A new conversation

Helen has launched a new community blogging project over at digtialengagement.org which aims to be:

a collaborative space for all those interested in digital engagement to share ideas and agree priorities for action around digital engagement

This is of a much wider scope than digital mentors, and has the potential to be a real hotbed of interesting and vital debate. Helen writes:

By digital engagement we mean the use of social technologies for social good. What do you think we should do on digitalengagment.org? In the immediate future, we want to use this site to create a digital manifesto, what more could we all do, and do together to get more people online and engage in the right tools for them to help them in their lives.

I’ve helped out by setting the blog up, and will be adding my thoughts on digital engagement in due course. The aim is for the site to be as inclusive as possible, so see how you can get involved.

We are going to have some interesting announcements coming up, including how we are going to try and get this conversation going en masse at the Digtial Inclusion Conference in April.

Creating social learning spaces

One of the issues with the training element of the digital mentor initiative is that, of course, different people like to learn in different ways - and this will be amplified by the widely differing ability levels that already exist out there when it comes to online media.

What’s required, then, is perhaps a new way of looking at how we learn best and how that might be delivered. David Wilcox has a fascinating post about ’social learning spaces’. Such a social learning space could be anything or anywhere that learning is possible: a workshop, a conversation, a blog or a wiki, or a forum. Offline or online, it doesn’t matter - the important thing is that people are open and share their knowledge to add to the sum of learning available.

I guess Wikipedia is a good example of an online learning space, but any blog is the same: people sharing what they know online so others can benefit. But I think it is important for online social learning spaces to be blended with offline to create a more rich exchange of information and increased trust in the community.

I wonder how the idea of social learning spaces could be incorporated both into the training of digital mentors, the training that the digital mentors will perhaps themselves provide, and also how it can be encouraged in the work of the communities benefitting from digital mentoring?