This photograph is a series of “visual prompts” to get participants thinking about what matters to them. I created a frieze of images involving a railway, garden gnome, alcohol bottle, swings, graffiti….to help those who couldn’t really think of a topic.

This photograph is more involved and is a “Community ICTs Journey”. It starts with a task of thinking about an object you care about and writing about it, on to creating a small blog, writing a story on a word processor, through to wikis, community newsletters and finally a community portal. Anything can be achieved within this project so it is to show what can be done and how it might look.

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…

I haven’t posted for a wee while; I have been out and about doing interviews, going to workshops, writing more chapters……..so there is more to follow! In the meantime, here’s a photograph I took of the Bonnybridge sign, which is a great example of the changes it is going through as a town – check out all those housebuilder signs stuck underneath!  This is also the start of Greenhill, turn right at that sign and you are in it.

There are more photos on flickr to follow, of the Seabegs Wood and the Antonine (Roman) Wall, as soon as I have uploaded and labelled them!

I suppose the Standards are a set of groundrules, a common foundation for encouraging consistency of engagement; but you also need to recognise which Standards are relevant to your community activity and apply them in practice.

You can view the Standards (Feb 2006) by going to:

National Standards for Community Engagement

You can also view a consultation document (Dec. 2006) on how the Standards have been working in practice by clicking on:

Evaluation of the Effective Engagement of Communities in Regeneration

Interesting “soundbytes” within such a short blog space (without you falling asleep), appropriate to my own work, are:

1. Good places make money.

2. Good places look after themselves.

3. Are housing companies building ‘places’?

4. A place can’t survive if it’s fragile; a place needs to support its inhabitants personally.

5. Placemaking is a mature process of knowledge-building; bring inhabitants up to the required knowledge set in order for them to participate fully.

6. Engagement occurs across different levels: doorstep, neighbourhood, town, council, region.

7. 84% of all planning applications are submitted by people with no training in design!

8. You are designing a place with a potential identity, an adaptable place.

9. How we move around the space we inhabit is important.

10. Ask, ask, ask: use social surveys with inhabitants. If you don’t involve inhabitants in decisions about their place then there is really no point.

Useful Further Reading

Carrying out a placecheck (in order to encourage community participation in their area), you can go to www.placecheck.info for a full set of potential questions.

Ebenezer Howard’s Three Magnets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebenezer_Howard (Town, Country or Town-Country) and population movement.

Le Corbusier’s ideas of urban planning: La Ville Radieuse, labelled as socially destructive. http://www.time.com/time/time100/artists/profile/lecorbusier.html – interesting article.

It brought up the feeling of powerlessness we as community members have; where are these decisions made and why am I not being informed of these changes to the end of my street, when it blatantly affects me? I will find out.

This is relevant to my MSc project, I assure you (!), in terms of how we grab control back from these mysterious council planning departments who seem to grant permission to alter our communities; thus altering our future. I’ll capture how it changes over time and keep uploading the photos to flickr.

If you were a council, what would you do, encourage a greenspace with a communal garden or build even more expensive homes that will bring in council tax? Where’s the environmental responsibility of housebuilders here? We got a playpark (woo hoo) and a kickpitch is supposed to be going in near this site I mentioned above. Let’s bet on the fact that the houses will be up way before the kickpitch; a bigger priority apparently.

Oh can you tell how angry I am.

Anyway, I uploaded my “photography” to my flickr page. You can view them as a slide show, and also read a bit of information on each. Click on http://www.flickr.com/photos/gilliancowell/ and click on Greenhill Photos: Batch I. I also mapped them on flickr’s geomap facility so you can see exactly where they were taken.  Plus, there’s a quicklink to my photos on the left of this blog.

They show an area very much in transition, a community taking shape. I can’t say I’m delighted with the vast greenbelt that has been systematically destroyed to make way for homes that are getting more and more expensive. However, research has shown that diverse communities are the ones more likely to survive. But I’m saddened by the dumping and the litter lying around. It got me to thinking who is responsible for the area we live in? Us, that’s who. I love living in Greenhill and I’m interested to know where it’s going. What kind of community we will make it (because we’re responsible for doing just that); after all, it’s growing and changing before our very eyes.

Hill, R.J. (2004), ‘Fugitive and codified knowledge: implications for communities struggling to control the meaning of local environmental hazards’, International Journal of Lifelong Education, 23 (3) : 221-242.

Carleheden, M. (2006), ‘Towards democratic foundations: a Habermasian perspective on the politics of education’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 38 (5): 521-543.

Farooq, U., Ganoe, C.H., Xiao, L., Merkel, C.B., Rosson, M.B. and Carroll, J.M. (2007), ‘Supporting community-based learning: case study of a geographical community organization designing its website’, Behaviour & Information Technology, 26 (1): 5-21.

Webb, S. (2006), ‘Can ICT reduce social exclusion? The case of an adults’ English language learning programme’, British Educational Research Journal, 32 (3): 481-507.

Hammond, K. (2006), ‘Alasdair MacIntyre’s idea of an educated public and ‘informal’ adult education in Scotland’, Journal of Adult and Continuing Education, 12 (1): 107-115.

This gives me an idea for where I’m going with my reading. Well it’s apparent to me anyway, I’m looking at past studies where the communities themselves have articulated their learning needs and how that has worked out. I’m not convinced by the social exclusion argument still; like in some way there’s an accepted middle where apparently “normal” and “functioning” groups of people are living happy lives. And those of us on the margins are perceived to be excluded. Not sure, but hey, I’m open for a debate about that. My project isn’t concerned with the economic side of learning (i.e. to get a job) but rather being aware of yourself, your surroundings, engaging more with your community and monitoring the results of that.

by Julian Germain. It’s a lovely photography book, a portrait of an elderly gentleman told through original photographs. It’s very emotional to read and captures his life in so many emotive visuals. For those of us with non-digital cameras and who still like to stick our photographs into those psychedelic cloth-bound books with the static clear covers on the photos, this book is very welcome!

The point of this post (incase it’s not clear!) is that we are so focused on technology that often printed representations of our lives are so much more precious, often have a bigger impact and can be instantly passed around to friends and relatives when you are together; quicker than a web page or photograph blog. OK so it’s easy to turn on your laptop and pass that around but you get my meaning……..

There is an increasing emphasis in policy on using technologies to create meaningful learning projects; we need to be careful that we don’t exclude. If we’re obsessed with inclusive and engaging learning experiences then we need to respect the limitations and boundaries of technologies when used in a community setting. My project aims to test to what extent technologies are chosen over traditional means in capturing Greenhill as a physical space in which people live and engage with each other.

C.Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination (1959!) tells us we should keep a diary of our lives, thoughts, things that occur to us. We can look outward and interpret what we experience and how we feel. Your views of the world are specific only to you after all! Isn’t it interesting that the Internet has provided us with the capacity to create web versions of Mills’ ideas?  However, paper versions are more than valid, particularly for those of us without regular access to technology.  It’s about whatever you are comfortable with using, that way you are more likely to stick with it.

Some community projects do this in their own way too, with the e-postcard idea; individuals create electronic postcard representations of their area and send to communities in a different part of the world. It’s a really quick and creative way to share information about where you live and who you are. www.sonicpostcards.org is a cool example of this.