Thankyou to all Voicebox contributors

I’m sorry to tell you that Voicebox was not successful in its bid to run the Digital Mentors initiative from CLG.  The call came in this afternoon, and to be honest, I’m still reeling from the disappointment.

The successful bidder was Media Trust, and so I’d like to congratulate their team who also worked really hard to develop the winning bid.

As you’ve read from the Voicebox blog so far, we’ve come such a long way since last autumn in terms of the understanding how an open and collaborative approach to developing bids can work, and so this wont be the last time we will use this approach to develop other opportunities that come our way!

A big ‘THANK YOU’ to all of you that contributed to the Voicebox blog. I’ve learned a great deal from you all and hopefully, some great contacts too.  I’m sure these links wont be lost!

In the meantime, I hope you will join with me in offering your support to Media Trust (and their partners) to ensure the Digital Mentors initiative help peoples in deprived communities in England develop skills in using social and community media.

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?

What have diets, 5-a-day and Ready Steady Cook got to to do with training, developing and supporting Digital Mentors?

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

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?

Birmingham Social Media Surgeries

One great way that training is already being provided in Birmingham - free of charge by volunteer experts - is through the Social Media Surgeries.

This video from Stuart Parker of We Share Stuff shows the surgery in action on Wednesday 26 November 2008:

Free Social Media Surgery, Birmingham from We Share Stuff on Vimeo.

Good training comes from good research

I personally think a lot of this “follows” from the research and mapping because you can find out what training exists, including potentially re-usable materials. And you can find out where gaps are.

The trick is going to be finding cost effective ways of delivering training and a variety of training options according to both the type of digital mentor and the outcomes that are intended. By that I mean one demonstrator might look at say, trusted intermediaries, who could be digital mentors, but aren’t currently playing that role, so maybe a health visitor or social worker (!). that demonstrator may be breaking new ground and may require training and development for different kinds of stakeholder.

This links then into the sustainability and scalability issues.

I really do think we need to think widely on this bid…and I see all the parts fitting together… so sometimes it’s a bit tricky to just write on what siloed topic… yet we do need a way to focus!

Introducing Training and Development

This is the training of the people who are the digital mentors (and not the training of people in the communities).  Training may be online and face-to-face, and we want to develop toolkits to support digital mentors building on work that has already taken place. We will aim to disseminate all materials developed to a wider audience beyond the demonstrators themselves.