A UK blog about youth and technology.
Scanning Twitter today, I noticed VInspired Voicebox mentioning The Youth of Today.
The site, supported by the DCSF seeks to help young people make a positive impact on UK society by providing training, mentoring & networking assistance to 13-19 year olds, aiming to create the young leaders of tomorrow.
The site has all the usual suspect social media bases covered, including a blog and twitter.
From http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6805567.ece
A teenager was ordered to be detained yesterday for posting death threats on Facebook.
Keeley Houghton, 18, said on her Facebook profile that she would kill Emily Moore, 18, whom she had bullied for four years since they were at school together. Houghton was sentenced to three months in a young offender institution after pleading guilty to harassment at Worcester Crown Court.
I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing in future. Luckily there are projects like the excellent CyberMentors, where victims of cyber bullying can support each other and get help from professional counsellors.
A couple of cool UK schemes empowering youth to use their time to make a difference.
Both are for 16-25s, so skewing a bit older than I’d like. In my experience it’s the 12-16s who often feel the least empowered, though obviously there are many good reasons why it’s a lot harder to make these schemes work for under 16s so don’t let that put you off.
1) Junction49
A UK site to help young volunteers create and carry out their ideas for social action. Ideas range from student stress, to photography, to justice in the Congo.
“1) You submit an idea
2) We respond to your idea, giving you advice on how to turn your idea into reality.
3) We offer you support on where to find funding and how to put together a plan.
4) You can also gain support from other young people who’ve had similar ideas.
5) Now add actions to your idea – this is just another way of describing a to-do list of everything you need to do to get going. But the important thing is that once you’ve posted the actions all other Junction49 members can see them and offer to help you out”
Webby: http://www.junction49.co.uk/
2) Vinspired
Getting youth involved and passionate about volunteering with loads of excellent opportunities, presented in a very cool way. I’m a big fan of their new Favour Farm scheme (tis very Karma Army).
“v is an independent charity aiming to inspire a new generation of young volunteers. We do this by funding and supporting voluntary organisations all over England to create inspiring and diverse opportunities.
We also pride ourselves in supporting voluntary organisations to overcome any barriers they may come across in their work, such as the negative stereotype of volunteering.”
Webby: http://www.vinspired.com/
An obvious recurring trend is to take a much beloved classic and repackage it in a way that’ll appeal to young people, or at least in a way that non-young-people (old people?) THINK will appeal.
Obviously this is nothing new and has wildly varying rates of success. Personally when I was a teen, I found Baz’s Romeo + Juliet to be rather brilliantly done, and done without re-scripting the Shakespeare into some sort of hideous skateboarding rap battle.
Now, they’re at it again. This time it’s London-based Elsinore Films producing six 3-D film versions of Shakespeare classics, starting with Hamlet and based on the musical theatre versions created by ‘Shakespeare 4 Kidz‘.
More here: http://www.shakespeare4kidz.com/news/variety-3-d-hamlet…
(the original Variety article throws up an error for me)
Putting aside S4K’s cringey name (I hope it’s ironic), I’m interested to see how the films turn out. They’ll need to be something pretty special if they’re going to meet their stated aim of competing with Harry Potter and HSM. Course, with those franchises winding down, if they can unearth the next Efron or Radcliffe they’ll do ok.
In other news, I must remember to get a copy of Pride and Prejudice, the comic (yes, really).
In other, other news, teen or not, everyone should read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a truly excellent start to what will no doubt become a tacky, done-to-death genre that we’ll all be sick of in a few years.
Bright! Colourful! Magazine!
USA, but made me laugh.
Taken from http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/08/daniel/
“On Thursday, a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of an Indiana man whose online efforts to proposition underage girls led him to not one, not two, but three undercover cops, none of whom apparently knew about the others.
Despite [this], the panel upheld his conviction, ruling that the additional chat logs still showed his intent to commit a crime. He is serving a sentence of 17-and-a-half years in prison, followed by supervised release for life.
There’s no evidence in the record that he ever succeeded in talking with a real underage girl.”
Do any real teens use chat rooms anymore? In the traditional sense, I doubt it. AOL and MSN closing their chat rooms was probably the death knell. So where have the yoot gone? MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, virtual worlds like Habbo and obviously social networks social networks social networks.
Here’s hoping the police are having a bit more success there…
