Big Society – Another View

Your carriage awaits

Where are we really heading?

Proceed with caution

 

Wearing three hats* I found the latest blog post from ResPublica somewhat intriguing. The full article is here. if you are interested in the way the decision influencers are thinking – I believe the article is worth reading. That doesn’t mean I agree with it.

It’s difficult to argue with the individual comments and ideas in ‘Power to change the future’ by Mark Pack but there seems to be a lack of co-ordination in the article. This seems to be the same lack of co-ordination that says ‘Remove lumps of the Harnessing Technology Grant mid-stream and use the money to fund free schools’.

Dominant suppliers, directors hiding behind commercial confidentiality and the House of Lords gravy train are all considered – along with early years education.

If I was a journalist I may say – ‘If you’re looking for cracks in the Con-LibDem alliance – here they are’. I’m not, so I won’t.

*I run a company based in Leicestershire. We are based in a voluntary sector hub – as part of that agreement I’m a trustee of the charity. In addition to that, the majority of our customers are primary schools in our surrounding area. (Therefore I’m keenly interested in anything that may affect small businesses, the voluntary sector and primary education).

Ofcom Bulletin – Another view of what's happening

Issue 36 of the Media Literacy e-bulletin now available

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The current bulletin has some great information and can be downloaded from Ofcom’s site here.

The sign off on the introductory page ‘Enjoy the last of the summer’ suggests they may have been preparing this for some time :)

Links to all the below items are in the bulletin itself.

‘Social Media Surgeries supporting the Big Society’ – looks particularly interesting, as I’m a trustee for a social enterprise. I’ve been advocating that voluntary sector organisations should really get on board with social networking. Interestingly, American business author, Jim Collins, regards some of the approaches needed in education to be similar to those needed in voluntary sectors.

Media Literacy Conference 2010 is appealing, but not free :( There looks like there’ll be some great speakers and very useful breakout sessions.

ActionFraud has a wake up call. In June this year they found that of all the reports they took where a fraud had actually taken place, 37% occurred online.

Do you want your share of £9,000 worth of kit? The BT Internet Ranger Schools Award will be made to a school or a group of schools who encourage young people, up to the age of 16, to use their ICT skills to help other people learn about computers and go online.

The Ofcom Communications Market Report includes these snippets – .. the over 55s are the fastest growing age group to adopt technology… 16-24s are the most efficient users of communications services as they squeeze 9.5 hours of media consumption into just over 6.5 hours actual time (we used to go to t’pub) ..

Other notes –
There’s a document on a major research into young people, the internet and credibility.
ClickCeop for Facebook has now been downloaded 55,000 times.
Details of various related seminars and meetings are also included.

Links to all the items are in the bulletin itself – available here