Filed under: Empirical Research
Everybody apologises for not blogging for a while…and I am no exception! Sorry! It’s been a busy month, however I have now promoted my community project around the Greenhill area via a few means:
1. Leaflet drop to 500 houses – I chose the oldest estates and the newest estates, roughly 250 houses each. I did not leaflet-drop estates that had been built in-between as I wanted a stark contrast between oldest and newest. Plus, that would have amounted to 1000 houses, and as the project can only take 10 individuals I felt that was a bit extreme!
2. Posters in public places such as the Library, the health centres and the bigger and newly-refurbished Bonnybridge Community Learning Centre.
3. Information e-mails to the local councillor and community learning and development individuals from Falkirk Council.
I have set an information and discussion evening in the Greenhill Community Resource Centre for Wednesday 25th April from 7-8.30pm. This will be a chance for individuals to come along and learn a bit more about the project, sign up on the day or go away and think about it some more (preferably sign up on the day, once they go I might lose them!). The session is just after the local councillor’s surgery so I hope to get some individuals coming into my session and for there maybe to be a slight public-issues flavour to the project too.
Anyway, I’ll let you know how it goes! I have certainly done everything I can to promote the project, even putting up with being chased by dogs and getting my hand almost bitten when I put a leaflet through a letterbox! I certainly hope it is worth it.
In saying this, if I get little or no interest for the project that will be a really interesting measurement. Why are individuals not interested in participating in their community?
Because the use of ICTs in learning is so vast and difficult to decipher at times I will be providing a structure for participants to work within, but if they want to go outside of that structure then I’d be delighted. So I have split up the project into:
- photography
- local history
- mapping
- storytelling
- audio
The kinds of things they might want to capture are community issues/action, the environment, family history, poetry/stories, precious objects…
And within these headings have provided two different tools to capture what they want to say/take photos of/map, etc. I felt that leaving it totally open would be too overwhelming and very difficult to manage. But in the spirit of participation design I wait to see how the resource comes together, or whether it is many different resources. It may end up as a community portal, a CD, or individual projects captured on the Internet, in CD or on paper form…
