Tag: Voluntary Sector

School of Everything – except for choice?

A few weeks ago I showed a friend how to use predictive text. He was delighted. So was I. Teaching and learning are precious and potent means to connect.

Charles Leadbeater (writing in Prospect Magazine) mentioned something new to me: the School of Everything. It’s an online/offline project still in dvelopment, being created with support from the Young Foundation. The site they are working on is intended to be a place where we can all connect to share knowledge; a combination of wiki, classroom, coffee shop and workshop.

They set out their principles here, which (if you don’t mind) I’ll repeat:

Read more

The Path to Perfect Play – a new podcast on the Grassroots Channel

“Play is a every child’s human right”

After a decade or more working with after school clubs and play schemes Laura Watts established a new organisation in Birmingham called Dens of Equality. She wanted to help the families who found their children effectively barred from the pleasure of full blown play because they had some form of disability.

Dens of Equality is a central hub which helps groups of parents create their own autonomous organisations. With these the families can apply for funds and also approach play workers directly, encouraging them to find new ways to include all children in their play schemes. They create tight new relationships which work for professionals, parents and children, all using a system which hands power to the people closest to each child.

Please leave comments on this blog.

Links – mentioned in this episode:

Written version (pdf) of this story with more information (dead link)

Dens of Equality

Birmingham Early Years and Childcare (dead link)

Todd Hannula (dead link)

Pete Ashton

Soweto Kinch Podcast– direct link to mp3

Roger Telphia Podcast – direct link to mp3

Kings Norton Farmers Market Podcast – direct link to mp3

Wikipedia Founder gives away the ultimate social networking site?

This is just a quick mention of this story (also here) . Jimmy Wales tells us he plans to use www.openserving.com to offer us all free hosting plus 100% of all advert revenue from the stuff we write, as long as we keep a link to his company Wikia. He plans to host all sorts of open source software (including wordpress which creates this blog) and allow us all to create multiple author blogs with voting and feedback buttons etc etc.

How will he make his money – it looks like it should come from advertising on wikia.

This is an enormous opportunity to draw many more people into using the social web, and for non-profits to not only see their web cost tumble, but start earning money from the things they and their supporters are saying. It is also likely to become the focus of a huge amount of (mainly open source ?) creative effort to make the different websites work well and look fab.

Still don’t understand it properly though.