I’ve been exploring the early beta of Crowd Map and decided to create a UK Parent Bloggers map. I’ve added myself to the map by creating a short introductory post explaining me and this blog.

It would be great to add more parents to the map – wouldn’t it be cool to see where other parent bloggers are? I think it would.

Sign up is easy and once you’ve signed up create a new post on the UK Parent Bloggers map. Add a little information about yourself and of course, a link to your blog.

For security and privacy reasons I’d suggest you only add your city or town, not the exact location, but the choice is yours.

Just click on the little drop down arrow above the landing page update box to view the map – then browse away. The little arrow toggles between updates and the map.

https://crowdmap.com/map/ukparentbloggers/

We spent the weekend visiting family and stayed in a Premier Inn hotel on the Saturday night.

Premier Inn offer a guaranteed good nights sleep policy, meaning that if you don’t have a good nights sleep they will refund the price of your hotel room.

Image from epsos “White Dog Sleeping“ January 23, 2012 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

This is an interesting business promotion. It’s a great promotional strategy but is open to whole host of abuse and gaming.

There are also many factors outside of the hotels control, namely the guests. On the night we stayed around 10 guests rolled in from the pub at around midnight. They proceeded to slam doors, shout and charge around the corridor. The noise woke me and my wife up but thankfully the kids slept through. We mentioned this to the reception on check out and without a quibble or a fuss they refunded us the cost of the hotel. In fact, they refunded the next people checking out and I no doubt suspect they refunded many others too.

I was very pleased to have the room refunded but I wonder how long a promotion like this will remain sustainable. In a hotel you cannot control the guests. The walls between rooms are wafer thin. The bedding and beds will never suit every person. There will always be something wrong. There is no such thing as a universally perfect hotel room.

A policy like the Good Nights Sleep one is counting on more people enjoying a nights sleep than those that do not. I suspect they also make a bigger markup on the other aspects of a stay in the hotel; the breakfast, the restaurant and the wi-fi.

It’s a bold move by Premier Inn and I for one welcome it, but I do wonder how long it will carry on until it becomes unsustainable.

In fact, I can’t think of a single hotel stay in which I’ve had a perfect nights sleep…..can you?

We face many challenges bringing up children in the age of the internet. One of the most pressing challenges is that our kids will be, or already are, creating their own online persona on sites like Facebook and Twitter, sometimes armed with information and facts about the opportunities and risks, sometimes not.

Many will enter in to the process with little understanding, awareness or concern about what their activities online may lead to, or have an impact on, later in life. Many will enter in this online world through their parents; many of whom are already reserving Facebook pages for their kids.

Online reputations are easy to create, time consuming to grow and maintain, but can be dashed and destroyed in minutes. Our persona(s) online can also have direct and dire consequences on our personal lives too (search online for high profile stories of people who have lost jobs through loose social media comments; their are loads of them)

As parents I think we have a strong obligation to explain and outline the potential damage our children could be doing to their future and current self. We should explain the dangers of meeting up with strangers, we should explain about identity theft, phishing attacks and all of the other nasty things that can happen online. We should explain to them about strong passwords and cryptography and daisy chaining of accounts. We should talk about basic security like https and good house keeping rules like firewalls and anti-virus. We should explain about relationships and interpersonal communication.

Or we could let them enjoy themselves and not freak them out.

Finding a balance is what’s needed. And that balance will vary depending on the individual.

We sacrifice a significant amount of our security to live an online persona; so too will our kids. It’s our jobs as parents to help them through this by giving them the tools and information to be safer online, but not to scare them away from the benefits that the internet can bring.

But all of this teaching and education should not lie solely with the parent. Those who can influence and direct our education system will need to step up and get involved too. But teaching web security and web safety in schools will raise an interesting challenge of consistency between school and parents.

As with all mass standardization (i.e. the education system) it often takes a while to get the material and information in a structure that can be mass-produced, mass-distributed and mass-taught. Will the online social channels, society itself and security threats have moved on by the time it is taught…I suspect so.

I think our children’s future will be challenging but exciting and full of opportunity. If we can keep them safe online, encourage them to build real-world relationships and treat their online persona with respect – they will explore ways of using the internet we can only dream of. The challenge is in ensuring we don’t have burned out, stressed and paranoid kids and teens.

Schools will have an increasingly important role to play in our children’s safe future online. Are they up to it?

I hope so.

Whether they are up for it or not though is somewhat irrelevant if we as parents are not.

After all, education begins in the home.

We had a fantastic time over the weekend at Moors Valley Country Park in Dorset on the Gruffalo Trail.

The kids loved the walk through the woods stopping at checkpoints to answer questions about the Gruffalo book.

The things was none of us felt like heading out for the day. With another early morning wake up we were all moping around. As it turned out just getting up and getting out can boost your mood and energy no end. Great day.

I’ve just finished reading a very good book called Get the Job You Want: 10 Secrets to a Successful Job Search.

Loads of interesting stuff to read about but especially succinct and to the point were the 8 characteristics of a successful candidate.

Get the Job You Want: 10 Secrets to a Successful Job Search