With partners at Glasgow University and Northumbria University, we’ve been awarded £40,000 in funding from Not-Equal for a new project.
The project has the working title “Hastag Poundsign” until we can come up with something better.
Intervention Concept
A problem is that a lot of people, particularly young people, are terrible at working out how to judge the value of information online. We are particularly interested in the case of young people who:
- are likely to make significant errors with trust online
- Don’t know that they are
- Don’t trust us (or school, or any authority figure) to tell/show them how to make better evaluations of people in this space.
Okay, so how do we reach the people who don’t trust us, so that we can explain to them that they are trusting the wrong people and how they should trust other people in future?
Let’s turn this on it’s head: who do they trust?
- friends
- famous people
Actually it turns out that 70% of young people trust YouTube personalities more than traditional celebrities and 40% think their favourite influencer understands them better than their friends.
So they trust influencers. And what makes this really interesting is that (a lot of) influencers are quite willing and able to help for afordable fees. So hiring some influencers who the students would be more likely to trust (not recognise, but trust based on the platform and the metrics) to run a virtual workshop is a surprisingly economical approach.
Project Plan
The intervention will use co-creation techniques to produce lesson plans for four or five 40 minute sessions, to be used in school’s personal development sessions. A cohort of students (the ‘End Users’) will work through these lessons and we will pre and post test them to find out if there are any changes.
The lesson plans will be developed by other students (the ‘Creators’) in co-creation sessions. These co-creation sessions will include 6-11 students each, and each will focus on a different topic around our target material. Our guess of thumb is that one hour of co-creation might produce a 15 minute or so exercise for the wider cohort.
Timelines
We’re intending to start co-creation sessions by the end of Febuary (we need to if we are going to get the results evaluated by the end of the school year), so we’re currently busy getting all our ducks in a row, recruting, doing lots of paperwork, and generally being on top of everything.