With a change of location from the UN HQ Africa yo the Hill Park Hotel (scene of the famous broken foot incident in July) all participants set about engaging in day 2 of this participatory learning workshop (PLW).

For reasons that are still not clear we were located a room that was far too small and then transferred to a larger one (the one we booked) and then waited and waited whilst the hotel staff (friendly enough) attempted to find screen, projector & speaker (again all part of the booking) 😉 When all was finally in place the hotel’s network staff decided to take the server offline for security maintenance work, just as we were about to show a video Chaz had produced earlier. All of this meant a delay to and a change in the planned schedule but everyone took it in good heart and got down to work.

One group had started really early meeting partners in town at the university to shoot interviews, vox pops & B roll on entrepreneurship…..and they arrived back before the deadline I’d set, which impressed me greatly. Their editing seemed to run smoothly apart from the ……ooooops I kicked the cable which unplugged the laptop used for editing and almost lost the entire project late in the day…..eh Sonja? 😉

The other group’s working on cultural diversity issues has been evolving in a very interesting way and I am fascinated to see how this project turns out……the focus on inter-tribal marriages and the challenges is presents is fascinating and this was an unexpected pathway through the orignal subject area given.

Four of the new participants were placed in the audacity group and they started work on podcasting. Neither Emily or Angela had used Audacity before and have worked really hard to teach themselves both before and during the trip. They also faced the challenges of working with a group of people with strong and at times conflicting views. I was impressed with the manneer they stuck to what was a challenging task and in just one day have a really interesting round table style podcast in production. I spoke to the group before they left last night and they are looking forward to the critical editing session first thing this morning.

 Fred from SEMA Film Festival came in to discuss our Stories from the Cities collaboration (more later on the blog). We discussed a few plans and he asked to take photos and capture the training processes on video for us. Lucy and Jen then worked on the ideas he had come up with preparing next weeks exhibition. The picture for this blog is one of Fred’s and captures the mind-mapping and segmenting discussions of the podcast workshop.

Very pleased with how everything is going and especially with the students who are very…..errrr……lively ;-). The are working very hard and I am very pleased with their engagement. It is also pleasing to see just how well they are getting on with our partners. Very pleasing indeed.