Personally I can’t see much prospect of this right now in schools, however at some point in seems inevitable. I’ve just done a peer review for a Guide on Digital & Social Media that Tim Davies is writing for Participation Works and added a comment about mobile phones. The barriers people used to have to making films, taking photos etc. aren’t the same anymore. On my phone I can record video, edit it and mix it with different film clips and audio and send it to my computer.

Most phones take photos (at a higher resolution than many dedicated cameras did not so long ago), most also have the ability to record audio. The majority of new phones can easily access the internet and those of us with blogs can write posts and administer our blogs from our phone. Then of course theres the likes of twitter that uses sms messaging and the many applications we can now download to our phones to make life easier or more interesting (like gmail on your phone or syncing with gcal).

Something thats being increasingly trialled is sending payment by mobile phone. You can now purchase parking tickets (and extend them), train tickets, and send money via paypal using your mobile phone.

Then theres the thing that I find most interesting which is phones using GPS - being able to find places and help people find you using satellite mapping.

My point is that phones if not already, will become indispensible, and being able to use them effectively will be just as valuable as learning to use computers and the internet. So at some point it seems inevitable that schools will have a role to play to make use of the technology students are already carrying around in their pockets.

Mobile phone use is something we’ve discussed a lot within OnTheUp development chats, particularly because of the potential for young people to be able to give instant reactions to activities their involved in - not so much reflective feedback as ‘in the moment’ feedback! This is likely to be much more forthright and honest and so could provide some very interesting data about young peoples experiences.

In terms of recent development we now have an example site up and running and Ana has created some example applications. It still needs a bit of tweaking so it will be a couple more weeks before we open it up to have a look at but hopefully this will help to provide a better idea of what the sites about (soon!………..)

The two approaches to assessment I’ve been reading about most are:

• Having a set standard to achieve (based on various indicators)
• Measuring distance traveled

I don’t think we’re interested in number 1, and I think attempts to do this are very questionable. Number 2 is much more relevant to us but I have a concern over this. My concern is that in both cases the ‘measurable element’ does result in a ‘final score’.

For example, we’re not trying to help people assess how skilled somebody actually is in communication, what we do want to achieve is that people recognise when they have an opportunity to develop or work on their soft skills, and to recognise the progress they make as the result of them participating in a project/activity/goal.

The problem with having a ‘final score’ is that inevitably people will compare their results and this will lessen the effectiveness of the system. An example being that if you take part in a personality test purely for your own benefit and with no intention to share the results its much more likely that you’ll give honest answers than if you feel you have something to gain by ‘answering correctly’.

So the challenge for us is that we somehow want to help people measure their ‘distance traveled’ and we also want to provide them with a ‘report’ to help them recognise the progress they’ve made, but we need to provide these reports in a manner that doesn’t allow them to be compared or used as some kind of leaderboard.

Kate made a suggestion related to making the experience feel more ‘game like’ and although we don’t yet know what this means or have any practical ideas to achieve this I think its a good way of thinking out of the box about how we can help people recognise their gains but in a purely personal way……more thinking required!

OnTheUp isn’t aiming to actually assess soft skills, well at least not in the traditional sense - we’re not aiming to develop something that allows you to get a ‘Grade A’ in Communication or Creativity! What we are aiming to do is to help people assess whether or not they feel they’ve developed personal skills and qualities while working towards particular projects/goals.

Our aim for for the user is to help them become more self aware of the skills and qualities they have and how they developed them - the underlying principal being that people who have a good understanding of their personal skills & qualities will be able to handle interview situations much more confidently (there are of course lots of other benefits but we’ll stick with this one for this post!).

Ultimately people that use the system will still find themselves in interview situations and will still find themselves being assessed by interviewers, so heres what I found on my delve into how soft skills are currently assessed…..

First some answers from a question posed on LinkedIn: “ How to accurately assess soft skills & potentials of an employee”

Ignoring some of the arrogant “I’m such an expert interviewer I know in seconds” type responses, the main suggestions are either tricky questioning “How did/would you deal with this situation” or placing people into a situation and observing them.

Quite rightly somebody points out that its hard to see past the ‘interview game face’, although I’d equally suggest that for many people they won’t react naturally or give their best answer when being grilled at interview.

Another interesting point made a couple of times is that ‘past performance is a predictor of future behavior’ - I don’t know how valid this is but its useful to know for people supporting young people that the experiences they help young people have and how they handle them could help give them an advantage in future interviews (and very relevant for OnTheUp).

An article on ZDNet also favours the tricky question approach. Whats interesting about this article is that it suggests delving a bit deeper - “Everyone you interview will claim to be a team player. Make your questions more targeted, and you’ll get a better sense of whether the candidate can back up that claim”

This fits well with what we’ve done to try and have categories of soft skills, it also emphasises the need for people to have had real experiences and to be aware of what they gain from them.

An article on Articlesbase suggests that to identify your soft skills you should:

“Think about which soft skills you use in your current job – what would your manager say were your strengths? These personal traits make you unique.”

Very useful and relevant - but what if this is your first interview? What experiences do you draw and reflect on then? (a good argument for volunteering and getting involved with community projects I think)

Something else I came across is something I vaguely remember from University days called Emotional Intelligence. An article on experience.com refers to Daniel Golemans work that “shows that emotional intelligence (or “EQ”) matters twice as much as IQ or technical skills in job success”, and the article goes on to state:

A study of nearly 500 organizations worldwide found that the people who scored highest on emotional intelligence evaluations rose to the tops of their companies. These star employees were more outgoing and self-confident than employees who received less favorable performance reviews.

In terms of assessment theres also the huge range of personality type tests available, although I share the thoughts about the value of these demonstrated in this post on ere.net

Madhava went over the various key processes within the early version of they system we want to get up & running and started to piece together the database requirements and what links with what. This isn’t something I could have done and something I think Grant and Ross desperately want so that they can start looking into th technical development. We think we need to meet up now with Grant & Ross, so hopefully we can find a suitable time and get their input and then start making things actually happen on the technical front.

Things are progressing elsewhere too. On Monday I met up with Rebecca from Antigone and had a really good chat about OnTheUp and where the idea had come from and who everybody is thats involved etc. She’s today requested a it more detail so we’ll get that over to them asap to help them consider if they want to back the idea.

I also submitted a proposal over on the Innovation Exchange based on OnTheUp – they’re planning a ‘Festival of Ideas’ and today they contacted me to invite us along to discuss the idea as a potential method for supporting excluded young people. Fingers crossed I can sort out childcare to go along and this will be another opportunity to get some feedback from people about our plans.

Theres another relevant event called Shine organised by the UNLTD people. I can’t make it to this one but Ana and Madhava may be able to. I think the rapid amount of input since we met up just a few days ago is incredible – especially when you take into account that this is something everyone is working on on top of their other jobs & commitments.

I’ll send emails round to see who can meet up in the near future – we’re thinking to have two meetings – one about the techie stuff based on Madhavas sketches for setting up the database, and one to talk more about strategy – funding, marketing, firming up the development plan & so on.

The final ‘pitch’ was to a panel of judges for the opportunity to win £2,000 (£1k for the runner-up). We didn’t win (or run-up) and I think its fair to say the judges were distinctly underwhelmed with our effort! Maybe this was because what we’re aiming to achieve is a bit too involved to get across in a 5 minute presentation and that people were hoping to see something that felt more finished - but it was never going to be possible for us to get to that stage in the short space of time available. The two ideas that did ‘win’ were Enabled by Design and Prison Visits (now renamed to Rate My Prison). Both ideas were technically simple and had pretty much got complete sites up & running by the end of the event. I think the Enabled by Design idea has some interesting potential especially if it helps people achieve their own design solutions.

The event was by no means a loss for us - personally I couldn’t have hoped to meet and work with a better group of people and with their input its taken a very complex concept beyond my original slightly bland thoughts and developed them into a very exciting concept (more detail on this another time!). In addition to the team we had input from all sorts of experts dropping in at various times, most of whom gave out some really useful advice and helped bring some clarity to our efforts. Perhaps what we most lacked was somebody to give some advice on how to move a concept forward to becoming a reality - the actual steps any new enterprise needs to take and the sorts of resources and people we’ll need, so this is the next step for us now and one we’ll get on with in the very near future.

For now David Wilcox who kindly joined us on Saturday has posted up a couple of films including a bit from our final pitch that you can see below:

You can read the brief in the attached pdf. The first page gives an overview of the purpose of the Personal Development Report concept, and this is followed by some ‘case studies’ illustrating how different people might use the system. I had quite a few further examples but I think this is enough to give people a picture.

So now its a case of taking along these ideas tomorrow and hoping that there will be a few people interested in developing the idea further. If so I think one of the interesting debates will be about which model to use for sustainability and I think there are several opportunities towards this (but I’ll save the discussion for the weekend!).

So fingers crossed that I’m lucky enough to meet up with some enthusiastic talented people (well I’m sure I will but lets hope they want to work on this idea!). Personally I can see all sorts of potential and there is a strong need for a system like especially if we can make the use of what technology has to offer now. I can also see a system like this paving the way for many similar ones by various award schemes etc.

For the concept to work there are two key factors - usability and credibility. Credibility will take some time but one of the main ways of achieving this will be through use so I’m very much hoping that over the weekend I’m lucky enough to get to work with technical people who are able to make very complex things very simple!

In terms of use I think those that will find the system most useful will be:

• Young People - becoming aware of their skills and feeling confident to talk about them
• Practitioners - measuring impacts of projects and comparing different the outcomes of different programmes and projects
• Employers & Educators - understanding what soft skills are and who has what

So we’ll need to understand what soft skills are too! And then having worked out what they are we then need to find a sensible way of helping people assess them over time (and in a way that they understand and enjoy).

This isn’t something new to me - our kind of work has far more outcomes in the soft skills area than anything else and its always been a frustration that its so difficult (and questionable!) to measure the ‘journey’ that people have gone on. If you ask yourself the question “what kind of a person was I five years ago and what skills have I developed during that time?” - its very difficult to answer other than in terms of hard skills & experiences “I was a Supervisor, now I’m a Manager” or “I completed my Diploma or I did a First Aid Certificate” - but this doesn’t give a real insight into the person you are and what you have to offer.

Anyway back to what those soft skills are. I’ve been building a list and attempting to categorise them. This is based partly on previous work I’ve done but also I’ve been trawling websites looking at what Employers are looking for and also advice given to Human Resources Departments about assessing candidates soft skills (which are very vague!). Reassuringly theres a lot of stuff about the importance of soft skills and one thing I particularly liked was a comment that ‘Employers recruit people on the basis of their hard skills and then sack them on the basis of their soft skills!’ (as part of an argument for better recruitment strategies).

So heres the list so far and please do comment if you suggestions/changes/comments - at this stage all input is useful:

The qualities listed within each category are not just ‘indicators’ they’re skills themselves. I’ve categorised them because part of the design is likely to include a ‘menu’ to allow users to focus on particular categories of skills that they would like to measure/assess.

You can read the details about what this is here

The concept is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and is based on the booklets we use ( details here) at YoMo in our training with young people.

The Personal Record Cards we use in YoMo training aren’t designed to be an assessment of young peoples skills - their purpose is to try and make young people aware of their personal skills and qualities and also to encourage adults working with them to have conversations about these things.

Now in theory the booklets could also be useful as evidence of young peoples learning/development - but to use them this way depends on young people using them honestly (and understanding the various ratings), and the supporting adult keeping good records.

An online version can take the principle of this idea much, much further. First of all the questions can be less obvious about what the skill is they relate to and so make the assessments more genuine. The previous responses can be hidden from view meaning that the actual developments over time should be more accurate (doing it on paper tends to make people feel as though they should give themselves a higher rating each time).

The ‘overtime’ feature means that young people can input ratings at the start and end of their involvement in a project or activity, and also some times in between. What this will do is allow the actual developments made, to be attributed to whatever project or activity they were involved with at the time (providing good evidence for the benefits of programmes and activities).

A brilliant addition to my thinking was inspired by Kate who contributed to the comments on the sicamp site - this is the addition of a ‘weightings’ system that will allow young people not only to rate themselves, but also their peers (and potentially adults to contribute too). A flexible ratings system would mean the ‘administrator’ can set up a ratings system with a bias either towards peer assessment/self assessment/tutor assessment depending on the programme.

Together this is the key functionality as I see it. The final ratings would be averaged out to provide a final report showing the changes in different skills/qualities over the time of a project. The real power of this would be that this final report can be used by young people to help them confidently talk about how they benefited from their involvement in a project and it will support them to explain to potential employers/educators about the ’soft skills’ they have.

There are lots of potential ‘add ons’ - one of the main ones I see is the ability to provide recommendations to young people based on their final reports. These might be potential activities they could consider doing, potential roles they would be effective at or even potential careers they may be interested in.

I think the key to how well this will work will be its usability - its going to be crucial that the system is as clean and simple as possible and that it feels intuitive to use both for participants and administrators.

What happens now is that the people at sicamp put together a team of people to develop the idea and next month I’ll join them to see what can be put together over 48 hours. I’ve never attended an event like this and am very excited - both to see how the idea develops and to see the event itself. What I really like about the idea of the event is that theres a collection of different people coming together to try and create ideas and solutions - this makes a very nice change from the very drab conferences in the youth sector world that so often preach the same old messages, reel out the same old faces and often have negative undertones - lets hope that sooner than later the youth sector can follow the example of people dropping their ‘jobsworth’ attitudes to try and come together to find solutions!