The event featured two speakers: Silvia Novak from published Faber & Faber and Rain Ashford from the BBC.  Silvia described how F&F is using social media to engage directly with its audiences, while Rain shared her passion for Lilypad Arduino. Attendees also took part in an interactive artwork by Barnsley artist Jo Pearson, which combined the ancient system of iChing with QR codes and mobile technology.

More detail on the event can be found on the Geek Girls Allowed blog: http://geekgirlsallowed.thegisthub.net/2010/09/

In association with Creative Sheffield and as part of the Sheffield Business Festival, “@BLYorks” includes presentations by games entrepreneur Ian Livingstone OBE (Sept 20 at Electric Works) and music legend Mark Jones (Sept 29 at The Showroom). You can find more details and book a place by using the events search on the Business Link website and searching for Be Inspired events in South Yorkshire. Alternatively, call Business Link on 08456 048048.

Also in September (8th-11th), Creative Sheffield is hosting the MADE Festival, which includes TEDx and a 48 hour boot-camp for entrepreneurs. It looks like September will be a busy month for digital businesses.

Some 200 trainers are expected to attend the event, which will include various session tracks, including keynotes, IT Pro, developer, Microsoft Office and information worker, BI, SQL, security, IT Academy/MOAC, soft skills and more.

For full programme details and registration, go to www.mctsummit.eu .

• Bradford
• Doncaster
• Huddersfield
• Leeds
• North East Lincolnshire (Grimsby)
• North West Sheffield (High Green)
• Rotherham
• Sheffield Central
• York

Social Media Surgeries are relatively informal events where people with some knowledge of how to use social media as a communication tool pass some of their knowledge on to people working in voluntary and community organisations, arts charities and very small businesses. The first Social Media Surgeries were started by Nick Booth of Podnosh.com in Birmingham, and Digital 20/20 has taken his model and applied it around the region.  A team of volunteers was already in place planning the first Yorkshire & Humber Social Media Surgery in Huddersfield in November 2009, when Digital 20/20 launched the first Leeds Surgery a few days later. Surgeries in York, Sheffield Central, North East Lincolnshire, North West Sheffield, Bradford and Rotherham all followed on, and the latest addition to the stable is Doncaster, launching on the 28^th July 2010.

The basic tenet of a Social Media Surgery is that volunteer advisors (who have become known as “Surgeons”) sit down over a cup of tea and a laptop with someone who wants to learn more about how to use social media to engage with their audiences, recruit more volunteers, or report on their events. It is important that “Surgeons” do not see this as an opportunity to demonstrate their technical knowledge, but that their first step is to listen to what the “Patient” is trying to achieve, work out how comfortable they are with social media, and work with them to find an appropriate tool to help them get to their goals. As the Surgeries have built their track record, word of mouth has brought new customers through the door, attendance has grown at all the Surgeries, and evidence has emerged that they are having a real impact on community capacity. Many new people and organisations have been assisted to become active on Twitter, to set up new blogs, or to manage their Facebook group effectively.  And the approach at Surgeries is that people learn something new, go away and practise it, and often return to a future event to get feedback on what they have done and assistance in moving to the next stage. Another key part of the Social Media Surgeries strategy is that those who attend are encouraged to pass on what they learn to those they work with in local communities.

All but one of the Yorkshire & Humber Social Media Surgeries to date has been held in central locations in major population centres. The North West Sheffield Surgery is an exception to this rule, the one event so far taking place at Paces Campus in High Green, and drawing people in from a range of very local organisations. In the long term, the plan is to attempt to get all the central Surgeries to spin off neighbourhood events, but this may only happen effectively when people who have come to the central Surgeries as “Patients” feel comfortable enough in their use of social media to act as “Surgeons” in their own local events. There is evidence from Birmingham, which has been doing this for longer, that this is indeed starting to happen there.

In the era of the new Government’s Big Society policy, the growth of Social Media Surgeries, in Yorkshire & the Humber and elsewhere, is doubly important. It both shows how volunteer effort can be mobilised to help with skills and capacity development in the voluntary and community sectors, and it demonstrates how the reach and profile of such organisations can be improved using social media at a time of scarce resources.

Chris is a self-effacing man, and just as personable in the flesh as he appears in his various online manifestations, and he laughs off the epithet which has been applied to him as “the most influential person on Twitter” as “just something to do with algorithms”.  Nevertheless, the fact that the algorithms have picked him out as such demonstrates that he must be doing something right with social media. Chris calls Twitter “the Serendipity Engine”, and it is purely due to Twitter that his second ever visit to the UK (the other was to Devon, he’s never been to London) saw him by the banks of the River Don, following a conversation on the micro-blogging platform with Doncaster-based entrepreneur and Chair of Doncaster College governors, Rob Wilmot. Rob persuaded Chris that Doncaster was the place to be to discuss the potential uses of social media in education, and so Chris decamped to this side of the pond to help us explore the issues.

The Social Media in Education Podcamp on Day One was followed on the second morning by a straight lecture from Chris. The Podcamp is Chris’s particular take on the unconference format, sometimes called “barcamp” or “open space”. These kinds of events are self-organised events, where participants are invited to suggest topics for workshops they want to lead, and invite other delegates to join them in parallel sessions.  As with many other such events, a grid was drawn on a noticeboard and a scrum ensued as attendees grabbed the post-it notes and fought for the best slot for their own presentation.

Chris Brogan got the event off to a rousing start with a keynote address, during which he pointed out the example of US Community Colleges which he called “places where hope grows”, and urged the education institutions represented to see themselves in the same light. Social media enables organisations and institutions to develop relationships with their users, and, crucially, with potential users. As he said in his second-day lecture, effective social media use means you can get to know the customer, and build a relationship with them, long before you ever have to sell anything to them. And people are much more likely to buy something from someone they know.  Statistics were quoted which suggest that 60% of the media consumed by today’s young people is made by their peers and not professionals.  Educational bodies can help people learn to create media, and should be aware that this will result in content much more appealing to the people they are trying to reach  than anything they might produce themselves.

From there it was off into some really intense discussions on many different aspects of Social Media in Education, from developing a Social Media Strategy to using iPhone apps in education.

Some common themes ran through the day including:

Frustration with in-house IT Departments: many internal IT managers just don’t get social media, and see it as an additional burden on their staff’s time. Blanket blocking policies are still pretty common in colleges and other public sector networks.

Joining the Conversation: Institutions need to understand the conversational nature of social media, and move away from “broadcast mode” into two-way dialogue with users, learners and potential learners. This can be a difficult shift to manage, and many marketing staff fail to develop the necessary mindset.

Controlling the message: Some institutions find the fact that social media can give a voice to many different people in the organisation to be threatening.  Managers are used to being able to control the messages that come out, but social media makes this a lot harder. Some respond by trying to clamp down, but this is rarely a successful strategy, and it is far more effective to join the conversation, develop a persuasive persona, and win people onto your side.

Staff lack of comfort with social media and digital tools: The digital divide is still very apparent in the education sector, with organisations like FE colleges and adult learning providers staffed with significant numbers of people who have little or no interest in social media, and who struggle to use digital equipment. This is an additional barrier to adoption, beyond management and blocking issues.

Child protection and teacher/student relationships: These inter-connected issues manifested themselves in a number of ways during the discussions. The Podcamp was mainly focussing on post-14 learning, so child protection was perhaps not quite the issue it might otherwise have been, but it is still an important factor. The fact that Facebook, at the time of the Podcamp at least, was holding out against introducing effective child protection measures, has not been a help in persuading teachers and their management that the introduction of social media to the classroom is a responsible step. Many teachers and tutors are also nervous about what social networking means for their relationships with students. Social networking between teachers and students risks opening up the private lives of teachers to the scrutiny of their charges, and means they could be seen to be invading students’ private spaces.

A workshop session on the issues of “Social Media, Digital Identity and Personality” failed to do more than scratch the surface of this complex issue, provided more questions than answers, and perhaps opened up a debate that might extend into a series of events in the future.

Day two was about a more-or-less straight lecture from Chris. It felt like a lecture, because it was held in a lecture theatre, but Chris’s style does not really lend itself to the term “lecture”. Beginning by telling the room that everyone there is, collectively, much more intelligent that he is, is not usually the way most lecturers would begin.  Chris has clearly got his social media “sound bites” well honed, one which struck a real chord was “promote others 12 times to every one time you promote yourself; and be at the shoulder of every deal”. This brought home how much social media is about generosity, and, while it may be tempting to think of the old adage “if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made”, it was a neat way of encapsulating Chris’ point that social media allows organisations to develop real and meaningful relationships with their customers and potential customers, the result of which is that people really want to buy something from them.

For the delegates in Doncaster, there were two aspects of Social Media in Education of interest, that of using Social Media in the marketing and recruitment activities of the organisation, and that of its use in the classroom. Much of the content of Chris’s presentation was more relevant to the former rather than the latter aspect, but there had been much talk about classroom issues in the previous day’s sessions.

Chris urges organisations to “Listen – publish – connect”, the material you put out there must be responsive to your audiences’ needs and desires, and you must use it as a focus for opening and maintaining a dialogue with them.  In the modern era, people expect organisations to be open about what they do, but effective use of social media requires organisations and individuals to practice “publicness”, find their voice, and learn to become comfortable with living large parts of their lives in public. A lot of people think that being open about what they do undermines their competitive advantage, whereas the reality is that it demonstrates you are getting things done, and these days, people suspect those who are secretive about what they do might have something to hide, or at least that they are less than proud of their work.

Another thing that social media allows you to do is to let other people speak about you. Fora such a Facebook Groups and other online profiles encourage users and potential users to share opinions on your organisation. If you are successful in befriending them and showing your generosity online, they are likely to talk about you in positive terms, and testimonials from others are always much more powerful than anything you might say about yourself.

Altogether, this was a fascinating day and a half, a first for Doncaster with such a world-renowned speaker arriving in the town, simply because of an online conversation with Rob Wilmot. In many ways, this was an apt demonstration of how the internet and social media are shrinking the world, and shaping new forms of relationship. There is much work to be done in this area, however, in ensuring both educational institutions and teachers & lecturers are comfortable with social media and able to integrate it into their work. Digital 20/20 and its partners look forward to taking this forward with Doncaster College and many of the organisations and individuals represented at the event.

Skillset, the Sector Skills Council for Creative Media, is currently undertaking the largest formal review of skills needs and working life in the UK’s Creative Media Industries. Results will directly and quickly shape all Skillset’s work, including future training support, pinpointing skills gaps and making sure our industries maintain their world class position.

If you would like to take part, please visit the Skillset website: http://www.skillset.org/research/activity/workforce/article_7741_1.asp

Full details of the commission can be found by going to http://www.enhancementfund.co.uk/commissioned-activity/commissioned-activity-overview.asp and downloading the pdf. The deadline for submissions is 12 noon on Friday 30th July, 2010.

Digital 20/20’s Local Authority Education Group is very happy to pick up this baton and continue the good work done by the forum, providing updates on current policies and including an ‘unconference’ element, where participants have the opportunity to disseminate projects they’re working on.

Meanwhile, there are also moves afoot to continue a forum on a national level through ‘eduLAIT’ (http://lait.org.uk/), an online network for people working for Local Authorities with a remit for education and technology. It is focusing at the grass roots level, and looking to make visible and support connections between people working for Local Authorities, who have a common interest in solving problems, sharing information and discussing policy and practice.

FITS is a tailored best practice framework designed specifically for IT teams providing service to the school sector. Two courses are now available and are open for booking for August dates:

FITS – ICT Support in Education – Practitioner  £510 + VAT

Content:-Service desk; incident and problem handling; security, change release, patch management and configuration management.

Duration: Two day course. This comprises one and a half days of teaching followed by an examination which takes place at the end of the second day.

This unit will benefit individuals involved in ICT technical support in schools, colleges and universities and may include teaching assistants, technicians, management and supporting consultants.

This course provides 2 credits towards NVQ level 4.

FITS – ICT Support in Education: Advanced/ Managers £710 + VAT 

Content: Service level management, service continuity management, availability and capacity management, performance monitoring, preventative maintenance, print & output management, energy conservation, storage management, directory services administration and financial management.

Duration: Three day course. This comprises two and a half days of teaching followed by an examination which takes place at the end of the third day.

This unit will benefit individuals involved in ICT technical support in schools, colleges and universities and may include senior technicians, management, head teachers and supporting consultants.

This course provides 2 credits towards NVQ level 5.

Location and dates:

Leeds City Learning Centre: 2^nd August and 16^th August

To register on one of the above courses contact WSLIT on 07791 306837 or email wsl.margaret@rocketmail.com to book your place.

The focus of this one day event is on the use of online tools to support, enhance and enable collaboration between Further and Higher Education and their commercial, public sector, cultural and social & civic partners. Presentations will include 3 keynotes plus sessions showcasing outputs from the JISC Trialling Collaborative Tools for Business and Community Engagement project. The day will also include networking opportunities and a panel discussion to explore emergent themes from the day.

The event will be of value to anyone interested in any of the four dimensions of BCE, namely: Employer Engagement, Knowledge Transfer, Lifelong Learning or Cultural Community & Public Engagement. Attendees will include senior managers, academics, lecturers, IT directors, knowledge transfer managers, business development managers and staff from support services.

Registration for the event (via the URL above) is free and includes access to the day’s talks, lunch and refreshments. Places are limited so please book early to avoid disappointment.