Scoutmaster Podcast 94

And now it's the old Scoutmaster. All right, So you know you listen to the podcast. You hear the joke at the beginning of the podcast. You might not repeat it because, frankly, some of them are pretty bad. This isn't really a joke, but it's funny. I heard a YouTube video of our chief scout executive, Bob Mazooka, giving a speech And one of the things he said was meetings don't have to be eternal to be immortal.

I mean, we'd love to have meetings. We have committee meetings, We have all kinds of meetings.

Right? Meetings don't have to be eternal to be immortal.

Hey, you'll have a good chance of using that somewhere this week, right? Hey, this podcast number 94..

Welcome back to the Scoutmaster podcast. This is Clarke Green.

So, uh, looking into the mailbag, Bill Daniel got in touch with us this week. He said thanks for your tremendous effort and output. I'm a new listener via iTunes on my iPhone. ITunes seems to have a random selection of your podcasts. I'd like to get them all onto my iPhone.

Can you give a newbie some technical help? And then I also heard from Jeff Berg. He says I've been listening to all your podcasts from the very beginning. I appreciate all the great ideas and thought provoking conversations you have.

When I got to podcast number 11, though it was an incomplete session, Is there any chance it could be reposted or emailed so that I can listen to the rest of the story? I've got like a very basic familiarity with the way that iTunes works.

Um, what I'm working on right now is a some way of archiving the podcast on the website so that they can easily be downloaded to your mobile device or to- uh, you know- your computer If you want to listen to them later. I know there's a lot of you out there who are kind of working through the backlog. Um, this is podcast 94.

So you got a lot of catching up to do. If you're doing that, If you do come across something like Jeff dead with podcast number 11, let me know and I'll get it fixed.

And I think we got number 11 fixed now too. Rick Pushey has also wrote that he is the publisher of his local council newsletter and that's the Las Padres Council in Santa Barbara, California, and they feature a monthly website in the newsletter And they did a scoutmastercgcom this month with the podcast and everything.

So thank you very much, Rick, for doing that And, um, hey, everybody out there in Las Padres Council in Santa Barbara. Uh, drop me a line. Let me know that you heard me. Uh, Steve Boone wrote in. He said last week he talked about scoutmaster projects and scouts using them to fulfill their leadership requirements for star in life. That was back in podcast number 93..

I'm a fairly new scoutmaster in Winston Salem, North Carolina. I'm trying to start a new position within our troop called the Game Master. The scout would be responsible for coming to our regular meetings 15 minutes early and having a game prepared for any scouts who want to come early and play. It seems similar to an instructor position, but he'd be instructing games instead of like scout skills. Uh, and you always need to have a game ready.

Steve, that's a pretty interesting idea: Work with the scouts at their level, find out what they need, what they want, and then help them discover a way to make that happen. If it, if it's coming up with something called a Game Master, Hey, sounds great to me. Um, you won't get a patch for it, but, uh, it sounds like a good scoutmaster assigned leadership project. Over on the blog this week. Uh, we talked about several things. We've uh had a series about social media and scouting and we're going to expand on that a little bit in uh Scoutmastership in seven minutes or less.

And we've also got a survey going about Weebel as transitions- very short survey. Go to scoutmastercgcom and look for the Weebel as transition survey. Just a few questions about how you manage Weebel as transition, uh, what you think uh needs to be fixed in your particular situation. We're getting ready to record our next scoutmaster panel discussion in a week or so. Uh send your question to scoutmastercg at Verizonnet by email and we might choose you to be part of the recording session and have uh be able to ask your question live and uh get some responses, have a little dialogue with the, with the scoutmaster panel.

So the rest of this show, let's see. We are going to talk about social media and scouting. We're going to uh play a email question from the archives and this was back in scoutmaster podcast number four.

So uh, it was a while back and the recording quality is not what it is today, but I think it's good enough to listen to and that should be enough for this podcast.

So let's get started. Shall we scoutmastership in seven minutes or less. Our scouts are what are called digital natives Now. In other words, they don't know a world without computers. In the internet, You and I are likely to be, uh, what's called digital immigrants.

We were raised and educated in an era before digital technology or during its emergence, And, um, if you want to learn more about that, I recommend an article that uh writer and educator, Mark Penske, wrote in uh back about 10 years ago, And I will have a link to the PDF version of that article on the uh post that contains this podcast. All these wonderful technologies have definitely altered our lives and we can sing their praises or we can complain about them, But I want to talk about social media for a moment. Social media is a word that's banner about, and I'm going to talk about social media tools. My definition of social media tools may be a little bit different from the general definition out there, because I include everything that we use to interact on the web. I basically have it broken down into three different categories. There's these general publication outlets.

I define that as anything where you create the content, you put it online and you wait for people to read it. Uh, websites are the most familiar tool for publishing information. Uh, they're kind of static and it's content that does not necessarily change very often Blogs like scoutmastercgcom blog is web and log together and that publishes content on an ongoing basis or as posts or individual articles.

Podcasts, like the one you're listening to right now, can be video or audio, but these are general publication tools that basically put stuff out there and people can respond and interact with them in different ways. There are social networks, too. Social networks are a whole other class of a web application, like Facebook and Google Plus and MySpace and all of those Uh, and they allow a really broad general interaction. They're more of a conversational type of thing. These tools are more of a group meeting place, Um.

And then there are personal networks and these are generally used for one-on-one exchanges of information without any real outside monitoring, and you know the most familiar personal network is email. Uh, texting is also one of these personal networks.

So, basically, you know, that's kind of my- probably imperfect- way of breaking this down- There are the general publishing tools like websites, the social networks like Facebook, and then the personal networks that are more of a closed loop, like email and texting and things like that. One of the more remarkable things about all this social, all these social media tools, is that they change seemingly from day to day. Sometimes it seems like from hour to hour, Uh, the rules change, The way that they work changes, uh, the way that you can interconnect to them And, uh, cross publish things changes. It's. It's at once an amazing and potentially frustrating type of thing.

If we go back 10 or 15 years, to when the internet was just emerging and it became a household thing and everybody started using it, what happened with scouting? Well, everybody wanted to have a website for their particular corner of the scouting world.

If you had a troop or a pack, you know, if you were part of an order of the air lodge or council or a district, hey, we need to have a website. Well, why do we need to have a website?

Well, everybody has a website. I mean, we have to have a website, right, And you know, a lot of time and effort went into putting websites together.

Uh, there were wonderful people who put resources online- you know different program resources and things like that- and established those types of websites, And I think we found it all very useful. There are some very basic underlying concepts to all this that you probably know, but it's something that I think we need to constantly remind ourselves of and it's something we need to remind our scouts about That is, whenever we are working online with any of these social media tools, we cannot assume privacy. If it's typed into a computer, set into a microphone, set into a cell phone, if it's texted, if it's a picture, if it's a movie, it's traceable and public And it will never, ever go away.

I think that has to be understood. Once we put anything into digital form, it is, for all intents and purposes, permanent, And we have to consider that whenever we're using one of these social media tools. There's also some unique challenges to using social media stemming from issues of youth protection. The BSA has an excellent set of principles for using social media and outline of how to use it safely and how to apply youth protection principles to it, And I'll have a link to that in the post that contains this podcast. But it's really pretty simple, because the central concept of our youth protection policy is that there is no one-on-one contact between youth and adults.

It's always monitored, And so we need to extend that into the virtual world. When we are emailing scouts or when we are working with them online through a social media outlet, It cannot be an exclusively one-on- one communication. It needs to be monitored. And that's very, very simple to do. You just have to include a third person in any conversation you're having with a youth member, And that's pretty simple. The way that I handle it with email: if I'm having an email conversation with a scout, I carbon copy my troop committee chair And if he's having a conversation with a scout, he carbon copies me.

It's an understanding. Sometimes we get messages and you know they're not for us to act on, they're just for us to monitor.

Finally, I think there's one thing that the use of these social media tools is not going to change: The concept of closing the communication loop. One of our biggest challenges as scout leaders still remains communicating with scouts and their families and with scouts being able to communicate back and forth with each other. And if you don't close that loop, if there's not some kind of reply in that communication, then it's no fair.

It's no fair to put something on a website and you know say, OK, I've tagged you with the information. You should have read the website.

You know, shame on you, and then that's not going to work. It's no fair to put something in an email and just send it out to everybody and say, well, hey, I put it in an email tagged you with the information you're it now. That's no fair, And the reason it's no fair is because these are very imperfect systems. Maybe 80% of your scouts and their families will read the email or look on the website, and that would be a really high percentage. But there's, but there's always going to be, people who do not read an email, They don't look on the website and they get left out.

So the gold standard is closing the loop of communication And you know, the only way you can do that is communicating with people one on one, And the standard for communication these days, if we're not standing toe to toe and talking to people is is using the telephone. You know, even leaving a phone message, that's not closing the loop. The loop has not been closed.

So the onus is still on us to make sure we close the loop of communication and we talk to people. Social media cannot do that. A website cannot do that. Emails cannot really do that.

So I can tell you what the evolution of using these tools has been for our troop. You know we thought that, first of all, having a website was a really cool idea and we spent a lot of time designing it and putting it up. And it was. It had all kinds of bells and whistles on it and nobody paid any attention to it whatsoever.

You know, I mean five of us thought it was really cool but it wasn't very useful. We've tried email lists and groups and calendars online and things like that And there's no magic bullet. All these things are only supplementary to a good, solid, closed loop communication system And that's always going to be picking up the telephone. There's really no other way to make it happen.

So we have now a hosted website and it sends out a weekly email newsletter and that seems to work pretty well. I think probably about 75 to 80 percent of our families actually read that newsletter. But the gold standard still personal telephone call patrol leaders call every week and they make sure they close the loop of communication and let scouts know what's going on. And we net and that's the way that families get to know what's going on.

So those are my thoughts about social media. There is a series of four articles online at scoutmastercgcom if you'd like to expand on this, And I'd love to hear your thoughts and your impressions and how you use social media tools in your association with scouting. Cliff Jacobson and you're listening to the Scoutmaster podcast with Clarke Green

Email, that is folks. And here's an answer to one of your emails From Mark Bowie, scoutmaster of troop five three, one in Orange, California. He says: hello, Clark, I enjoy your thoughtful blogs and podcasts.

Well, thank you, Mark, and I'm interested to learn about your views on Meribaj days. Now, what I'm understanding is Meribaj day is kind of like a Meribaj college or any kind of an event where multiple Meribajs are offered with counselors attached. I know our local museum near us offers two or three Meribajs a couple three days a year and Scouts can come in and as a group they can work their way through the Meribaj.

He says your podcast item about Ben Powell's view on badge hunters versus badge earners was timely And we have recently been having a debate in our troop about Meribaj days. One side says that the primary purpose is to raise money for the hosting troop And I don't really know how that works, but I'll accept the fact that somewhere out there our troop is hosting a Meribaj day and they might be doing it as a fundraiser and not to ensure quality instruction for the boys and that they're only a short kind of Meribaj completion. Others say that in today's business schedule is too hard to find Meribaj counselor and schedule meetings with them to review progress, And that Meribaj days are the only practical way, outside of summer camp, to complete.

Meribaj is what do you think? Well, I'm going to stand directly in the middle Because I agree. I agree with both sides to a certain extent.

So let me explain myself. First of all, Meribaj is.

There's a very simple system and there's a very simple rules about who gets involved. Where the boy brings you a blank blue card, Mr Scoutmaster, He says: I am going to do scouting, you know, camping Meribaj, and I would ask who is your counselor?

And I would say: is he a certified counselor? And if I needed to check up on that, I would use what resources I needed to make sure that this was a registered Meribaj counselor and I would possibly review with the boy the youth protection specifications around. Meribaj is that there are no one on one meetings with adults.

In other words, bring a scout with you or there needs to be a second adult present And then I would pat him on his head and send him on his happy way. Several days, weeks, months later, he will bring me a completed blue card I will tell him to take it to the advancement chairman or the troops scribe, and then the troops scribe or the advancement chairman will hand me the blue card to sign at one point And I will hand the scout a Meribaj at our earliest convenience and shake his hand and congratulate him for a job well done.

Now, nowhere in there, nowhere in that very simple process, does the Scoutmaster interfere with who the counselor is, if it's a registered Meribaj counselor, the rigor of the study of the Meribaj or the quality of the instruction of the Meribaj or the quality of work that a scout does with the Meribaj. I see only blue cards. I see happy scouts. I hand out Meribaj's.

If for some reason, I was to become concerned about the instruction of a given Meribaj, or I was to become concerned that, you know, somebody was just giving Meribaj's away, which is a concern that's often expressed, but in 25 years I have never, ever seen anybody giving Meribaj's away- Then I would take that concern to the people who are certifying Meribaj counselors, because it is not the scouts fault if the Meribaj counselor is not doing his job. It's the Meribaj counselor's fault.

Who certifies Meribaj counselors? Well, your council advancement committee does, and your district advancement committee and that would be the person I would take the concerns to. If you really think, if people are really thinking that these Meribaj days, as you call them, are just shortcuts, and take it to the next level and ask what kind of quality control is being done for the counselors that are operating there and things like that. Otherwise, keep your nose out and let the scouts go and do and achieve A Meribaj is not a certificate of completion of a course of rigorous study. I got to tell you, a scout with life-saving Meribaj is not a qualified lifesaver, nor is a scout with first aid Meribaj and EMT. Those kind of certifications require far more rigorous study.

First aid Meribaj and life-saving Meribaj are valuable and they're a valuable set of skills, But we would never depend on them as a sole indication of somebody's skill level, maturity and their ability to handle a situation that a lifeguard or an EMT would handle, would we? Now I am going to differ with the others that say in today's busy schedules it's too hard to find a Meribaj counselor in schedule meetings and things like that.

Well, we have things like email. I have done significant parts of Meribaj's that I counsel with email. My inner drill sergeant would like to see more rigor in study and more rigor in the instruction of Meribaj's. But understanding what Meribaj's represent, what they're supposed to represent and how scouts will have learned a little something about a given field of study or endeavor. I'm quite satisfied with the way that the system works.

I will have a little internal dialogue with the internal drill sergeant and I will say: you know, it's not that big a deal. Baden Powell said something about the jollity of scouting.

Jollity is not a word that you hear a whole lot, but you know Baden Powell was born in 1857, so let's cut him a break. That indicates to me a certain amount of lightness and fun and intensity and excitement surrounding the work of scouting. I wouldn't be too upset about the Meribaj days. I kind of agree. I'm a little suspicious of the whole thing.

I'm suspicious of, you know, 30 guys and a 16-year-old counselor trying to complete swimming Meribaj at camp. Just how rigorous and complete can the instruction be in that kind of a situation?

But it's been going on for years and you know I'm satisfied that the guys have gotten out of it what they need to get out of it. These are not my badges to protect. They're not my standards to protect. I have yet to embroider hand, embroider a Meribaj and hand it out at a court of honor.

We go and buy them from the Boy Scouts of America who own the Meribaj and who own the program, And I will assent to the way that they're going to administer it, even though, even though the inter-drill sergeant, may have some difficulties with it. So I hope that helps you, Mark, And if you need more clarification on that, do drop me a line.