It's been an exciting couple of weeks at the Mobile lab. On the evening of Thursday, June 5th, we celebrated the completion of the Locative Learning Project with our partners, Banff Community High School and Learning Through The Arts, as well as with the Grade 7 Social Studies students and their parents. A barbeque in the park seemed a fitting finale to a collaboration that took us often took us outdoors. While the food was being served and eaten, we gave students and parents the opportunity to the final version of the Banff Mobile History Tour for a spin. This version features audio/video media files created by the students that play when a tour participant walks into the area chosen by the students at an earlier phase of the project. If you missed this event or the public demos that followed, please take a look at www.banffmobilehistory.ca for all of the content and a mapping application - the next best thing to actually physically experiencing the tour!
The following two days, June 6th and 7th, we offered free demos of the Mobile History Tour to the public. A number of people saw our ads in Banff Centre publications and on posters around town and were eager to try the demo. Others saw the articles about the project in both the Rocky Mountain Outlook and The Crag And Canyon newspapers and couldn't resist experiencing the final product of all the hard work that the students and facilitators put into creating the tour. All of these ads and articles are available for viewing on our Press/Media page.
And just in case we hadn't had enough of tour and BBQ organization, we arranged on Tuesday, June 10th for a Grade 6 class from Canmore's Lawrence Grassi Middle School to come and take the Mobile History Tour, to get some feedback from the perspective of students who might be in a position to undertake a similar project in the future. Many of the students really enjoyed the tour and most said they'd be in favour of trying a big project like the LLP some day, which we took as very positive feedback. We celebrated their visit with, you guessed it, a BBQ down by the Bow River.
The LLP team would like to take a few lines to thank everyone who helped out with making this ambitious project a reality. The project would never have been more than just an idea if not for our generous funders, Inukshuk Wireless. And it couldn't have come together if not for the hard work of our partners, Learning Through The Arts and Banff Community High School. We'd also like to thank the Banff Community Foundation for their financial support of the barbeque and the Canmore student visits. Other thank-yous go out to The Whyte Museum, the faculty of BCHS, the Banff New Media Institute Staff, Patrick Hayes for his development of this website and everyone else who has helped over the past 10 months!
