by info@shift6.net 3 March 2009
Shift6 (where and how Blyk communicates with its collaborators) will migrate to the about.blyk.com website at the end March 2009.
Shift6 has run a number of workshops and ideation sessions with young creative thinkers in London and has begun work with a number of Universities across the country.
In the next few weeks we will be posting some of the workshop sessions material on the site and look forward to your observations and participation.
Thank you for your patience.
This is the first year I’ve noticed people donating to charities and emailing me about it instead of sending out Christmas cards. In that spirit I thought I’d highlight UK Youth’s work with young artists in promoting their work and organising exhibitions around the UK.
UK Youth is the leading national youth work charity supporting over 750,000 young people, helping them to raise their aspirations, realise their potential and have their achievements recognised via non-formal, accredited education programmes and activities.
Really worth supporting. Happy Christmas everyone!
Something really worth picking up at the news agent this month: Dazed and Confused has a great article in their New Year issue asking their readers “What does it mean to you to be young and british?”.
“We were really excited by the response to the Dazed teenage takeover. There were so many great ideas that we couldn’t even begin to put them all in the magazine, so we’ll be doing our best to get as much as possible up on DazedDigital.com as well. It’s great to confound stereotypes, and be able to showcase the energy, creativity and positivity of young people today.”
The Young Foundation was behind this weekend’s Social Innovation Camp in London’s East End. Part of the idea was to support people with great ideas for social services by bringing in “makers” of all kinds, ie designers, web developers, etc. It’s great to see an event that actually tries to push people with ideas to create tangible things that can then potentially get a first round of funding. Could have been called “going beyond the pub rant” :)
Highlighted ideas include The Good Gym and Useful Visitors. Check out the others.
I’m interested in what people think of this anti-drug use media campaign that just came out called Talk to Frank. Specifically targeted at young people, i wonder what they think of the style used and the talking dog concept.
Despite an overall decrease in drug use, cocaine use has remained stable amongst 16-24 year olds at 5%.
The new campaign, run by the national drugs information service FRANK, is specifically aimed at the 15-18 age group. “
Seems observing young people and technology has become a recognised field of research and thinking these days. I found this article in the Economist about the net generation coinciding with Don Tapscott’s new book Grown up digital: How the Net Generation is changing your world HC a sequal to his 1997 book Growing up digital: The Net generation. Fascinating stuff which is surprisingly full of very optimistic views on the ambient technologies that children and young people have grown up with.
“As the first global generation ever, the Net Geners are smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors,” Mr Tapscott argues. “These empowered young people are beginning to transform every institution of modern life.” They care strongly about justice, and are actively trying to improve society—witness their role in the recent Obama campaign, in which they organised themselves through the internet and mobile phones and campaigned on YouTube. Mr Tapscott’s prescient chapter on “The Net Generation and Democracy: Obama, Social Networks and Citizen Engagement” alone should ensure his book a wide readership.
danah boyd and her colleagues have just completed a 3 year collaborative research project on youth and media. Check it out!.
Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies barely existed. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.
We include here the findings of three years of research on kids’ informal learning with digital media. The two page summary incorporates a short, accessible version of our findings. The White Paper is a 30-page document prepared for the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Series. The book is an online version of our forthcoming book with MIT Press and incorporates the insights from 800 youth and young adults and over 5000 hours of online observations.
The most wonderful aspect of the election of Barak Obama as president of the United States was the impact that youth vote had on the final numbers as this article from MSNBC points out.
Political analysts have long been forecasting a high number of young voters in this presidential election — but there’s always that niggling fear that young people will do what young people are known for: flaking out, slacking off and failing to show up when it counts.
But this time, young people turned out to vote in droves. An estimated 22 to 24 million young people voted in this election, an increase in youth turnout by at least 2.2 million over 2004, according to CIRCLE.
“(The youth vote) is turning states that (Obama) would’ve lost or barely won into more comfortable margins,” says John Della Volpe, the director of polling for the Harvard University Institute of Politics. “Not only are they voting in higher numbers, they’re voting more Democratic.”
If you had had the right to vote in the US, who would you have voted for?
I’m the type of person who usually sifts through online content and rarely digs very deep into marketing campaigns. In this case, I was hooked on this for about 20 minutes. Somebody else’s phone is a new Nokia campaign advertised in London that does a great job of depicting the life of an early to mid twenty year-old through their text messages, MMS and pictures. Really impressive and also really interesting how you can grab people’s attention by catering to their voyeuristic tendencies.
I attended the Microsoft Research Symposium on Social Computing 2008 a few weeks ago in Redmond and as part of one of the tracks, someone had invited 3 young 18-19 year olds from Seattle to come and speak about their use of technology, how they saw technology in their lives and their expectations for the future. Needless to say some of their statements kinda blew my mind and I thought I’d share some of my notes with you. For a little bit of context, these 3 students attend the Seattle Academy of Art and Science what I can only assume was a public school (in the British sense of the word) for children of the wealthier strata of Seattle. Here goes:
- Their parents were as old as most of the parents of the people attending the symposium who were mostly in their 30s. They said their parents Read more >>
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