I have being mulling over ideas to encourage or provoke youth service practitioners to use our soon to be launched blog. My Project is expanding our learning community so that practitioners who deliver services to youth will be able to contribute to our blog. The young people we serve are youth experiencing poverty and homelessness and our blog will be the online component of our Learning Community. After viewing the previous Serendipity post from Teemu Arina, I’m getting inspired to try out some new strategies and use our blog to involve young people in a more intentional way, especially as individuals with great potential and valid stories to share.

One of the challenges (there are too many to list here) is that youth service practitioners are overwhelmed with the intensity of their work and like practitioners in the journalism, education or other public service sectors, using web 2.0 tools are far from their mindset let alone practice. Regardless of their readiness or interest in using these web 2.0 tools, the potential and opportunities for reaching young people by engaging them with these tools are huge. In many situations the youth served by these practitioners, are using many of the tools already. It is incumbent on our sector and ourselves as practitioners to start using these tools in our practice both in the field in within our respective organizations.

Here are a few ideas that I will test out with practitioners in our Project and outside our Project.

• Request that practitioners ask youth (client they serve) if they can record (either podcast or take notes and then post later) a story that reflects a situation where they overcame a difficult period or experience and who around them helped them through this experience. This is just an example of a question to ask. Any story question could be used by the practitioner as they would know best what story might best acknowledge the assets and strengths of the youth. It would be important to have the story recognize the young person’s talents and abilities or convey a message of accomplishment. The practitioner would also request if the youth would permit the publication of this story on our blog so that others might learn from this story.
• Ask practitioners to post a brief story to our blog about the reason they are motivated to work in the youth service field or what was the underlying event that caused them to choose their career.
• Ask practitioners to share a story that reflects the greatest challenges they see in their sector as youth attempt to negotiate their way through and into the community.

I will be adding more ideas to this theme over the coming weeks. This is an area where my work and social networking activities are merging. I think it’s good for me to be more public with my work activities activities especially as our Project blog starts to take shape.

Brent Uncategorized learning conversations

Internet Time Wiki / unmeetings Annotated

Are you tired of attending conferences and leaving without feeling like you learned anything or even connected with people on topics of interest? Jay Cross has some good posts on an alternative to these “one way talking at you” learning experiences. It’s unconferences or unmeetings and this is a good starting point for learning more about these useful alternatives to event based events

Unmeetings

Open source, open space, grapevines and gossip, conversations and stories, learning spaces and learnscapes, unconferences and The World Cafe, podcasts and wikis, graphics and concept maps, complexity and community…these are part and parcel of the free-range learning I investigated relentlessly while writing The Book

Business meetings used to come in one flavor: dull. New approaches create meetings that people enjoy, often organized in scant time, at minimal cost. Unconferences are characterized by:

* No keynote speaker or designated expert

* Breakthrough thinking born of diversity

* Having fun dealing with serious subjects

* Emergent self-organization

* Genuine community, intimacy and respect

Jay’s bottom-line: Conventional meetings are events; unmeetings are on-going processes. Unconferences work because they spur relevant conversations, which I think of as the stem-cells of innovation. My summary on unconferences.

Meaningful conversation is more important than ever because conversations are essential not only for imparting knowledge, but for creating it. Knowledge flows. Imagine the power of conversation with other free range learners conducted outside one’s specialty!

Brent Uncategorized unconference unmeeting jaycross

What a wonderful presentation. I am being pushed to the edge of my own learning after viewing and listening to this slideshare presentation. Teemu is a 24 year old Finish entrepreneur and homo contextus – yes a new word that works for me. His blog is called Tarina and not surprisingly there are many great posts and resources to be found.

Brent Uncategorized elearning serendipity

I am storing this away for future reference and to send to some of my colleagues.

Mathemagenic: learning and KM insights

Links on unconferencesWe are talking about “Reboot and other unconferences” at work, so I have been collecting all kinds of relevant links (more at del.icio.us/mathemagenic/unconferences):

An Open-Source Conference: BarCamp by Anders Ramsay – for an impressionistic overview. Also, on “why?”:

More than just an alternative model for facilitating a rich exchange of ideas, BarCamp seems to represent a generational break from conventional professional gatherings. They usually take a year or so to plan, cost tens of thousands of dollars to execute, often have some corporate backing, and are mostly planned over email. In contrast, the first BarCamp was put together in about six days, mostly via instant messaging, SMS, and ad-hoc wikis, for a cost of about $1,500, which is less than the price of a single ticket to some of the more high-end tech conferences. Stripped away are the constructs adopted by major conferences from academia, such as keynotes, posters, formal calls for papers, and peer reviews. Gone too is the presenter/attendee divide, where those not giving talks too often are passive spectators, except maybe for the occasional end-of-talk Q&A.

and

The informal feel of the event also makes people less concerned about presenting fully developed ideas, instead, increasing the comfort-level of throwing out off-the-wall ideas just to see what the response is. And by the same virtue, an audience who, in a more formal setting, might politely listen quietly to a not-so-great presentation, is more comfortable speaking up, maybe even turning the presentation into a workshop to see how a bad idea can be turned into a good one.

Conference vs. Unconference by David Gammel – summarising the alternatives

How-to:

* high-level organisation
o Ten Steps to Organizing a Barcamp by Crystal Williams
o How to DIY Unconference by Kaliya Hamlin
* facilitation and specific tips
o Participatory Conferences by David Gurteen – on specific facilitation techniques
o Improving unconferences by Scott Berkun – on adding a bit of structure to the program in a way that benefits all
o How to run a great unconference session by Scott Berkun – for the participants who propose a session

There is definitely more
Continued:

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Brent Uncategorized unconference

Sea Dragon software from Microsoft lets the genie out of the photography bottle. Most Awesome!

Brent Uncategorized seadragon

Half an Hour: You work in a community, not a company

Thursday, June 28, 2007

How real is this. Very real from my perspective. It’s the best advice I have read in a long time. To have your head tuned in this attitude and direction is a life skill.

You work in a community, not a company

Responding to Jay Cross.

“It doesn’t work to take one from column A and one from column B, e.g. secrecy and transparency are opposites. Competition and collaboration are the same deal.”

Ah ha! I remember saying something like this on this very blog, not so long ago.

“What should a person do if they find themselves in a non-believing, ice-age organization?”

Make your own rules, make your own job. Work not just in your organization but in your sector, your community. Carve out the appropriate niche for yourself no matter where you are employed. Move on if your employers don’t recognize your value.

Look at anybody who is a leader is this space, or any space. It is not a person who did their job. It is a person who *changed* their job by either redefining their existing responsibilities or creating a new position (or company) entirely.

“What’s the most enlightened thing to do here? I’ll post this issue to the Internet Time Community in case the discussion grows lengthy.”

Again – understand that while you may work for a company, your work environment isn’t defined by – or limited by – the company. You work in a community, not a company. You may be paid by the company but your job is defined by the community and, if you’re doing it well, you’re serving the community.

Remember that you don’t work for the company, you work for yourself. The company is merely your largest (and perhaps only) client. Keep in mind that the company will not hesitate to terminate your position, redefine your role, or do any number of things that will not be in your best interest. You have to watch out for yourself.

In the meantime, the company will watch out for itself. It doesn’t need a whole lot from you, beyond what you’ve promised to deliver to it. What the company does is up to the company. You aren’t going to change the company – it will have to change itself (that is, the owners or executives will have to reach their own change of heart and attitude on their own).

The best you can do is to show what your (newly defined) work and (personally defined) attitude can bring to the company. As publicly as possible, document and record, should you ever need it for a promotion case (or job interview).

Brent Uncategorized downes stephendownes