Not surprisingly only 35% of youth workers felt able to help young people take advantage of the opportunities of Social Networking as opposed to 53% who felt they should focus on the dangers of the Internet.
There are a huge range of opportunities to do good, creative work with young people using online tools and social networking sites. The Internet is here to stay. Let’s get busy using it positively.
It seems as though Nokia’s Sports Tracker is just a neat little training tool for runners and cyclists… however…
Do you ever go on holiday, wander around, take some photos and then forget where you went and how you got there? This could be the tool for you! Sports Tracker records your journey using GPS (kind of the opposite of sat nav… tells you where you have been rather than where you are going!) and you can then upload your journey to the Sports Tracker site where it marries your GPS data with Google Maps. You can add photos of your route using geotags. So Sports Tracker is really a Journey Tracker. Pretty cool.
Dr Tanya Byron has published her report into safer internet use and gaming. You can read the report HERE. This is the executive summary bullets:
The internet and video games are very popular with children and young people and offer a range of opportunities for fun, learning and development.
But there are concerns over potentially inappropriate material, which range from content (e.g. violence) through to contact and conduct of children in the digital world.
Debates and research in this area can be highly polarised and charged with emotion.
Having considered the evidence I believe we need to move from a discussion about the media ‘causing’ harm to one which focuses on children and young people, what they bring to technology and how we can use our understanding of how they develop to empower them to manage risks and make the digital world safer.
There is a generational digital divide which means that parents do not necessarily feel equipped to help their children in this space – which can lead to fear and a sense of helplessness. This can be compounded by a risk-averse culture where we are inclined to keep our children ‘indoors’ despite their developmental needs to socialise and take risks.
While children are confident with the technology, they are still developing critical evaluation skills and need our help to make wise decisions.
In relation to the internet we need a shared culture of responsibility with families, industry, government and others in the public and third sectors all playing their part to reduce the availability of potentially harmful material, restrict access to it by children and to increase children’s resilience.
I propose that we seek to achieve gains in these three areas by having a national strategy for child internet safety which involves better self-regulation and better provision of information and education for children and families.
In relation to video games, we need to improve on the systems already in place to help parents restrict children’s access to games which are not suitable for their age.
I propose that we seek to do that by reforming the classification system and pooling the efforts of the games industry, retailers, advertisers, console manufacturers and online gaming providers to raise awareness of what is in games and enable better enforcement.
Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe – this isn’t just about a top-down approach. Children will be children – pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim.
She was interviewed on the BBC news this morning. You can watch it here:
Leaning and Teaching Scotland have just announced what they think the markers fo excellence in literacy are for the 21st century… and the definition of texts is:novels, short stories, plays, poems, reference texts, the spoken word, charts, maps, graphs and timetables, advertisements, promotional leaflets, comics, newspapers and magazines, CVs, letters and e-mails, films, games and TV programmes, labels, signs and posters, recipes, manuals and instructions, reports and reviews, text messages, blogs and social networking sites, web pages, catalogues and directories. (emphasis added) (ht Ewan)
So, what will that mean for youth work in the 21st century? Informal educators inhabit the world their ‘clients’ live in. We meet people ‘where they are at. How do you think that Christian youth work will engage with this generation of digital natives? And will banning youth workers from texting, instant messaging and Bebo really turn out to be a good idea?
Over the next while I’m going to be working with ICC and some of my friends at Church of Scotland on a project to make a CertHE level youth work course available as a distance learning course with almost all of the content online using Moodle. Why? Maybe this video has some clues…
Posted by Stewart 
Posted by Stewart 
Posted by Stewart 
