What have diets, 5-a-day and Ready Steady Cook got to to do with training, developing and supporting Digital Mentors?
December 5, 2008 by Paul Henderson
I’ll come onto this later but at ruralnet|uk we’ve been thinking about how Digital Mentors (when everyone has nailed down what they are!) can be trained, supported and nurtured in a sustainable way over the next two years and beyond.
Challenges
The challenges include the basics of access to the technology (computers, mobile, broadband, wifi) in deprived communities, building relationships and getting skills and knowledge to the people who can then run with it and make all the tools (the final piece in the jigsaw - NOT the first) work for them and their community. Part of this is inextricably linked to sustainability which Bruce Wright has expanded upon here and getting away from the cycle of spinning existing projects into new and exciting bids to tick funders’ boxes.
What can we do?
The process of training, supporting and developing digital mentors is probably going to be a blended one, mixing face-to-face, online, strategic and practical learning and sharing. It will change over 2 years and it might be a little messy, but this stuff is like that and it will never be ‘finished’, so we need to put digital mentors at ease with this situation. Digital mentors are going to teach everyone else as much about how it really works as the so-called experts will teach them, so we cannot set down in stone a lesson plan, but rather make sure that we can respond to the needs of new and existing digital mentors.
Together with UfI over the past 8 years we’ve helped mentor UK Online centres through the DirectSupport programme, originally face-to-face and latterly online through our Experts Online service. We have a model with the net:gain network of centres providing ICT strategy and support, which is based on a social franchise, which could provide some pointers as to how this might be run.
Training a Digital Mentor is not like learning how to use Word or Excel - but as I mentioned before there will be some basic access issues, and without ‘connection’ in the broadest sense, none of the great work that is being done on the ground will ever get online. However just because I can use Word, doesn’t mean I’m going to write the next Harry Potter - and putting the (relatively simple, cheap) tools in the hands of the people that can tell those stories is the key. Which is why we also see the advisory roles as being part of training and development - indeed 2 sides of the same coin (without wishing to mix metaphors, that coin could also be sustainability, but I’ll let Bruce Wright correct me on that one!)
Arguably it has already started with the digitalmentor.org site showing just what can be done, but this continuous process of sharing, learning, aggregating and distributing is one that we feel is at the centre of the digital mentors project and key to its success.
Toolkits…
Absolutely we see the need for aggregating the tools - but part of the training should surely be to equip digital mentors with the nous to find what they need without being spoon-fed…we need to be innovative and use tools like Tumblr, Pageflakes, Hashtags but these will come and go and something new will pop up. Therefore we need to be wary of creating YAT (yet another toolkit, or worse a one-stop-shop…) - even though I admit we’ve done them ourselves
Neil Williams e-Comms manager at CLG points out the problems of (government practices of) social media on the web becoming fragmented
This also links to a comment Mark Walker from SCIP made on the Digital Mentor Mailing List
From Dave Briggs version of the social media game
We need to be careful how we approach this (and measure its effectiveness) but one model is the lifecycle of the ‘Social Media Game’. It has appeared in many guises over the years because it has been shared, laminated, moo carded, changed remixed (Creative commons) NOT because it is a static resource, guarded at the gate on a single site. Its influence has spread and is more effective because it has changed. This sort of resource is what we think of when thinking about ways of supporting digital mentors, and what we need to do is enable the enable the ‘use , remix and feedback’ loop.
The cooking analogy
So if you’ve made it this far, well done - so what about this analogy: Digital Mentors are not about the surviving from grant to grant (going from one diet to another in the new year..), it’s about a (healthy) digital lifestyle.
This project should link the cheap, cheerful and powerful quick wins (Ready Steady Cook) to a longer term sustainable view (5 fruit and veg a day) and the knowledge and skills for communities to have their voice to and know where to go to get help (find the best ingredients and cook dishes that are right for their community).
We can also give digital mentors access to resources (recipes), training (cooking classes) and even better, access to the best brains in the business (Jamie and Gordon) thanks to an open and collaborative network that already exists.
What do you think?
Hey Paul
A timely post. I’ve just been talking to @petecranston about ways we can take forward training, mentoring and resources for youth workers, e-activists and community activists - without (a) re-investing the wheel and (b) everything going instantly out of date.
I love the healthy eating metaphor. One of the challenges we were exploring (to stretch the analogy) was how to ‘create a balanced meal’. We can throw in lots of great ingredients - (resources, case studies, how to handouts etc.) but the real challenge is in creating a menu that makes sense.
(ok, I’ve confused myself with this metaphor now… )
We started to explore some sort of platforms and models for making those menus… and I’ll try and blog on that more soon…
mmmm, cake: I think we have to do more than 5 fruit & veg a day since isn’t one of the drivers in social media and the rest of w2.0 that it’s tasty, and sometimes not very good for you
but to leave the analogy well alone, I think this is such an interesting set of ideas. Another thing that Tim (Davies) and I talked about is what makes people engage in online collaborative public-good activities over and above the quick and easy (avaaz petitions). I was involved at the beginning of a collaborative toolkit for IT trainers in International Development that has continued to grow and enrich the content. Some of the impetus comes from (very) small grant-funded programmes but a lot also comes from a group of people who feed the platform because when they need something it will be tastier and more nourishing (damn, that analogy again: perhaps more like a vinegar plant or sour dough starter) http://www.itrainonline.org/
We could ask those still actively involved what they think makes it hum
Pete Cranston
The challenges that we face is to recognise and learn/replicate the best of practice that has been available for many years, but which dovetails and integrates effectively with new approaches and innovation to reach the next 10/15% of users still digitally excluded
The trouble with analogies is we need to pin down what is on offer, and there are some really basic issues here that we need to consider - most especially to do with platform, content, infrastructure and of course the nature and defintion of mentoring. At AbilityNet these are really significant issues - as we want to see the notion of inclusion of a range of abilities and disabilities at the heart of the offering, but we are lookign for signs that these needs will influence the choices that eed to be made
We also really want to see disability pervade across all workpackages - but at present im not quite sure how that could be organised - but im sure that all will become clearer
Paul - spot on with the analogies and outline. We need the development of innovation and creativity, rather than the teaching of ’solutions’ passed downwards. The world is going to keep shifting and digital confidence is just a small way to thrive within that context.
I think digital mentors can provide key community capacity building through connectivitiy and skills as well as creativity and employment. I have not mentioned the analogy but it is through small beginnings and change that culture shifts can happen especially for disadvantaged communities.
[...] of them - in spite of the obvious crossover …even when one of my posts gets a pingback from a blog post explicitly about one of those [...]
Broadly we accept the need to encourage imagination and creativity across the spectrum of mentors - what we also want to do is to embed that creativity in some fundamental best practice of technique - I want users to video blog for instance, but I want tutors to know how to close caption and create transcripts to ensure that we dont simply draw a new group online without thinking about ensuring that their voice in inclusive and does not deny access to others to their content.
For all of these reasons, AbilityNet are keen to ensure that there is a pervasive accessibility throead across all workpackages and would be committed to delivering that thread as part of the consortium
[...] me here. I’m not entirely new to this blogging lark, it’s just that so far I’ve preferred to blog where it’s been more essential to [...]