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

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?