I’m up all too early because I head back to work in-clinic today in order to start a new part of the CONNECT program.
Basically, I’m bringing sex ed and CR into the clinic, giving women in the waiting room an option to come sit in the cozier room with me and other clients to do Q&A and discuss all things sexuality, reproductive health, sexual health, abortion, relationships, the works. Hopefully, I can find a way to do this so that I don’t seem like a clown sent into the old folks home: I need to figure out a way to invite them in where I’m not poking my head into the waiting room, hawking my wares with a “Yo, sex education is in the house!”
All the same, I’m excited. It feels like a first day of school: I even have some new school supplies. This is one of the first things I proposed to diversify the works and help our clients when I took over directing the outreach program. If all goes well, they stand to learn a lot, I stand to learn a lot, and I think it could be a truly marvelous thing. Plus, I have really missed being in the clinic over the last monthish, and I’m really looking forward to giving my co-workers big, bear hugs.
In other news, I am hoping to present a panel with a group of fine, fine women at the 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival and I need your assistance.
Sex Ed Online: How Teens Self Savvy
Creators of popular online teen sexuality content—including the Midwest Teen Sex Show and Scarleteen.com—community educators, scholars and advocates discuss teenagers, sex, and the Internet. Content developers, parents and teens: Bring your questions, fears and hopes. We’ll answer generational quandaries. Apparently, there are prizes for the best questions, but I have no idea what they are.
For the uninitiated, here are the deets about the SXSW Interactive Festival:The SXSW Interactive Festival (http://sxsw.com/interactive) is an industry conference for web developers and digital creatives, held in Austin and now in its 15th year. These days the conference has become so popular that it gets hundreds of proposals, like mine, from people who would like to present at the conference.
To help the SXSW Interactive folks sort out what people what to hear, the conference organizers now use a web-based panel picker. Please visit and use the panel picker and to place a vote on it for my proposal and leave a comment. It’s fine if you don’t currently have plans to attend SXSW Interactive 2009 - anyone at all can vote and leave a comment.
Leaving a comment would be especially helpful, because the SXSW people pay more attention to those comments than anything else.
So, if you’ve got a sec…
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==> Please go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ and, in the search box, enter “Sex Ed” in order to quickly find the listing for my proposal, place your vote and leave a comment. The panel picker will be active until August 29.
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It will take you less than 3 minutes and costs nothing, but you must open an account on the panel picker to post a comment. You are not signing onto any e-mail lists by giving your information, and you do not need to attend the conference nor must you have attended it in the past in order to vote for my panel. While votes to rate the proposal (1-5 stars) are valuable, I’m told that what really counts with the organizers it is having comments written about why someone would be a good speaker and/or why the topic is of interest. So please vote for my idea and comment
And here are more details about the women who’d be presenting with me: Karen Rayne, Karen Kreps, Nikol Hasler and Kris Gowan PhD.
* Nikol Hasler is one-third of a highly entertaining podcast, “The Midwest Teen Sex Show.” A Midwestern mother of three (who isn’t afraid to use her children in the service of sex education) Nikol has no formal training as a sex educator but along with her co-creators Guy Clark and Britney Barber, she has created a great sex education tool, playing with stereotypes not just about sex, but about age, race, class, and orientation in a way that is engaging and opinionated enough to be useful.
* Kris Gowan has a Master’s in Education in Human Development and Psychology and a PhD in Child and Adolescent Development. She is the author of “Sexual Decisions” (Scarecrow Press, 2003) and started www.teensforum.com (but left before it became overly commercialized) Her research has focused on healthy relationships/sexuality in adolescence and lately on positive youth development and the intersection between youth, the Internet and sexual development/sexual identity.
* Karen Rayne earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, which she puts to good use educating parents about how to talk with their teens about sex and romance. She also provides comprehensive sex education to teenagers.
* Karen Kreps will be moderating the panel. Karen has more than two decades developing interactive content (www.netingenuity.com), and has written and published the book, “Intimacies: Secrets of Love, Sex & Romance,” a collection of columns she has written for The Good Life magazine. See http://trueintimacies.com. For six years, Karen hosted monthly public discussions about love, sex and romance.
Some of the questions that will be answered on this panel include: 1. What do teens want to know about sex? 2. How do they use the Internet to find answers? 3. Which social media tools provide the best sexual education? 4. What positive or negative impact can the Web have on teen sexuality? 5. At what ages should online use by children and teens be monitored? 6. Are parents abdicating their roles as sex educators to the Internet? 7. Does online info encourage or discourage sexual experimentation by teens? 8. What role does the Internet play in educating youth about sex? 9. Can the government regulate online sex education and should it? 10. Can online sex info be trusted for accuracy?
I will be most grateful for any support you can offer and hope that you will please use the Panel Picker and vote for our proposal. Thanks!
And with that, I’m off like a good hair day in the rain. Literally, unfortunately. Monsoon season seems to be starting early here this year. Great.
