Jon Jolly

There’s a great conversation happening over at UK Youth Online about practical steps for youth workers to take while interacting with young people online.

Most people are taking the view that to ensure accountability and transparency, workers should have a different profile or login for work and personal.

I’m interested in this debate as I currently don’t do this and instead have one personal profile that I use for everything. This is because many of the young people I work with know me through the church and I know their families well. Also the church does not yet have any guidelines or expectations around online media. Personally, I am well aware of the tensions when posting information online, so I try to remain consistent in my actions and only post material I would be happy for my mum, pastor and young people to see! I don’t have a “hidden” private life so am happy to share with all.

However, I do recognise the potential danger in not separating work and home. My personal views could easily be attributed to my church or work agency or vice versa, and certain larger organisations will have rules or expectations regarding your conduct online. Posting more personal items could put you in conflict with your employer. There is also the problem of young people being able to contact you at all times, even when you’re on holiday and making sure that all these exchanges are logged. So there are certainly advantages to separating out work and personal profiles.

What’s your view?

There’s lot of talk at the moment about the future of youth work. Marko’s been blogging extracts from his new book ‘Youth Ministry 3.0…‘ looking at how we’re missing the mark in [US] youth ministry, and what needs to change in order to more truly live into our calling as youth workers.

Over this side of the Atlantic, Tim Davies has been running a survey on Youth Work and Social Networking for the NYA and has set-up an online network for looking at the use of social media in informal education.

If you’re interested in exploring what social media means for youth services, participation projects, IAG, or any other organisations providing support, advice and activities to young people - do come and join us over on the UK Youth Online Ning network.

I would encourage any youth worker with an online presence to go and join the conversation with Tim. There’s a lot to be explored!

Finally, if you’re confused about the different stages of online development, Steven Flower nicely summarises the ‘Point O’ progression:

Web 1.0 was about receiving content
Web 2.0 was/is about making / contributing content
Web 3.0 is about filtering information

Where are you on this scale and how do you use it in your work with young people?

Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows was released on download earlier this week to great anticipation from fans. Their first release since 2003, In Rainbows is only available directly from the Radiohead website, but in a ground-breaking move, fans get to choose how much they pay for the music - anything from the 45p processing fee upwards! NME has an interesting article showing how much fans have decided to pay and the average seems to be around £5.

However since the release there’s been a huge backlash around the internet due to the compression of the download files. Each track is encoded in DRM Free 160kbps MP3 which is generally fine for listening to on MP3 players, but pretty poor for decent systems as it loses all the intricacies and detail of the music. It now appears that the low quality download is only a promotion for the full high-quality CD album to be released next year. This has angered a lot of fans who feel duped into buying this inferior version even though they set the price they paid:

First and foremost, all of Radiohead’s previous albums were already available as MP3s encoded at 320 kilobits per second…

Second, most took issue with when Radiohead chose to announce that In Rainbows would be available at 160 kbps — after the majority of their fans had already paid for the download.

I’ve yet to download it myself. The 160MP3 will be fine for my macbook, but not for my home stereo or headphones. I think I’ll probably pay a smaller amount for the download and if I really enjoy the album then I’ll but the full physical copy when released to appreciate the detail.

On Friday we spent a fantastic evening at the Parish Church of St. Stephen Walbrook (home of the London Internet Church) for the first ever Christian Blog and Web Awards!

The whole event was really well organised with an amazing four-course meal and a great string-quartet providing a touch of class to the proceedings. Thanks must go to Maria for putting it all together and hosting us so well.

I posted before about being entered for an award and I was short-listed for the Best Christian Newcomer category against some great bloggers. Unfortunately I missed out on a trophy but had a lot of fun watching Tom Smith trying to blag an acceptance speech on behalf of Tim Hughes!

You can see the full list of winners on the Christian Blog Awards website and watch the edited highlights on Premier TV very soon (Kristie Winsen promised us)!

This is an interesting chart about what type of interaction Americans have online such as content creators, joiners (of social networks), spectators etc. Because it’s categorised by age, you can see how different generations use the web. I would imagine that it’s similar for the UK.

I’m interested that I’m (just) categorised as Gen X and my main activities are creator, collector and spectator. That puts me in 19%, 16%, and 41% of my age group respectively.

Ht: ysmarko