Nonformality

In the context of the Council of Europe’s seminar “Using E-Learning in Intercultural Non-formal Education” I gave a presentation today [Nov 30, 2011] to (1) briefly introduce approaches to quality standards, benchmarks and criteria in e-learning and to (2) exemplify how e-learning changes learners, learning and learning environments and how this impacts non-formal education. Without a voice-over some aspects of the presentation will likely be hard to follow, but there are many links to sources for further reading in there so it might be useful anyway. Click on the image or this link to download the pdf of the presentation (12 MB).

This article was commissioned by and written for the Estonian Youth Work Magazine «MIHUS», published under the ESF programme “Developing youth work quality”. More info on the programme is available here.

More than a thousand methods are listed in Europe’s largest toolbox for training and youth work at www.salto-youth.net/tools/toolbox/. More than a thousand tools, with new ones being added constantly. More than a thousand!

They stand for a growing dilemma and an increasingly frustrating conflict in our work as youth trainers and youth workers – the demand that methods must always be effective, evidence-based, creative, participatory, empowering, stimulating, exciting, new, crazy, surprising, powerful…

Is there a method in the madness?
Photo by Tim Chaborski

Is there a method in the madness?

The more methods you know the better you are. Methods have become a marketing tool, a part of our identities as youth trainers and youth workers. Some of these methods may even become our trademark – when you think of Madzinga, with how many trainers do you associate it? And yet, at the same time, it almost seems as if only a new method is a good method.

We are afraid of repeating ourselves. We don’t want to bore ourselves with what we do. But more importantly: frequent seminar-goers might recognise a method and consider us boring as well… Oh no!

It’s a long time since the map section has seen any additions, but having stumbled over the excellent “Mapping Stereotypes Project” by Yanko Tsvetkov aka alphadesigner I couldn’t resist to amend the collection. In an interview with the Telegraph, Yanko explained:

“I created the first one in 2009 because at that time there was an energy crisis in Europe. I just created it to amuse my friends but when I put it up on my website so many people liked it that I decided to really focus on the project of mapping the stereotypes based on different places in Europe. I was surprised by the reaction because I never really expected it to take off like this.”

Here are, in alphabetical order, Europe according to Britain and, after the jump, Europe according to Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, the United States and the Vatican.

As Yanko put it: “Sense of humor highly recommended.” Indeed :) Enjoy!

Europe according to Britain | Mapping Stereotypes Project | Source

From youthpolicy.org, where I will be blogging at The Beat about how policy affects young people:

Whatever intergenerational contracts may have been in place – spoken or unspoken, real or perceived – are largely gone. The promise and hope of previous generations—in the Western world at least, the majority of young people around the world could never dream of such things to begin with—to lead a better life than their parents is a flickering image of the past.

But it’s not the lack of economic prosperity alone that infuriates young people. Not that it wouldn’t be reason enough: close to 90 million young people are unemployed, constituting about half of all unemployed people – and also roughly half of all young people interested in working. And that’s the average – in Syria, to quote but one example, the unemployed young people make up nearly 80% of the working-age unemployed population. The growing youth employment crisis, earmarked by these ballpark figures, has been largely ignored.

Add the unsustainability of the current growth-and-screw-the-environment-mantra and the massively rising social injustice to the colossal employment mess, and you get a highly explosive mix, which keeps bubbling to the surface on the streets across the planet. Young people have to watch how the world as we know it, its economic, social and political fabric, disintegrates, day by day. They don’t like the mélange of the cocktail of political, economic and social disfranchisement, and have begun to show their anger about being robbed of their own future with what Heribert Prantl calls “the sacred rage of the young.”

For years now I have been collecting information on and tracing the origins of different models, schemata and theories of participation. Enticed by a current project, I have put together a selection of models with their original imagery and, in excerpt, original introductions and explanations. I will review and extend the selection regularly, and update this post as well as the pdf-file (Version July 2011, 11 MB). These are the (currently: 30) models covered:

The European Dialogue on Internet Governance (with the obvious but easily unfortunate abbreviation EURODIG) understands itself as an open platform to discuss internet governance and related policy issues. It was created in 2008 and aims to involve all stakeholders from across the region, from governmental and non-governmental organisations to content and infrastructure providers, from internet makers and users to internet observers and regulators. Once a year, the European Dialogue on Internet Governance culminates in a multi-stakeholder conference. The conference, and the entire process, need some serious upgrading.

Here are twelve starting points to reload EURODIG for 2012.