Posts Tagged ‘facebook’
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The Digital Generation Project
Photo credit: Chris Walsh
The Digital Generation project is a useful new site for everyone who works with young people or is interested in seeing how they use technology. Supported by the John D. and Catherine. T MacArthur Foundation and started by Edutopia, the Digital Generation Project aims to document the stories of people from Generation Now, for whom YouTube, Facebook and MySpace are as familiar as letter-writing and long-distance trunk calls once were to the older generation. It will be useful for parents to learn about and track the kind of digital tools their kids are using, for teachers to understand and utilise these tools to change the classroom and to support students in their learning, and for researchers and other institutions working with young people to get an insight into their world.
The project is US-based, but of course the insights will be valuable no matter where you are. They are also on Twitter (@EdutopiaDG). I suggest you check out some of the resources on the site to begin with, especially those here on the ‘building digital media and learning’ site, and this digital youth research from the University of California at Berkeley.
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All For Good
In a move that is likely to give a considerable boost to volunteering, a bunch of different individuals and groups from the technology, marketing and public sectors – including industry behemoths Google and Craigslist, have set up an open-source platform to list volunteering opportunities, called All for Good. The project was launched in response to President Obama’s call to action and is managed by Google. Quoting from their ‘About‘ page,
Our core team is made up of volunteering enthusiasts from places like Google, Craigslist Foundation, UCLA, YouTube, FanFeedr and Aha! Ink. As a contributor to the All for Good project, Google is hosting the All for Good website and products. Several Google engineers worked on All for Good as a 20-percent project (Google lets engineers spend a day a week on projects that interest them), collaborating with a broader team to build the product.
Users can log in with their Facebook, Google, AIM, OpenID, Yahoo! or Netlog accounts. Though it is initially supposed to be US-centric, as per the FAQ, the site automatically identified me as being from London and listed a few London-based volunteering opportunities, which, given its US-focus are very limited in number.
The site seems fairly easy to use, and maps out the locations of different opportunities apart from listing them. That’s not a particularly new feature though, because VolunteerMatch in the US launched a Google Earth plug-in earlier this year that performs pretty much the same function. All for Good’s single most distinguishing feature is is the fact that it is open-source: any group that wishes to provide a volunteering opportunity can easily do this via the Volunteer Feed Listings form. Do-It does provide a similar offering in the UK, but it requires the use of the YouthNet-supported bespoke software V-Base.
It will be interesting to see how All for Good develops – they have already put out a call to developers who may be interesting in building All For Good apps, and to improve the beta.
[Via Ars Technica]
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