Tag: young people

Helping Birmingham Leadership Foundation use social media

Video by Punk Zebra for BLFLeaders

Birmingham Leadership Foundation helps new and aspiring leaders to emerge. They connect emerging leaders with established leaders to help them learn from each other’s experience.

They organise networking events, training and connect existing leadership development projects to encourage the next generation of leaders in Birmingham to develop – leaders who reflect the city’s demography. These could be:

  • A young person aged 16–30 with the ideas, ambition and spark to make an improvement to the lives of others in their local community.
  • A person who is proactive in their community.
  • A chief executive or senior manager of a private company or public sector organisation who wants to work with, and support, the local community but lacks the know how and contacts.

Nick and I ran a social media surgery at the Foundation’s first Monday Masterclass last month. We’ll be working with the young leaders at the upcoming Masterclasses, sharing social media skills to help them get out there, network, collaborate and make things happen.

We’re also helping the Foundation team with their social media strategy and to further develop their own social media skills.

Data visualisation: what do you think school is for?

Screenshot: snippet of wordtree visualisation

Sue Beardsmore spoke to a class of primary school children in Birchfield, asking the children to tell her what they think of school, the city of Birmingham and what they hope to do when they grow up.

Sue tabulated the answers into a spreadsheet and I’ve had a quick play at visualising one question in the text data: “what do you think school is for?”

Here’s the result (click the link to view the image at full size). I used a word tree in Many Eyes to choose a starting keyword, in this case “learn”, and then view the children’s answers in context to the keyword.

I really like the word tree format (say over a word cloud) as a way to understand context of the text I’m interested in.

Do you need some help making sense of your data? Talk to us.

Stuff I've seen May 22nd through to May 24th

These are my links for May 22nd through May 24th:

  • Living with rats: It’s all about social justice – Nice presentation on the future of regeneration from Julian Dobson
  • Big Society champion appointed Government advisor – Nat Wei, one of Teach First's founding team, has been appointed as the new Government adviser on Big Society and a member of the House of Lords.
  • PM and Deputy PM’s speeches at Big Society launch | Number10.gov.uk – A transcript of speeches given by Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg at the launch of the Big Society programme on 18 May 2010.
  • Conceptual inclusion – "Language such as ‘be on’ is one of the many barriers groups face and it’s one of the reasons I enjoy volunteering as a surgeon because it really gets you thinking about how often and how easily you use words or phrases that seem commonplace but are in fact jargon to many and the session presents an opportunity to explain or discuss the terms properly. The digital world is moving so quickly that it isn’t just new words needing to be learnt but whole other ways of thinking,"
  • duncanhodgson.co.uk – "online youth work is the most valuable tool I've used in a long long time" – Let's not forget that!