h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Daily Log and Schools

Hi
Here are some initial thoughts about engaging schools during the voyage. And a bunch of questions for John and Nick.

There were some schools in NZ that were following Sir Peter Blakes expedition so we hope they will pick up on the albatross voyage and read the daily logs on the website. Unfortunately a lot more people learnt about his expedition after his death than knew about it beforehand. So we’ll have to do a bit of work to make sure people know about the voyage.

Question?
Have you had a look at www.blakeexpeditions.org and seen the daily logs entered (look at the ‘archived logs’), they have general sailing log entries (eg. Longitude, wind, etc) and a personal entry by one of the crew and photos. I imagine we will be doing something along those lines as well as daily mapping and recording our sightings of boats/seabirds?

Suggestion*
That each day (or most days) we have a question or activity for the students to do. For example, we could just ask them to find out what countries have ratified a certain agreement, or, if we see a Royal albatross ask them to learn about it’s breeding cycle or find an island where it breeds. Or it could be something more arty, like making a paper mache seabird (real or faniciful) or something to do with maths, like make a paper dart and compare its flight speed to the wandering albatross.

Questions?
Children could send feedback to the boat about what they have learnt or what they are doing. But is this going to be manageable? Will it be necessary to have a note saying that we would love to hear how they are going with their projects, but do we also need to ask them to make their responses to the boat brief and tell them that we may not respond individually? How easy is it going to be to respond to people who email the boat during the voyage? What volume of messages can we deal with?

Carol Knutson (New Zealand)

Thanks Carol for lots of suggestions.

re the daily log type of thing - like Blakeexpeditions and a number of other sites yes we plan to do this in our own way - crewmembers can maintain a daily log (BLOG) in their own H2G2 space plus ..

We're anticipating a daily ships log on H2G2 as well, but I'm wondering about the format of this. Position and weather, which might be fascinating to us on the boat, isn't the stuff to grip and engage people unless it's in terms that people ashore can really relate to. So we need to think about that. Bird sightings I think is a good one, but what format should we maintain that in? I posted a suggestion for that in another thread. But this needs some thought and planning I think. Are there any good models we could follow?

Re activities for schools, my feedback here has been that a daily activity would be overkill - and certainly from the boat we'd be unable to support that and everything else. But in reality it doesn't need to be run from the boat. What about a curriculum page, being an overall guide for teachers and students? With a whole series of structured activities and assignments etc Could this be run from land by someone such as yourself for much of the project?

You are right to question just how much interactivity we can support from the boat. The killer will be the cost of the airtime. But even if this were totally resolved, there is no way we could answer a large number of individual questions, and this would be a poor use of our resources. Much better to use the community website approach so we only ever answer a question once, so no individual emails. We could further address this by having a structured approach, maybe each week focusing on one aspect or another - putting up a sort of background paper of info about the topic, then someone on land viewing all the correspondence that comes in (via H2G2) then summarising the issues to be addressed, passing these to the boat for a response back on the web. We could also do a weekly online interview on the topic with someone on the boat using the BBC Live studio facility, webcasting this and also storing it on the site for replay on demand.

To do this we'd need to figure out a whole range of topics to address - maybe we could get some suggestions form school students on what they'd like them to be on, and starting to assemble a list.

School students could create their own H2G2 page highlighting the activities they are pursuing, and publishing their own efforts, whilst challenging other schools to match them. This way the students start to become part of the whole site and part of the project itself. They would get great ideas from each other. We could put in links to their sites from our pages, so they really are part of it. This could feed off itself and escalate, so that the boat and the voyage is really just the catalyst.

Nick

The idea of keeping a personal daily log is great - will be a nice 'window' into the voyage for the public (and friends and family). As for the daily ships log - I reckon the weather and position are still important and would take up little space - there are many people who will be watching this from a more practical point of view (not just education/entertainment value) so this sort of information I think is essential (and what's more takes up little space).

As mentioned in the other posting, the daily log of species seen is probably the simplest method to provide people with an idea of birds seen (but with more rigorous data collected and analysed following the voyage). Presence/absence on a daily basis will be of general interest to people - as long as they can click through to images and information about each of the species - this needs to be thoroughly thought out and planned in advance of the trip, and perhaps housed somewhere else to keep size of the H2G2 site down. I have photos of some species which could be used, but we would need to gather photos from others to use. Names of some birds are going to mean little if kids/adults cannot see what they look like.

I agree that a daily activity would be an over kill, and the risk that we run is that the boat receives so much correspondence that we spend all our time in front of the computer replying to email, and perhaps annoying those we do not reply to. Maybe a weekly activity, which I think would be far more practical from a teachers point of view (they already have a busy curriculum), and would be more easily managed by us - the idea of managing it from shore is I think essential - but who would do this? Weekly interviews are also an excellent idea, and addressing the key issue of the week would be a good opener.

I think the volunteers should come up with a few suggestions for weekly topics for their leg of the voyage - relating to the objectives and target species of that leg. Mine being Chat and Royal alb could be something like -

1. Where do Chatham Island albatross breed?
2. What is the largest of the albatross?
etc etc

The idea of kids creating their own H2G2 sites is great, but not sure if it is practical?? I guess we need to query a few teachers about the practicalities of all this - so maybe before we get too carried away we should contact teachers in some of the main countries to see how practical our ideas are?

Anyway, a few thoughts....
Brent

Thanks Carol,

This will probably end up being resolved by what is practical for Nick to manage from the boat.

I wonder if we couldn't write daily letters to a nephew/neice or grandchild and publish that each day in the form of a log. It needs imagination but imagination is very much part of a long sailing trip.

Into the mist...John.

Hi, My name is Philip Wakelin,
I have just met Nick Grainger, in fact he's sitting here next to me showing me around this neat website. I'm a grade 3 teacher at East Preston Islamic College in Melbourne. This sounds like a fantastic project and i look forward to being involved in some way or another.

I've heard about Carol and I'd be really open to ideas for the kids.

Look forward to getting to know more about what's going on.

Philip, in Melbourne.

Hi there Chaps,

I have just come across this great web site, with things to excite children about albatross and sea birds. I don't know if people have all ready seen it, but it really is worth a look.

http://www.wfu.edu/albatross/index.htm

The project looks like it’s been quite inactive for some time. I will send them an e-mail, and see what we can do.

All the best

Matt