Community Engagement

This week, two of the Creative Community projects give us their perspective on engaging learners with new strategies and e-learning tools: Georgina Nou from Deadly Mob, and Tony Di Santo from the Townsville Small Business Network will be presenting tomorrow morning, at the Framework September Online Event “Tapping into Resources for e-Learning“. Other projects will join in the threaded discussion too.

We’re also looking forward to Edayz in Adelaide, where the two South Australian groups will join together to showcase examples from Milang and the Murraylands.
Plus, our Victorian teams from this year will be presenting at ConVerge, the Victorian conference for the Framework. Details coming up soon.

Last week Mary and Josie had the great privilege of attending the launch of the online meeting place of the Gap Youth Centre Project in Alice Springs. The centre has created a vibrant online meeting place for their students to continue their learning journey where ever they are … in town, out bush or online at either!

The launch was ambitious, as Georgina and Linda opted to do it both online and in the internet cafe. Many guests in the cafe also logged in to Elluminate and could join online guests from Brisbane, America and all over the country.

Guests included representatives from DEET,DEST and the Desert Kowledge Centre, and well as many teachers, students and interested community groups.

They also launched their promotional video made using images and music of young people at the centre.

Well done to everyone - we look forward to seeing the development of the online meeting place.

Just the other week, in mid-July, leaders from the e-learning Creative Communities projects gathered in Melbourne for two days of intensive professional development, celebration, collaborative problem-sharing, and “high performance teamwork”.

Creativity was the theme, for the two days - to explore the creative side of our projects. Josie Rose set the scene, emphasising the extraordinary processes that can emerge when people pool their talents and draw expertise from many different fields, (aka the “Medici Effect”).

Delia Bradshaw invited each project to tell the story of their progress so far by illustrating or celebrating a “significant moment”. Community leaders showed their flair for imagination and improvisation, by drawing on theatre as well as television genres. Stay tuned for audio excerpts from these presentations.

Speakers during the sessions included Jim Cavaye, who led people to explore how learning is crucial to the vitality of communities everywhere.

People also learned about

• the usefulness of the Framework media department (Hayley Beck),
• a huge benchmarking project (which has shown the uptake of e-learning rise significantly in the last five years, Ian Phillips),
• the inclusive e-learning projects (Mary Schooneveldt), and
• the role of EducationAU (Kim Edgar), as well as
• “High Performance Teamwork” (Marie Jasinski).

Huge thanks to all the community leaders, presenters, and others who attended, for your energy, warmth, inspiration and generosity.

In Murray Bridge, on Monday the 3rd July, Stacey and Shane led their community through an exciting and innovative project launch, on the “Captain Proud” steamboat, paddling along the Murray River. Members of the community joined our leaders on the boat, to share their views.

On top of that, this launch was ambitious: people from local community centres were invited to attend via the internet. Live conferencing software (known as Elluminate), enabled others, faraway from the boat, to give their opinions on how e-learning could make a positive impact with the people in their centres.

The day coincided with the local launch of NAIDOC Week, so Shane was run off his feet, orchestrating multiple occasions.

Another highlight for Josie and Michael was seeing Shirley and Stuart, from Milang Old School House (MOSH) give their new and improved presentation to a packed room on the second day.

Their audience was definitely impressed with the combination of community involvement, hand-out CD-rom, and open-source-driven communicative web sites (at byte-on.org.au).

At the start of May, Josie and Michael went across to Adelaide, to join in the “Connecting Up” conference, from the organisation known as CISA (Community Information Strategies Australia Inc.) There was genuine interest from the audience, in the range of projects from 2005, and the Barkly Arts project movie was a great way to grab people’s attention. Fortunately the sound in the room was good enough to hear the fly buzzing at the start of the movie, and people were able to enjoy the terrific Tableland Drifters’ backing music (find out more about the Tableland Drifters from the Barkly Arts project web site; you can even download some of their music).

One other conference highlight was the keynote by Joe Baker, who spoke of several occasions where technology has been useful for community initiatives around the world. For example, the food voucher scheme in the US, where people had to stand in line for hours, until a passer-by came up with a database scheme, and later extended this to include barcode swipes and internet access too. You can find his keynote on the conference website, or via this direct link (it’s an mp3 file, 13.5mb).

The selection committee put their heads together, selected six exciting new projects from around Australia, and the journey begins. Mid-April saw people converge upon Melbourne, new project people, and also the community leaders from last year.

An energetic couple of days, filled with thinking, brainstorming, planning and getting to know each other. We were very lucky to have the incomparable Delia Bradshaw share her ideas around community, pedagogy and technology (you can hear this presentation, and view the slides here); as well as the inimitable Clint Smith taking us through the “Designing e-learning” web site.

Photos you may find on our flickr account here. (Especially worthwhile are the images of scarves draped over the machines.) Audio from the introductions is available on our ‘odeo’ podcast.