If you’ve heard myself or Stuart talk about Five Minute Mentors or had a quick go of the beta, then you probably understand the concept (we hope). If not, then this video should help. And if it piques interest then please give us a shout and we can organise your group beta access.

Five Minute Mentors from bounder on Vimeo.

Progress is continuing on five minute mentors, our online mentoring website supported by Becta — here we are using the site to do a quick practise mentoring session. The site isn’t quite user-friendly enough for our liking yet (some tweaks needed — you can for example arrange a session in the past) but the video calling is working really well.

The private beta is involving existing learning groups, however informal — so if you’re a learning provider or group member and think that secure, quick online mentoring could help give us a shout and we can set you up.

We Share Stuff recently received funding from Becta as part of the Learning Revolution to develop a web based group mentoring service — it’s called Five Minute Mentors and is based around the idea of quick video chats.

5 Minute Mentors enables co-mentoring within existing groups: Individuals request help and advice from other group members on specific topics. This takes place outside of the meeting/learning schedule and both mentor and mentee can choose the best available time slot for their conversation. All sessions are limited to five minutes ensuring minimal time outlay for both parties. Privacy and security are priorities and the application ensures no personal information is given out unwittingly by either party.

5MM aims to promote shared knowledge, improving the learning experience for all.

We’re looking for existing learner groups to be involved at this early stage. As part of the pilot for the project we are actively looking for suitable groups – at all levels of ability, subject knowledge and technical know-how – to help us fully beta-test the application, iron out any functional issues and provide feedback for improvements to the finished service. Our development costs are covered by the funding, so any involvement of your organisation in this project would not require any financial outlay by you or the group members/learners testing the service.

We’re blogging all about the development over at fiveminutementors.com.

Over the last month or so we’ve been doing a series of workshop sessions with brap — who work to promote equality — on giving some of their clients an introduction to the opportunities social media might offer their businesses, charities or social enterprises.

Each session was for four hours with around six people — with two trainers. We originally thought that that would be plenty of time and that boredom would be setting in by then — but there wasn’t a session where we wouldn’t have liked to extend just a touch. After some very brief introductions, the first thing we did in each session was to divide into groups of two and play the Social Media Game.

The game is a great way for people to start thinking about the big picture of the social web, how different tools, techniques and ideas work alongside each other — and it also acts as a way to quickly see some of the options that are available. We’ve been playing the game slightly differently; smaller groups (so we can make sure everyone has grasped the concepts behind the cards), tighter questions which the teams can alter to more closely reflect their real situations, and we’ve done an updated set of cards (which you can download here to use or alter yourselves).

After this we worked more directly with each person and started them going on something that might prove immediately useful to them: starting a blog was a popular one, as was learning how to monitor the social web. But the main idea is just to have a go — that might be Facebook, Twitter or even a quick video cast (shot on iPhone so excuse the appalling sound):

We’re hopefully going to be doing some follow up sessions to see how people are getting on… will keep you posted

Stuart has written up his thoughts on the session on ‘digital mentors’:

“just a few attributes there and it gets me thinking where are the people with these attributes right now? They’re out there doing the work already! Independently in many cases (and often for free). I see the ’surgeons’ from the social media surgeries who don’t have the weight of targets and crap access / tools and red tape to bog them down. This freedom allows them to do their stuff and it works. “

At the unconference I led a session on “defining digital inclusion” — born out of a long held worry that different people and organisations don’t quite mean the same thing when they talk about digital inclusion.

I talked about how I felt that the definition needed to be platform agnostic, and have room being able to find out how to do something rather than explicitly having a particular skillset. We discussed how it was definitely separate from digital engagment, and how it was often closely connected to social inclusion.

We also looked at how it was placed with the issue of access (both in terms of accessibility and physical access) — we thought that maybe the three are looked at in the wrong order.

Traditionally the problem seems to be trying to be solved in the order:

Access -> Inclusion (skills) -> Engagement (motivation)

but motivation and engagement (which is closely tied with social engagement) is such a strong driver to the skills and to the access that it needs more attention. Engagement isn’t transactional, in the same way that inclusion isn’t tool-based skills — so money (savings!) isn’t a motivation to engage. The group felt that more work towards social engagement was the real driver, that digital isn’t as separate as some approaches seem to be.

Certainly We Share Stuff’s idea is that people learn the tools (and to make decisions about which to use and how) because there is a motivational reason for it. Often we hope that the digital engagement is a driver to wider social engagement too.

I was surprised that we were all pretty much agreed on what we meant by “digital inclusion” — that it was (and this is my wording, worked out now):

the confidence to use technology when appropriate, and to know where to get help if needed

How well does that sit with organisational definitions? Or yours?

Led by Alison V Smith.

Audio from a session on working to digitally include young people — led by Carl Plant, and first, Saul Letourneau:

Antonio Roberts on his unconference:

“Although there are government plans afoot to get more people online in some way (access to TV, PC or mobile phone Internet access) does that mean someone is digitally included? Is it measured by the amount of comments people leave on blogs or if they even have a blog or Internet presence? What does digital mean anyway? Most of the things in my kitchen are in some way digital, so does that mean I’m somehow more digitally included than my neighbour? Also, what about those who just simply have no desire to go onto the Internet?”