Marc Reck

Today was another excellent day on the Educator Course. We are looking at rationales, and writing a scheme of work for our course, and tomorrow we get to host our first 10 minute lesson to the class on whatever we want. (I’m thinking of doing a 16 piece human sequencer!).

Either way, its inspired me to write about one of the composite parts of the Mr Elephant idea, that i have been thinking about for the last 6 months or so.

Basically we thought it would be interesting to try and facilitate the sharing of information, and interaction of local community through our website, (alongside the workshops at events, and a proposed workshop programme in 2008.)

People who are interested in something can offer knowledge and therefore inspiration to like minded people, simply by sharing a few tips that have helped them progress. Furthermore, i think that clustering these tips with similar “areas,” could hopefully benefit and network the community and the individual, thereby producing more opportunities for individuals, and collaborations in communities.

This could therefore lead towards happier and more integrated communities, which sounds idealistic, but also echoes back to the societies that we used to live in before the industrial revolution, and the tribes that exist around the world today… Now we have the internet, and I feel if people respond to the idea, this could have really positive social benefits.

So after a lot of thought, i figured a way of doing this would be to break it down into areas of knowledge. – Creative, Practical/Survival, Health, Wealth, and Environmental, and invite people to post their top 5 tips on whatever they like doing. This would hopefully have the knock on effect of promoting people locally, whilst sharing knowledge and inspiration. It also offers another way for people to interact with the site and our events.I reckon the areas are pretty fundamental to humans beings, so they seemed like good places to start, though i imagine if people respond well, they could probably be categorised even more. I wanted to try and keep it broad in order to encourage cross pollination of the information and contributors, whilst also making it easy for anyone to post.

I feel i need to have a meeting with Dubber again, and maybe some other creative talents in order to do this most effectively, but i’m hopeful about the idea. I plan to start adding to the categories next week, by using the various characters and avatars on my webcam, and hooking up with a few friends. A few people have already said they would like to offer regular tutorials, and i plan to go out and meet people who can’t record, whilst also recording people at our events.

Either way i’d love to see this work, and i guess its one of the 3 or 4 Mr Elephant ideas we have in light of the big city plan, in terms of helping to engage communities at least. If anyone has any ideas I’d love to hear from you.

To facilitate the video comments, i bought a decent webcam this week, and can highly recommend it. Its the Logitech Pro 9000, and you can get it for about £45 from P.C world online, (unless you have a nice built in one already of course . I bought it so as i can record directly to Viddler, using their fantastic video hosting site. I’ve been “testing” their wordpress video comment plug in, from a heads up on Stef’s blog last month, and figured this would be an easy way for people to leave their tips and videos in the various areas, without having to log in or register.

At the moment the page is just a basic write up, but i aim by March 15th, to have uploaded some of our own tips and tutorials, and then get busy meeting and recording people to help facilitate the “germination process”…..Then i guess we just wait and see who gets involved

If you would like to share your top 5 tips, please visit www.mrelephant.com, though please bear in mind while the site is being built live, it’s not finished until March 21 st (the 1st day of spring) …..(so you may be the first