young people

Online Ambition

Online AmbitionOnline Ambition is a great project run by Edinburgh Napier University, brought to my attention by the comment that Ella Taylor-Smith left on another post.

The aim of the project is to bring together young people, their parents and advisors to discuss using the web to enhance careers, rather than hinder them!

This will involve a range of different issues, such as digital CVs, using social media for profile and reputation building, and managing online profiles to ensure potential employers don’t get the wrong idea about you.

I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of using online networks to develop a career. If it weren’t for this blog, I’d still be stuck doing an administrative job in a council somewhere.

The first event is on April 11th in Edinburgh, with Ella and her colleagues, as well as Tim Davies. Here’s the flyer (PDF warning).

It will be great to see how the event goes, and this is something I can see being very successful across the UK.

Connected Generation 2010

Connected Generation 2010 is, in the words of chief cheerleader Tim Davies:

…a one-day conference exploring youth engagement and technology in 2010. Based on feedback from participants at recent training events, and on the positive response to the Beyond Twitter event we ran up in Wrexham last year, we’re trying a mixed Conference and Open Space format again – with a morning of top-quality input from speakers and a range of pre-planned workshops, followed with an afternoon of curated unConference, where delegates can set the agenda and direct the conversations.

It’s happening at The Watershed in Bristol on Friday, 7th May.

Some of the speakers include:

Well worth signing up if you have any kind of interest in how technology can be used to engage with young people – even better value if you use the LPOOL discount code to get a tenner off the ticket price.

The web and safeguarding – a new project

Dom Campbell of FutureGov has blogged about the start of a new project around how the web can help improve and innovate in children’s services.

This project will kick off with a get together of interested folk:

To start off with, we are looking to bring together multi-disciplinary senior manager and practitioners, from childrens social services, to teachers, police and health workers, with social web technologist, public service designer, funders – or even just people who have a personal passion for this area – to help us design and run a small Safeguarding 2.0 pilot. Nothing big in the first instance, more a proof of concept if you like, but with the potential to transform the way in which professionals and non-professionals alike might better share information and form the kinds of relationships that might prevent future tragedies.

This seems a great project, and if you’re interested in this area, I would strongly recommend attending the round table event. More details embedded below:

New media for a new generation

I spent a very enjoyable day today at an event co-organised by Opportunity Links and 4Children. It was a good chance to listen to some interesting and challenging content about the social web and what young people are actually doing online.

It was also a great chance to meet up some some pals, like Mark Cheverton, Steven Flowers and Tim Davies. Tim was running his social networking game, using his Moo.com printed cards. It was excellent – focusing in on one particularly relevant technology for youth workers.

It seems that the area of youth work and the web is a rather complicated one, but it still should be relatively straightforward so long as everyone is sensible about it. Interesting to hear that the biggest problem still facing most youth workers wanting to get involved in the social web is having no access to social networking sites at work!

Load more posts!