McN2 Digital Heritage Consultants

PechaKucha: Volume 7

McN2 — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:48:55 +0000

Niall will be presenting on digital heritage and the Ulwazi Programme at this week’s PechaKucha event. More details below:

Date: Thursday 23^rd of February 2012

Time: 7:00 for 7:30pm

Venue: Factory Café (Colombo Coffee), 369 Magwaza Maphalala St. (Gale Street)

Donation: R15

Speakers Include:

Derek Thomas • Niall McNulty • Leon Conradie • Durban School of Comedy (Glenn Bo & Dusty Rich) • Durban Is Yours (Russell Grant & Bob Perfect) • Matt Kay • Iain “ Ewok ” Robertson • Blue Wilderness (Mark Addison & Ella Addison) • Archie Msomi & Cebo Zulu • Grant Prestedge • Quarter Bunny (Luke Comins & Chris Shappe)

As well as: 3 International Presentations

The ‘IPod’ For Development (and possibly heritage)

McN2 — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:49:56 +0000

Liberian Women Listening To Lifeplayer

My mom actually sent me this link and it is such an excellent idea that I thought I should share it.

Created to deliver on-demand programming that classrooms or communities can replay continually, the Lifeplayer is an oversized MP3 player that can be pre-loaded to hold 64GB of educational content, can download Internet audio and can record live voice or radio programmes for playback later. With a wireless solar panel and a hand-wound crank, the Lifeplayer can even charge mobile phones. Which means it allows rural communities to cross the digital divide and access vital information.

Buried down at the bottom of the article is a one-liner, which states “even oral histories that are in danger of being lost can be recorded onto the Lifeplayer and saved for future generations.” This is where the potential for its integration into a larger digital heritage project lies. Indigenous knowledge, local histories or folklore and community interviews could be loaded onto the Lifeplayer and listeners encouraged to interact with this content and record their own content. This user-generated content could be uploaded to a central database through the cellular networks and distributed to other communities or made available online.

Benedict Vilakazi’s Grave

McN2 — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:42:39 +0000

Last Sunday we took a tour of the Marianhill Monastery in Durban. The area has a fascinating history, tied in to the Trappist Monks and their missionary work as well as being responsible for educating a number of liberation leaders. Of interest to us was the grave of Benedict Vilakazi, who is one of the featured writers on the North Coast Writers Trail we are currently researching. Vilakazi was an educator and author who was born in Groutville but educated at Marianhill, where he also later taught. Full profile can be read here.

Benedict Vilakazi's Grave

Developing e-resources for research: the case of the KZN Literary Tourism project

McN2 — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:06:49 +0000

Late last year we took part in the e-Learning Festival at the Durban University of Technology, presenting a session on our work with the KZN Literary Tourism project.

The KZN Literary Tourism research project is now in its ninth year of operation. Literary Tourism is tourism that deals with places and events from fictional texts as well as the lives of their authors. This could include following the route a fictional character charts in a novel, visiting particular settings from a story or tracking down the haunts of a novelist.

Literary tourists are specifically interested in how places have influenced writing and at the same time how writing has created place. In order to become a literary tourist you need little more than your favourite novel and an adventurous spirit. However there are literary guides, literary maps and literary tours to help you on your way.

The project runs an active website where it hosts a number of resources for research. These include a database of author profiles, literary videos, audio clips of writers reading their work, and digital versions of the literary trails produced by the project. All research produced by the project is also available through the research section of the website. This presentation will look at the KZN Literary Tourism project and the e-resources it has produced over the past few years.

Click here to view the presentation …

June Drummond podcast on KZN Literary Tourism website

HERITAGE AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

McN2 — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:20:17 +0000

Last Friday we presented a paper at the Heritage and Socio-economic Development Conference at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. The paper was well received with participants particularly interested in the community-participation through digital technologies and collaborative resource development aspects of the paper, two areas we have been involved with since 2008.

Click here to view the presentation …

Apartheid Museum. Pic by Emiliano Homrich

Digital heritage as a tool for schools

McN2 — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:40:59 +0000

Its a New Year and we’ve kicked it off by visiting two schools – one in Hammarsdale and the other in Umbumbulu – where we will be running the phase two of the Ulwazi Schools Project.

This innovative project uses digital heritage to teach research, media and digital literacy skills to students from disadvantaged schools. Weekly lessons are arranged thematically, with students having to research articles on, for example, the history of their school, local environment or family then write an article and submit it to the Ulwazi Community Memory website. Students are taught how to use digital audio recorders and cameras, how to acces the Internet on a mobile phone, how to conduct research online and how to conduct oral history interviews, while being fully engaged in the learning process through researching content relevant to their lives.

As a model for ICT training it is excellent. So far the project has been enthusiastically embraced – take a look at some of the articles produced last year by school children from Menzi High School http://wiki.ulwazi.org/index.php5?title=Category:Menzi_High_School

Computer lab at Sibusiswe High School, Umbumbulu

2011 – A YEAR IN REVIEW

McN2 — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:41:17 +0000

Summer is here!

We’ve had another interesting year where we’ve cemented our work on digital heritage as well as explored the areas of e-citizenship and the possibility that digital media holds for the environmental movement. In no particular order, here are a few things we have done that we’re proud of …

Projects

We’ve worked on the Goethe Institut/Ulwazi Programme’s School’s Project. Read more …
Together with the Communication Factory, we re-designed the Ulwazi website. Check it out here …
Working with KZN Literary Tourism, we launched the South Coast Writers trail. Read more …
OneWorld commissioned a survey and report from us, on how best to implement a climate change knowledge-sharing platform. Read more …
With designer Dominic Strauss, we designed a poster for the M-Lib Conference in Brisbane. Check it out here …
We developed and launched an experimental heritage mapping project Map Inanda. Read more …
We digitised and made available online a number of literary documentary videos. Watch them here …
We redeveloped our own site, making it a lot easier to navigate and we think, really attractive!
We developed a new blogsite for trend forecaster Christopher Reid. Go check it out …
We initiated a social media strategy for Urban Earth.
Niall continued with existing projects – managing the Ulwazi Programme; digitisation and media management for the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity; research and content and social media management for KZN Literary Tourism; editing and blogging on Sprig.
Grant started working with the Tombouctou Manuscripts project – providing social media and web management – and with Sustaining the Wild Coast – establishing their social media strategy.

Conferences and Events

Niall attended the Highway Africa Conference where he was a New Media Awards nominee, coming runner-up in the NGO category.
Niall presented a paper at the Indigenous Knowledge Technology Conference in Windhoek, Nambia. The paper will be published in a special issue of the Knowledge Management for Development journal.
Niall presented a session at the Durban University of Technology’s e-Learning Festival.
Niall facilitated a workshop on the eThekwini Municipality’s digital offerings at a Library Week event.
Niall participated in the UNESCO/ccrri workshop on the development of a communication advocacy strategy for the city of Durban.
Niall participated in the Classification and its Consequences Symposium at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Grant attended the ASnA Conference. Read more …
Grant attended a series of workshops run by the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative. Read more …
Grant attended the Department of Arts and Culture’s Digitisation of Heritage Resources. Read our thoughts here and here and see Grant’s post on the Archival Platform.

Training

Niall co-taught the News Media and the Internet Society course for the Internet Studies department at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Niall co-taught the Literary Tourismin KwaZulu-Natal Course for the English Studies department at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
We provided oral history, media development and ICT training to the Rural Women’s Movement.

Awards and Recognition

We came runner-up in the Environmental Category at the SA Blog Awards.
We came runner-up at the Highway Africa New Media Award, NGO Category.
An article on South Coast Writers trail was published in The Witness. Read it here …

Enjoy the summer holidays and see you next year. We have a number of interesting projects on the go and look forward to sharing them with you in 2012.

Cheers,

Niall and Grant

Ulwazi Programme Schools’ Project Report

McN2 — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 08:31:54 +0000

Through funding assistance from the Goethe Institut, we have helped to rolll out the Ulwazi Programme to township and rural schools in a bid to create opportunities to enhance ICT skills among the youth and generate interest in their own history and culture. The School’s project will be run at four township and rural schools where there are computer laboratories – two schools during the 2nd semester 2011 and two schools during the 1st semester 2012. The pilot project will be run with a practical task-based section and an online e-learning component. This report looks at the first half of the project, recently completed.

Download the Goethe Schools Report

Award at SA Blog Awards

McN2 — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:57:03 +0000

We are pleased to announce that, Sprig, the multi-authored green blog we run in out spare time, was awarded a runner-up prize at the South African Blog Awards. We won this award last year and are pleased to again be included in the top three.

Indigenous Knowledge Technology Conference 2011

McN2 — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 07:09:09 +0000

We are attending and presenting at the Indigenous Knowledge Technology Conference this November in Windhoek. The programme is looking great and we’re really looking forward to a number of papers. Check out the conference theme below to get a feel for what its all about.

CONFERENCE THEME
Indigenous knowledge systems differ fundamentally from the knowledge systems that underlie technology development. Numerous initiatives aim to enable remote diverse communities to share their wisdom and practical know-how with conventional digital technologies but often overlook the very systems that they use to organize and make sense of the world. Further, many indigenous communities, especially those in rural places, have few opportunities to appropriate new technologies emerging in ubiquitous computing, such as social networks, flickr, virtual and augmented realities. To design digital infrastructures for currently unserved knowledge systems we must account for the transformations that occur as technology interacts with the ways of knowing, doing and being that constitute indigenous knowledge systems.