Roadtrips and RamblingsMerlyn Horton’s Travel Log

Please share with all of us how you are honoring and appreciating youth workers in your community or organization.  Click on the comments link below this post and tell us (1) who you are  (2) where you are (3) what kind of cool stuff you are doing or planning…

Cheers!

Jen McKinney and Brian Durand 

2009 Co-Chairs

I love youth workers and just today saw this great chance to show my appreciation. Please spread the word about “Thank a Youth Worker Day” and mark your calendar. Something small or something big. Just do something!

Technology’s applications/implications vary from the vast to the very specific don’t they?
Here are homeless groups identifying their perspective and goals through social media. The challenges they are facing (as are many of us are – including myself) is that the institutional models of promoting literacy, homelessness and mental illness are unable to sustain relevance when faced with the new models based on collaboration. It’s a though institutions speak latin and collaborative groups speak elephant. (See Clay Shirkey’s ideas about institutional vs collaboration. )

One of the challenges of the day this story illustrates for me, is how do we shift our economic models as we forge new side-roads off the information superhighway?

You know that “child-safety” software that monitors your kids’ every click and sends it to some spyware creep whose main profit-center is running national firewalls for totalitarian states who use the same service to figure out whom to hood, kidnap and torture?

Turns out that these same sleazeballs also monitor your kids’ IM sessions and sell the info to market-research companies that want to fine-tune how they sell sugar and explosions to kids.

Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.

“This scares me more than anything I have seen using monitoring technology,” said Parry Aftab, a child-safety advocate. “You don’t put children’s personal information at risk…”

EchoMetrix, formerly known as SearchHelp, said companies that have tested the chat data using Pulse include News Corp.’s Fox Broadcasting and Dreamworks SKG Inc. Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures recently signed on.

Web-monitoring software gathers data on kid chats (via /.)

Damn. Yet another reason to be involved and informed about what your children are doing online, rather than rely on software that ultimately doesn’t really have your family’s best interest at heart.