The first edition of Zero Dollar Laptop workshops is over and it’s time to reflect on what happened. Download a pdf version of the report here.
Zero Dollar Laptop workshops kicked off at Bridge Resource Centre in West London in January 2010 with clients of St Mungo’s Charity for Homeless People.
This report is jointly written by the team who devised and ran the project and sets it in the context of recent reports on ‘digital inclusion’. It aims to capture the experience and learning of ALL involved in this first Zero Dollar Laptop workshop series- participants and organisers, to inform future development of the project.
During these last two weeks: hardware maintenance, laptop customisation and blog formatting. Everybody goes away with a customised zero dollar laptop! Some of them carry stencils in their cases, others have stickers, but all have changed their desktops and window styles.
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This week week we will have four activities ready. We are trying to cover the different interests participants have told us about. We don’t expect them to complete all 4 activities. We’d like them to focus on the ones they prefer.
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Day of celebration at St Mungos! Celebrating what we have achieved together along the sessions, celebrating that we finally have enough laptops for everyone, celebrating with other clients from other courses…
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Today we dedicated our workshops to practicing and rehearsing what we will be doing next week. We did some mock interviews, took some pictures, wrote the articles and uploaded the results below. Some new and very interesting discussions took place. On the one hand we discussed the practicalities involved in an interview: questions need to be shorter and sharper than we thought, we need to be strategic in choosing the questions, we need to be teams of three people to make sure we have everything covered (one asks questions, the other one takes pictures, and the other takes notes). On the other hand we continued the discussions about what’s important to communicate: issues of isolation and social integration were particularly present in the discussion.
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This morning we had an editorial meeting to prepare for the event happening here on the 25th of March. We sat all around the table, 9 clients and the tutors, and had a lively discussion about what are the main things we need to cover, who will do what, etc. Excellent ideas came up. We all realised that this is really about the clients and that there is a something very poignant to be address and it’s the funding cuts.
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OVERVIEW – The Press Room Project. Preparation day.
For the coming two weeks we will work on a team project we’ve called The Press Room. We will turn our workshop space into a journalists office and learn the dynamics of documenting an event and publishing it on the web.
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This week we have started to get familiar with the basics of audio editing. Getting into multimedia has meant that the participants have had to install lots of different plug-ins and software to get their machines ready. We have used Synaptic Package Manager whenever possible since it is a much friendlier interface, and we have used the terminal whenever we needed to expand the list of repositories.
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OVERVIEW – Continuing from the previous week’s session.
Media files created by internet users are an increasingly important part of social networking websites and the internet in general.
Video editing is probably the most challenging activity in this set of sessions. Download pdf version.
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Today we cut out and tested the stencils we created with Inkscape last week to customise our laptops.
Joseph preparing to spray his stencil.
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