Many thanks for considering my website – The Natural World of Child Protection – to be worth reading.
I’ve been doing a bit of browsing and I think that this is the first of its kind in Ireland on child protection.
I will begin, like the Tour de France, with a Prologue; that’s what you are reading now.
The Prologue is (or was, I’m not sure if it still takes place) a short event that sorts out a few racing matters before the cyclists head into three long weeks on the road.
But – I promise – while the content, I hope, will be a little challenging, it will not be an endurance test like Le Tour – well I hope not anyway! You won’t have to have it read in three weeks, and you’re not competing with anyone else for some sort of yellow jersey in supporting families, or protecting vulnerable children.
Now I notice from reading other websites of this nature, or, indeed, blogs, that they focus, mostly, on contemporary matters that are of interest within the subject. Many of them focus on the writer and his/her interests, or perspective on the subject matter; and some of the writing is very good…….
This is slightly different.
It will be an invitation to look at child protection from a different perspective to the mainstream.
There’ll be lots of contemporary (leading edge – as they are sometimes called) matters included; many of them will be framed within a historical perspective. That is, how we got to where we are now and what influences us the most.
Now it might be useful to say here that the website started out as a book – and may yet, some day, be a book – but at present it’s on-line because I invite feedback, commentary, observations, alternative opinions, and reflections.
In fact, that is one of the main reasons why it is on-line and not a book. (Some of you might think it’s kind of half way between a blog and a book).
Anyway, I decided (after breaking through the fear barrier) that I might as well use modern technology as best I can because I feel that it is more interactive, dynamic, and invitational and enables two-way knowledge flow (this term will be used a lot) than a book which is generally static and where knowledge flows from the writer to the reader, and the flow from the reader to the writer can be slow – if at all.
Just to expand on that point a little, there has been a major change in the way we find and then take in information in the Internet age than how we did it in days gone by. For example, I notice that in my Spotify account, when I listen to a particular singer or album, Spotify hints at other albums, bands, singers etc. that I might be interested in – and makes them known to me. It’s the same with Facebook or Youtube.
This is very seductive!
Rather than listen to an album or watch a video that I really enjoy in a focused way and take it in fully, the suggestions lead me to hop from one to another and not really wholly absorb what I hear (or see). So it takes a little bit of discipline to stick to one thing.
It is kind of like that with websites too. There is so much information, (and particularly on older blogs and websites going back years), that it is hard to detect what is useful and relevant.
I suppose that there’s no real harm in being presented with too much information, but I do find it difficult to focus when too much is available to me at once.
I have tried to achieve some balance in this regard and I hope that I have designed it so that you will not feel overloaded.
How this is attempted, and how to navigate the website is described in the next post.