Report on Digital Butetown, Event III, St David's Hall, October 9th, 2009

[David Barrie]

Hi there - Here's a formal short report on the event that took place
in Cardiff last week by Tom Beardshaw and me and posted at
fitzalan.pbworks.com - the wiki set up by students of Fitzalan High
School at the session. Stills are available at the pbworks site but
I'll put a set on Flickr soon, should you want to see some pics.

_________________________________________________________________________________________


At St David's Hall, Cardiff on Friday, 9th October, 19 students from
Fitzalan High School in Grangetown, Cardiff atteded a digital media
workshop to explore the latest web technologies, such as blogs, video
sharing, social networks, RSS and wikis.

In previous work carried out by the Digital Butetown initiative - a
programme led by British Council Wales and supported by igloo
Regeneration - over 1000 students at the school were surveyed and
revealed that their internet use and literacy was high.

The message was that Grangetown and other communities that students at
Fitzalan attend - including Butetown - may be low-income neighborhoods
but amongst young people, 'digital exclusion' - at least accounted for
by the project's research - appeared to be high, at least in terms of
access to technology.

However, in a presentation on the project by Carl Morris of NativeHQ
to students at Fitzalan School in early October, there were many
things that students revealed they wanted to know and this was the
purpose of the event at St David's Hall.

In previous sessions of the Digital Butetown project, including
meetings with members of the community and administrators of the
Butetown.org social media networking group, it was also clear that the
community wanted to use the internet for social ends and also enhance
connections between existing online activities - but that people
needed to know more about the power of the internet, its possible
value to social organization and activism and learn some basic skills
in creating a community website and how to win 'link love'.

The event at St David's Hall served as a pilot 'taster' for a possible
future programme of 'social media surgeries', inspired in part by the
ground-breaking work currently going on in the city of Birmingham and
taking place in Cardiff. This was one strand of work identified as of
possible value in the future at a meeting in July 09 of online social
media experts from Wales and the UK and administrators of
Butetown.org.

The session at St David's Hall was led by Tom Beardshaw of Native HQ.

The impact of the internet on media and communications was explored,
with students learning about the implications of the openness of web
technology for society.

The workshop focused on creating media online, and started with the
creation of a wiki - web pages that lots of different people are able
to edit online. We used pbworks.com, which is a free wiki service that
allows people to create web pages that anyone invited can edit. The
students then shared their ideas for the issues they want to learn.
The web address of the wiki is http://fitzalan.pbworks.com.

High up on the list of student priorities was the desire to create
websites and share videos. So the students were encouraged to
experiment by creating blog websitesusing a number of different
services. One group was also tasked with creating a short video
sharing their thoughts about the internet and put it on the popular
video sharing website, YouTube.

The students created a number of blog sites using the free services
offered by http://tumblr.com, http://blogger.com, http://wordpress.com,
http://posterous.com and http://myspace.com. The web addresses of the
blog sites they created were added to the wiki. The students were then
shown how to embed videos into their sites using YouTube.

The students also held a series of discussions about technologies such
as RSS and Facebook, the types of conversations that different media
technologies enable and the implications of online technologies for
the future of media and open communications.

Thanks to Ellie Rawlings and Cath Bradshaw of Fitzalan High School and
Olga Kelly of the British Council and Mark Hallett/David Roberts of
igloo Regeneration for helping make the event happen.

And special thanks to all of the students who took part - and if you
read this, we'll be in touch!:

Rumi Khan
Dipa Begum
Rahema Begum
Aaron Hitchings
Charlotte Chelnis
Hayley Evans
Saddir Miah
Ashraf Ali
Shamsul Amin
Mustafa Hersi
Umar Sublan
Zara Khan
Hanan Ali
Amalie Senneset
Vijay Landa
Haikal Shafizal
Daniel Cody
Lewis Nicholas
Ryan Cook