Isn’t that absurd?

The learner-centredness of web 2.0 technology and the learner-centredness of non-formal education seem like such a perfect match.

And yet, we are to be found at the back of the digital revolution. Sitting there, not even really watching.

Here are ten reasons why youth professionals should be blogging:

UNDERSTANDING. Young people are leading the way in which technology is changing our world. Last year, I worked with 20 Europeans – all younger than 25 – who went on a trip to explore the new EU member states Romania and Bulgaria. They reported live from their journeys – magically with tools most of us still exclusively use for typing reports and making phone calls.

Your own blog will not only help you to begin to understand why all that stuff has become so normal to young people. Blogging yourself is the only way to discover the educational potential – and challenges – of blogging. And all the rest…

VELOCITY. When you hit the magic button [publish], your thoughts will be online. There is no editing, no waiting for weeks for some layouter to be finished, no authorisation procedure before the printing – eh, no printing! It’s instantaneous: the moment you want it to be published, it will be published. No fears of being outdated when others can finally read you!

INFORMALITY. On a blog, you can write what comes to mind. There are no requirements or demands on form, structure, contents, arguments, or the logical flow… You decide what gets out there, you set the standards. And with the informality of your style, you make it much easier for people to respond to your thinking – because it doesn’t require colleagues to come up with a fancy answer, they can just fire away with comments on your blog. No humming thousands of songs before reading a response in the next magazine :o)

VARIETY. You are one of the Unspeakables? You don’t like writing? Or you simply prefer photography or radio spots or short videos as a means of expression? This is your lucky time! There are many cool photoblogs and videoblogs and podcastblogs around already, and the scenes of youth work, youth policy, youth training and youth research would all largely benefit from the variety you bring in. Hell, there are even moblogs, and it doesn’t stop there – endless opportunities!

SPONTANEITY. Modern technology allows you to blog quickly, if you want. There is Twitter for being extremely short – you can just sign up for it, and twitter away – or Tumblr, if you prefer a lightweight blogging application. Wordpress takes a little longer to set up, but you can do pretty much anything you want with the beautiful beast.

NETWORKING. Through your blog, through sharing your thoughts and giving colleagues the opportunity to discuss and engage with your ideas, you can build up a network that is less dependent on physical meetings, which happen very rarely and are often overloaded with too many things already anyway. Little time is left for professional consideration of fundamental issues that are core to our work – a blog might be the place for you to have such a dialogue.

LEARNING. As a blogger, you don’t write yourself all the time. You also read a lot and get exposed to the views, ideas and experiences of other professionals in the field. Over time, a network can develop and the power and wisdom of crowds has time and space to develop its full potential. As a professional on learning, blogging will help you to become a learning professional.

ORGANISATION. A blog can help to organise your own resources. How many links, documents, papers, researches, resolutions, reports, sessions, documentations, and pictures do you have? Thousands. Admittedly, my own blog is not the best example for a well organised resource section (it will come, one day, it will come), but one can still dream…

SHARING. By making your stuff available to colleagues (and anyone who is interested, really), you make a visible contribution to the quality of the field. Others will happily follow your example and gladly join in to share their own resources, too.

After a while, you might get an extremely powerful, decentralised and distributed network of quality resources at all our fingertips. And the best thing of all: since nobody owns it but the community, nobody can shut it down. If one blog disappears, there will still be many others. We create a community of practice – all by ourselves :)

VISIBILITY. Blogging about our work not only makes problems more transparent or provides innovation through collective exchange and dialogue, it also – plainly and simply – gives the work we do with and for young people a medium, a voice, a platform. Such visibility and accessibility is badly needed – and we know it. We have known it for a long time. And complained about it for a long time, too. Shouldn’t we do something about it ourselves, then?

Are you prepared to share what you are doing –
and make that sharing a part of what you are doing?

All cartoons once more by the spectacular Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.

In 2005, a discussion document on intercultural learning was published in follow-up to the Council of Europe’s Directorate of Youth and Sports Long Term Training Course “Intercultural Learning” — LTTC ICL (the paper is available here).

In this document, Dr Gavan Titley argues that, while intercultural learning has become a key work area in European youth training during the last fifteen years, approaches that have been consolidated and widely reproduced during this period are no longer adequate to the realities in which young people live and practice youth work.

At the occasion of the DYS seminar entitled «Intercultural learning – which ways forward?», Gavan was invited to revisit the paper and its main conclusions and bring it in relation to the current educational practice of intercultural learning. Again, we recorded his intervention as a podcast for the world out there.

Download the podcast below to find out why using culture as a concept is dangerous and often inherently racist, why Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay has an intercultural policy and what this means for intercultural learning in non-formal education (and probably elsewhere, too!).

standard version | mp3 version | Podcast Feed | iTunes Link

Enjoy listening, and stay tuned!

In case you need some help with what to do:

A podcast is nothing else than a digital recording of a radio broadcast or a similar programme which is then made available on the internet. While the name is coming from both broadcasting and iPod, a podcast is not restricted to an iPod or any other media player, in fact. You can listen to it easily, using one of many different ways.

If you wanna know more about podcasting, head over to Wikipedia.

The only thing that you need is a computer which can play mp3-files. Millions of programmes do that for you – Windows Media Player (or Jetaudio if you are on the outlook for a better and free alternative) on PC computers or Quicktime on MAC machines or iTunes on both.

Normally your computer knows very well what to do anyway, so just go ahead and download the mp3 file — your machine will take it from there, most likely. If not, ask a geeky character in your vicinity.

Just be aware that audio podcasts are usually not the smallest files (also true for ours: 21 Megabytes), so download might take a moment or two. The good news: It happens in the background, so you can continue to work away!

For you iTunes users out there, we have also included the iTunes link. For you nerdy friends of ours, we also have a more modern version of the soundfile available. And for all friends of RSS and feed readers, we also have a link especially for our podcasts.