Archive for December, 2006
Steve Vosloo headed up to Boston for the day to meet with Gail Breslow, Director of the Intel Computer Clubhouse project. The very first computer clubhouse is located at the Museum of Science in Boston. Today there are 100 clubhouses around the world, each providing a creative and safe after-school learning environment where young people from under-served communities work with adult mentors to explore their own ideas, develop skills, and build confidence in themselves through the use of technology.
December 15th, 2006
Steve Vosloo met with Sarah Kramer of StoryCorps to introduce the Digital Hero Book Project (DHBP) and ask for general advice. StoryCorps is a US-based project to instruct and inspire people to record each others’ stories in sound. Sarah made very useful suggestions, building on what Joe had spoken about. They discussed interview questions for the DHBP participants, logistics around doing the actual audio recordings, e.g. at different schools using a portable kit or at a permanent studio where the school learners come to record for a day.
December 21st, 2006
Steve Vosloo met with Joe Richman of Radio Diaries to introduce the Digital Hero Book Project (DHBP) and ask for general advice. The award-winning Radio Diaries “works with ordinary people to document their own lives for public radio.” For example, Thembi’s AIDS Diary covers a year in the life of a South African teenager who is struggling to live with AIDS.
Joe offered this advice on producing good quality audio stories: 1) it’s a real skill to produce compelling audio, 2) it takes a lot more time to edit than you think, so 3) if you’re working with a group of youth, make their involvement as simple as possible, e.g. get them to interview each other, read from prepared texts or record very short sound bites such as their dog barking.
December 19th, 2006
