When I stepped out of the front door to meet Atari it was a cold, cloudy day, it was also 6am so maybe cold shouldn’t rate such a mention. By the time Atari, Doug & I disembarked from the train at the end of our journey, it wasn’t much warmer, at least as cloudy & now threatening to rain (it did so later in the day). The occasion was the annual Youth Affairs Council of Victoria’s (YACVic) annual conference, which was held in Ballarat in mid-October – yes, more than six weeks ago, but those six weeks have been full of work and other things for me and today is the first truly free day I’ve had, so writing this blog has had to wait, though judging by the weather outside today, little seems to have changed (though now, another week later, with Actnow finally allowing me to upload the blog...).
Why were Atari, Doug & I there? Well, Atari as facilitator-guru and (until recently) lord of Inspire’s Bridging the Digital Divide project (better known as BDD because no-one can say ‘Bridging the Digital Divide’ without their tongue feeling as though it has turned into a fuzz-ball the size of a small apple!) and Doug and I as enthusiastic, passionate underlings were presenting the Bridging the Dig...ok, as my tongue just tried to swallow my teeth, the BDD...to people who work with youth around Victoria (and even interstate). And because that sentence is rather too long and contains too many sub-clauses, I will try to be more liberal with my use of dotty punctuation from this point onwards. We presented a mini-action workshop to about 50people on the first afternoon in a room that was pleasantly large, had pathetic acoustics and was quaint enough to match the rest of the hotel. We commenced with a warm-up game of balloon volleyball that Doug pretty much made up on the spot, which was lots of fun, very silly and made appropriate use of available resources (we all received a balloon in our conference bags). Our presentation was mostly about the research aspect of the project, why Inspire chose to develop the action workshop and action challenge and the problems we encounter when trying to get young people with many other issues, such as depression or drug-abuse, to find the time and place to blog about their actions; I think we skipped over the bit about what happens when the website itself refuses to co-operate. Then, we ran a short workshop that just barely encapsulated the visioning part of an action workshop. We sort of tapped into the themes of the conference (‘here’, ‘now’ and ‘next’) and had our participants ‘vision’ ways in which they could use technology to engage young people better. We provided them with cameras to take photos to help define the dominant themes and guided them through to the point where they all had an individual action statement to take back to work. It was a very noisy workshop and I have to thank Sergeant-major Doug for restoring a semblance of quiet a few times so I could actually be heard when I was trying to explain the next stage of the workshop. A few people thought it was good enough that they enquired about obtaining the resources to run the workshop themselves, so someone at Inspire needs to get going on polishing it up and marketing it to the wide world, and I’m told that there was loads of really good feedback from those who came!
I also saw the other presentations on the first day and the morning presentation on the second day and attended a workshop on the first morning. The presentations were all really intellectually-stimulating and presented a few things in new ways.
The first was about the role of alcohol in young people’s lives; the role of advertising, the way in which young people are beginning to drink at younger ages, the actions of that overly visible minority that is drinking in increasingly more dangerous ways and ways to acknowledge the group of young people who don’t drink, but are never referred to directly (they’re just the rest of the statistics that make the numbers add up to 100%). The short-term and long-term effects of alcohol consumption were balanced by the research on the role the consumption of alcohol plays in the interaction between young people and what constitutes acceptance (at a party, etc). I only drink alcohol rarely and really dislike our society’s acceptance of drinking to excess and expectations that someone will drink alcohol, so I found much of it fascinating, but will leave my opinion out of this, otherwise a blog about our conference presentation might become a rant about social expectations and pressure.
The second presentation centred on young people’s place in society, their current situation and its security (or lack of). It highlighted things such as the number of young people in stable relationships, with children, etc compared to 20 years ago & compared to Canada now as evidence of the relative lack of security in our lives. And as it wasn’t as fascinating to me and I’ve left my conference timetable at home, I can’t remember much else.
The third presentation, on the other hand, was really impressive, so I can remember it (or more of it)! The theme was the role of technology in young people’s lives...yeah, something new for anyone using Actnow and the Inspire team in general...but it was interesting to hear a bit more of the ‘science’ behind how it works. It was most memorable though for a few quite funny responses made by one presenter to audience questions and some of his remarks in general. A very forceful “you know what really gets to me...people just talking about doing something; just go and do it...” or “go and do something that they haven’t even thought of yet, something that they haven’t written any rules for yet...then go and show them, look we got 5000 hits in the first day” (to borrow from Thucydides – an ancient Greek historian, nothing to do with youth affairs, conferences or Ballarat – the words are as I remember them and not always what was actually said, but I have tried to keep the general feel of the speech...umm, comments). It certainly stirred things up and I found it to be all quite amusing, even if not everyone else in the room was ready for such confronting ideas.
Finally, there was also some relaxing time around the conference, though Atari did seem to be doing an inordinate amount of work that wasn’t related to BDD or the conference... All three of us had dinner that night after our presentation. It was in one of Ballarat’s better restaurants (apparently), though there was a note accompanying the menu that said that vegetables had been removed from the mains as they’d been coming back untouched (not a good start, nor did it give me a good impression of Ballaratans...Ballaratians...Ballaratese...or whatever they are). Atari and I both ordered a steak, which was far from overcooked, Atari’s was so rare that it was in danger of dripping blood, and accompanied by béarnaise sauce, which strongly resembled butter with herb mixed through it and even tasted pretty much like butter, they was also some mushroom sauce, which, I’m told, was also rather buttery. This was after the snacks we’d been served that day (the caramel in the caramel slice was so thick with butter that you probably could have substituted it for a brickie’s mortar without him noticing!) and followed by brekkie the next day, which was really quite good, but somehow still buttery. So, Ballarat was deemed a most buttery town. As to the quaintness...it’s everywhere. There’s the architecture, but that’s only the older stuff, but the interior of the more modern buildings seemed to somehow make up for the exterior’s lack of quaintness and outdid that of the older buildings. All the furniture, drapery, windows, decoration, even the crockery in some cases, was quaint, seemingly inspired by trips to the English countryside.
Overall, it was a very successful and enjoyable trip, especially as it gave me a day and a half’s break from my crazy work schedule (it’s sort of calmed down now) and I got a chance to read something for the first time in aeons. There is an awards ceremony in the next couple of weeks for which BDD has been nominated, so I may get a chance to go to that too, which would be a nice end to a year of Inspire volunteering.
