In Ian Hislop's latest series on the BBC, "Age of the Do-Gooders" you can see the origins of the sense of morality that underlies our conception of volunteering today. He starts off with the question that he posits was the driver of this new moral sense in Victorian Britain: "What can we do?" Isn't this just the question that lies behind today's volunteering? Hislop starts off looking at the examples of this...

The web’s development has had an enormous and growing influence on the way information, advice and guidance (IAG) services are delivered. Recently, I've been doing some thinking about how IAG services for young people have developed on the web. The definition of what constitutes IAG precisely is a controversial topic- and not something I want to dive into very deeply with this post. In terms of scope I'm a...

This post started as I got sucked into using Google Labs' Ngram Viewer- a tool that offers visual representations of the usage of words in books published going back 500 years ago. Let's put the statistical complexities to one side for a moment, what makes this fascinating is that it offers us a kind of visualisation where words become proxies for all sorts of concepts and actions in our culture/s. For example, ...