, and looking to create positive change. Creating change involves having a voice. And thats what blogging is about.

Yet, we're still short on blogs in the youth participation world.

Looks like we've got the edubloggers to catch up with…

A tool for planning participation activities

Last year I spent an afternoon working with a number of charities who had come together to plan a residential that would involve a few young people linked to each organisation working together planning a shared social change campaign. We were talking about the different things that event organisers need to think about when bringing together a diverse group to make big decisions.

Participative Session Planning Tool

It quickly became clear that to make the residential sessions truly participative so that everyone could have an equal chance to be heard and to influence decision making and to make the sessions truly effective so that they could lead to solid decisions everyone could work with, all within in a tight timescale required a lot of planning and forward thought.

On the train home from that meeting, I tried to capture as many of the different aspects that need to be considered in planning an effective participative session with young people in a simple session planning tool (and, as with all youth-participation tools, I’m sure it has a lot to offer in terms of running sessions with adults as well).

From the tool itself:

This tool is designed to help you think about planning a focused session with young people or community groups. A session may be stand-alone, or may be part of a longer process, day or residential. It encourages you to think about the purpose of the session; the information and understandings of context that participants need in order to make informed decisions; and how you come to a group decision that everyone understands and can move forward from.

I’ve attached a copy of the tool to the bottom of this blog post as a word document and it is made available under a creative commons licence which means you can use and adapt it freely as you desire.

I’m not usually one for creating form-filling exercises, but its crucially important to put thought into effective participation sessions, and sometimes using planning tools can be effective in supporting that. I’ve certainly found it useful as a checklist to remind me to think about the whole picture when I’m planning consultations. I’d love to hear if you do make use of the tool, or if you’ve any suggestions for how it could be improved.

Attachment: Participative Session Planning Tool – 0.2 .doc

Tidying up the side bars (31-day-challenge)

Todays challenge in 31-days-to-a-better-blog is to declutter my blogs side-bar.

Decluttering

I've been concious that whilst I'm seeking to bring weave together Recent posts tabbed block thinking on technology, youth participation and social change – the audiences interested in those elements are often quite distinct. I had thought about a 'posts on participation' and 'posts on technology' block for the side-bar, but felt that would be too cluttered… however, thanks to the tabbed blocks module for drupal, I've been able to put together a nifty widget which allows visitors to see the recent posts they are most interested in. So, if you're a participation worker or a youth worker and you want to skip over all this stuff about blogging and find the content relevant to you – just click 'On Participation' in the 'Recent Blog Posts' list in the right-hand side-bar area.

I've not got the design of the tabs properly tidied up yet… but I'd welcome feedback. Is this a useful addition? Do you find the tabbed recent posts list intuitive.

There wasn't all that much other clutter in the side-bar – so I've just rejigged it a bit to bring recent comments higher up, and re-theming the comments, borrowing from the style on Andy Roberts blog so that the lists displays the name of the post the comment is to instead of a usually uninformative title or mini-extract of the comment. Hopefully that makes it easier for reader to identify if a new comment might be of interest or not.

As the archive block has moved further down the page in the re-shuffle, I've also added a new Archive page which offers a variety of ways of looking back through the history of Tim's Blog posts.

This restructure has got me reflecting a bit on accessiblity and page load times as Laura has also. I do find the MyBlogLog widget slows down the page load time quite a bit, and it delays the page fully rendering until it has loaded – but it's a very handy widget indeed. Perhaps I need to rework the theme so that the page can load before MyBlogLog appears…

In other news

I'm aware that much of the time I want to be spending on writing up blog post ideas and reflections has been eaten up refining the blog. However, with the joy of an impending long train journey coming up, I'll hopefully be posting a lot more non-31-day-challenge content come next week.

31 days – The challenge continues

The 31-days-to-a-better-blog challenge is carrying on at a high pace.

Today's challenge from ProBlogger Darren Rowse is all about advertising, and as this blog is about sharing rather than making money, that does give me a bit of time to catch up. However, the challenge has got more serious! Sue and Frances are offering chocolate to both the best improved blog over 31 days, and to the best comment posted by a reader of one of the blogs participating in the challenge.

Chocolate

I've joined the challenge, so that, dear reader, means that if you post a great, insightful and fantastic comment on this blog, I might just nominate you to be in the running to win… (Hmm, is this blog bribery?)

Sharing learning
I've been learning an awful lot over today from visiting many of the other bloggers taking part in the 31-day-challenge. There's an awful lot going on at the blogs of Alex Miller – Brent MacKinnon – Cammy Bean – Christine Martell – Frances McLean – Kate Foy – Kate Quinn – Laura Whitehead – Nancy Riffer – SmokeFree Wisconsin – Sue Waters and The Indian Blogger

Hopefully you will already identify I'm picking up on lessons from Michele Martin about making use of visuals – and I'm going to try and explore some nifty visualisation tools later this week as well.

The tasks

Day 7: Plan your Next Week's Posting Schedule

As with many of the other bloggers taking part in the 31-day-challenge, I see blogging as driven by content, not content driven by blogging. However, I do often leave unfinished posts languishing for far too long in BlogDesk before they make it onto the site, usually aided by delayed train journeys that give me the time to get them sorted out.

Snippet from The Bamboo Project Blog One I've been particularly struggling with is a 1/2 finished post on visualisations. Particularly on ways of taking RSS feeds and managing the information in more visual ways (perhaps in mind-mapped ways like the bubble-blog idea suggested by Micheles 'test-reader' on Day 2). So – I'm resolving now to take a good look at that again tomorrow and see if I can get it online.

I've also got some writings on Youth Development and the recent 10 Year Youth Strategy in the pipeline, so I'm targetting next week to get those out. Whether or not those posts really make it does, alas, depend on whether or not the train gets delayed when I head to visit my wife fascilitating at peace school later this week

Day 8: Comment on a blog you've never commented on before

The challenge has been great for encouraging me to be more willing to comment, so I've been dropping in input, questions and comments where I can across todays blog reading. Making the time to engage in conversations online does seem to move towards greater abundancy thinking and I'm really enjoying the opportunities it is presenting. I'm a little worried that my current level of participation is only enabled by the flexibility of the projects I'm working on at the moment… and that it will be trickier to keep engaged when work pressure bite.

That tells me though that I need to think about the value there is in engaging in online conversations across the blogosphere… and if there is real value there (as I'm feeling there most certainly is), I need to explore how I can restructure my work plans to make the most of it.

A question

This 31 day challenge is intensive. And the recent knowledge jam on collaborative technology I took part in was also an intensive 48 hour online interaction.

Thanks to: http://flickr.com/photos/titanium-white/ I'm interested in whether the 31-day-challenge approach could be adopted for organisational learning and change programmes (I'm going to be supporting a number of organisations on learning journeys to engage with social media this autumn) – but I'm worried that this current challenge eats up too much time to fit easily into the work day of busy teams.

Is the intensity of the challenge a key to it working? Or could you turn the 31-day-challenge into a 3-month challenge and still have the same effect?

I get the feeling the intensity is an important part of this challenge working so well to bring people together – but I'd be really interested to hear what others think….