Overview

As a social networking platform, Youth Map has been used in government and civics classes as well as with service learning projects. Youth Map is also an integral tool of the Legislative Aide game. Through engaging with their teacher, peers, and community members, students increase their content area knowledge as well as their civic engagement.

How is this accomplished? Through Youth Map’s integration of three kinds of mapping activities. Concept maps build an initial picture of local community functioning. Social network maps illustrate connections among specific local community, business, government, and nonprofit organizations. Geographic Information Systems map these onto geographic space and allow the addition of demographic, environmental, and other data sets.

Each of the three components are integrated within Youth Map in order to guide students through community investigation, data collection and entry, display and analysis, and Web presentation and output. In addition, teachers are provided with curricular materials that have been developed and researched in order to facilitate class discussion and issue framing, community investigation, and public presentation.

Youth Map was adapted from another ground-breaking tool for social networking, Community Knowledgebase. Community Knowledgebase is a powerful community network visualization and collaboration platform, developed for use in government, newsrooms, and other organizations. It builds a complex network model of local community networks - government, businesses, non-profits - to use in planning and community building.

Some professional skills in these fields are similar to those that youth use when they become civically engaged. They need to:

• discover and thematize problems
• gather and analyze information in many forms, including statistical, geographic, and network data
• find network connections and clusters that often lie below the surface among formal and informal local community groups
• interview citizens and decision makers at various layers of civic life
• formulate working solutions to problems that bridge various points of view
• engage in public deliberation over those solutions
• present alternatives to various groups, using rhetorical strategies that speak to groups with very diverse levels of education, different cultural backgrounds and community rhetorics
• formulate these alternatives in graphical form that can be easily accessed on the world wide web

As a specific adaptation of Community Knowledgebase, Youth Map harnesses the power of Community Knowledgebase as a professional tool for use in schools. Funded by the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (ED-07-CO-0046), Youth Map provides students with a rich network map of their local community that can be used in real service work and also in network-building games.

Youth Map can be used as a stand-alone platform, which will be available for purchase in the near future. It is also used as a base for epistemic computer games, such as Legislative Aide. In addition, current work is under way to make Youth Map fully integrated with popular social networking tools such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn; this will make YouthMap a Web 2.0 social networking platform that can be used to facilitate collaboration between schools and community organizations.