Lewis & Richardson: Service-Learning and Social Media
Filed at 10:00 am on November 17, 2008 • 4 comments
Program officers from Learn and Serve America at the Corporation for National and Community Service discuss their use of social media tools to expand the reach of service-learning. They react to the new study on games and civics released in September.
By Brad Lewis and Scott Richardson
Learn and Serve America is a program of the Corporation for National and Community Service, whose mission is to improve lives, strengthen communities, and foster civic engagement through service and volunteering.
Learn and Serve America has the stated goal to increase volunteer and service-learning opportunities for youth. (Service-learning, simply put, is the intersection between intentional learning objectives and community service.) Our national targets by 2010 are to:
. Engage 5 million college students in service, up from 3.27 million in 2005
. Ensure at least 50 percent of America’s K-12 schools incorporate service-learning into their curricula
If this is to happen on a budget that has never exceeded $43 million per year, it will happen through partnerships with intermediary organizations. Historically, these organizations have been our grantees who subgrant their funds to local programs that annually engage 1.2 to 1.5 million youth in service-learning across the nation.
Lately, however, we have turned to new social media tools to enhance our grant-making and expand the reach of service-learning. Learn and Serve recently announced $2.3 million in grants to six organizations to use social media to engage college students to meet community needs. This follows on the heels of awarding nearly $1 million in enhancement awards to ten youth-serving non-profits to use social media and Web 2.0 tools to foster greater engagement of students ages 5 - 17 in service-learning.
We anticipate these organizations will develop the next generation technologies to support youth service. The Social Media grant program, the first of its kind by a federal agency, capitalizes on two emerging trends: the strong civic attitudes of today’s millennials and college students, and the explosion in use of social networking sites.
According to UCLA’s annual survey of incoming college freshmen, two out of three (66.7 percent) entering freshmen believe it is essential or very important to help others. This is the highest this figure has been in the past 26 years. More than 86 percent of college students spend time on social networking sites each week, and both Facebook and MySpace report having more than 100 million users, most of who are high school and college aged.
Coupling the data on higher education with the recent findings from Kahne’s Pew-funded “Teens, Video Games, and Civics” creates a powerful case for the use of games as a way to grow youth civic engagement. Among the striking findings that bear on the service and service-learning world are that virtually 100% of American youth play games, 76% report helping others while gaming, and 52% report thinking about moral and ethical issues while gaming.
The central question that arises - and that the field will need to answer - is:
What is needed to inspire and reliably motivate youth to move from on-screen, online computer mediated experiences to real-world, active service-learning in communities?
There is currently a great deal that Web 2.0 technologies do and can do to support real-world service-learning. Web 2.0 technologies can support key elements of quality service-learning, potentially enhancing reflection, deepening research on community problems, and enabling students to demonstrate project results to large audiences. Social media can also enrich training for faculty and students and make it easier to assess a project’s impact on students, the community, and educators. Virtual tools are an under-used resource in helping students address community problems in the real world. Yet we need to explore and highlight how we to move young people from IN world to THE world.
The 16 grantees we have supported will undoubtedly come up with innovative approaches to bridging the real and virtual worlds. In addition, we are reaching out and engaging in the conversation with others who care about the connection between social media and civic engagement. We look forward to the next steps to follow on this study and the widening discussion of how to better connect youth as problem solvers in their neighborhoods and increasingly large communities.
Next: Amira Fouad: RezEd.org Releases First Seasonal Report on Ethics and Virtual Worlds > >
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Comments (4)
1: tutormentor at 10:23 am on Tuesday, November 18, 2008
I have led a volunteer-based tutor/mentor program in Chicago for more than 30 years and focus much of my time now on the infrastructure needed to support service in many locations where similar work needs to be done in different places.
I’m also a Commissioner for the Illinois Commission on Volunteerism and Community Service. At the June 2008 National Conference on Volunteerism there was much emphasis on engaging the talent of volunteers, not just the time.
I wrote a series of articles on my blog following this, which you can read if you search for June 08 articles.
These focused on one question: How do we keep people involved in service in the many years after they have been an AmeriCorps volunteer, or a service-learning intern in high school or college.
I feel that an answer is to engage them in a cause that they care about, or is personal to them, and support them with information and social networking, that they can use as they choose, when ever, or where ever, they are, for the rest of their lives.
If you do a Google search for AIDS, Hunger, Poverty, Tutor/Mentor, you can find thousands of pages of information. Few people will scroll through this on a regular basis to support their volunteer service.
However, if you go to a place like the Boston Innovation Hub, you can find a pie chart showing issues important to Boston. Click on any slice of the pie and you can dig deeper to understand the issue, and to find organizations offering opportunities to be involved with time, talent and/or dollars.
Thus, the potential of the digital age is to create libraries of information that support volunteer service in specific causes, where the growing tools of social networking can help the people who get involve share what they are learning, learn from others, build relationships, and be recognized.
Such a system of support will help grow involvement into ownership and then into leadership the longer it keeps people involved.
In our own tutor/mentor program that started at Montgomery Ward in1965 we have people still connected to each other who first met more than 35 years ago. Some are donors. Some serve on boards. A few are leaders of non profits or education organizations. More and more are re-connecting to each other on Linked in and Facebook and our own organizational web sites.
If national service and service learning can duplicate this long-term involvement in thousands of locations, it can dramatically change the quality and impact of service throughout the country and the world.
2: Heather C from New Organizing Institute at 1:10 pm on Tuesday, November 18, 2008
At the New Organizing Institute, we have been training nonprofits on using social media in their work for the past few years. We have recently been expanding our work with campuses upon realizing that the very people who are leading the way in innovating in the social media space (young people) aren’t necessarily translating that into the civic engagement realm. I’m hopeful that we (and others) will continue to make headway in helping young people translate their social media prowess into social justice work. And we’re thrilled that the Corporation is supporting that work—we look forward to seeing the results across all the grantees!
3: Brad Lewis from Learn and Serve America at 5:43 pm on Tuesday, November 18, 2008
“Tutor” and Heather,
Thank you for your comments, we’d be happy to discuss further, if you’d like.
Brad Lewis
Program Officer
Learn and Serve
(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
4: sgrove at 6:36 pm on Friday, November 21, 2008
I’m glad to see exploration into digital infrastructure - it seems to me that investing in tools and technology to make service learning easier and more efficient should bring in a fairly large return.
Congratulations on moving into this new arena, I’m sure it wasn’t easy pinning down reasonable ideas in a still-emerging area.
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