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

Courtesy of the wonderful (and sometimes rude) webcomic XKCD.

It’s funny and it’s target audience is web-savvy people who get asked for help on “computers” all the time, and who – mostly – will help people (with a World-weary air), but this flowchart is probably one of the best definitions I’ve seen of what I take “digital inclusion” to mean.

If you’re someone  that does the flowchart naturally then you’re able to perform the two things that I consider the activities of the digitally included:

• you’re able to experiment with technology to see if you can make it do what you want, without being scared
• you know where to look for help and when to give up and ask

And that’s it, I’ve never considered the phrase to mean anything more detailed that that – what do you think?

As an aside, think just how much help most digitally included flowchart followers are happy to give out, try pitching up at a Grand Prix and trying to get someone to teach you how to drive.

We’ve just heard some good news. The proposal we put forward to run an accredited training programme with Sandwell Youth Offending Team has been accepted. We start delivering our social media flavoured course from September. The course is designed to give young people a range of resources, skills and a qualification in support to them finding employment, training or going into education.

Once we have the course underway, we will share the hows and whats in more detail right here.

Following on the NIACE digital inclusion conference, we have set up a few ‘guides’ on current Internet usage. It’s really just to see if by providing a simple ‘how-to’ get involved with the social web, we can begin to build adult education related networks, if at all!

The ‘We Share…‘ series will be an ongoing thing and hopefully beneficial in understanding some of the barriers that practitioners / tutors etc face when learning how to the make the most of the social web in an educational context.

take 2453

Time for another quick update on things here at ‘We Share Stuff’. As you can see, we have finally gone live with the website – we had a makeshift photo shoot so you can see who we are – yes real human beings not robots (debatable?) Anyway, the whole web site thing will evolve over time, just like the ‘Net does! While we have the usual web site stuff going on, we also have a nifty blog system set up allowing us to provide blogs to organisations, individuals etc – anyone we work with basically! It’s a really simple system, great to use and was set up by Mr Jon Bounds. Bravo, Sir…

A quick mention on Blog Action Day, Wednesday 15th October. We were planning on attending as one of the social media ‘surgeons’ to offer advice but it seems we have been included on the ‘patients’ list! which is cool, because we can quiz some of the ‘experts’ on some of the finer details of blogging! We hope plenty of organisations get involved here, the technology can really help make a difference. Maybe it can be a platform to providing more frequent, similar events too.

Last, but by no means least, Some awesome work being done on the Digital Mentor role, by Dave Briggs – From recent consultation he has already set up a blog and a wiki, encouraging social media types to get involved with the discussion and possible direction of this role.

The Government’s response to tackling the digital divide has them coming up with a new scheme offering “vouchers” to low-income families enabling them to get online at home. This scheme is costing £300 million. Providing these vouchers will not address the problem, let alone overcome it. We’ve said it before and we’ll keep on saying it until somebody with ears in the appropriate places, gets the message.

It’s not about the access….

The ongoing evolution of the Internet..and it will be all about the Internet, means that people who are still to use the technology or have limited experience, are being left behind at an unacceptable rate. There are some small movements to address the real issues here but it’s all too slow and lacking in volume to make a difference.

I chatted with Nick Booth last night about the situation and we drew similar conclusions about what should actually be happening with that money. It should be providing training, guidance, communication, advice etc delivered by the people with the right skills and attitude and in a manner that recognises that the way we learn will need to change to make the most of what the internet is becoming. These “digital mentors” can be the answer to an as yet fully realised situation.

Our project is in the throws of equipping these mentors with the kind of knowledge and skills that will benefit those excluded from the digital community. Hopefully before too long, those who make the decisions will be aware of what’s actually going on and who knows, maybe do something about it.