I have just returned from an extraordinary trip to Ireland. The Achill experience is always special but the reasons it is special are different each time and this was my third time. To be in Ireland for over a week, especially on the West coast of Irleand and not experience one drop of rain, that is quite special. Neither a drop of alcohol! That's quite ...odd. Without much connectivity but yet being in charge of a workshop producing the project website is quite frustrating. Having taken my daughters because my husband is away in China at the same time, was a bit nerve-wracking until I saw how welcoming everyone was and that they were really integrated into their allocated work group.
I don't know how they do it but the students are usually really nice and this year was no exception, ranging from the young 18/19 year old Lithuanians to the rather older Germans.
The Achill experience is an Intensive Programme project and brings together university students from 4 different countries, UK; Germany, Hungary and Lithuania, though in actual fact the origins of the participants is even wider than that. The students start interacting together online in the run up to the trip as they apply for and appoint various managers jobs such as travel manager, catering manager and accommodation manager. These are real jobs carrying real responsibilities which can earn the students concerned real money if they do it right. If the managers have done their jobs correctly then the students and their teachers all meet together on Achill Island on the west coast where the students live and work in mixed culture groups in different workshops which all aim to find out about some aspect of the intercultural reality of the island or the student group or both. The week also includes a bus trip around the island while the rest of the time the students work intensively together talking to islanders and each other about different topics such as emigration, cultural artefacts, becoming an intercultural expert and so on.
This was my first time as a workshop moderator and to me fell the task of ensuring that the travelogue group worked effectively together to produce a web document of the event. I find it quite easy to be offline when I am on holiday but rather frustrating when I am still supposed to be at work. Working offline meant that only one person could see the latest version at a time and server problems at the destination end meant that we could not upload finished pages anyway but instead had to mail them to a third party and wait for him to get them up as and when it was possible instead.
I also noticed that we were producing blocks of text with no links as no-one had access to relevant URLs. For example we mentioned the Achill Cliff House Hotel where we had dinner every evening, we talked about SMART goals and we talked about the Kinlay House Hostel where we stayed overnight in Dublin. But none got a link even though they deserved it.
As part of the media workshop my group were invited to examine Kieran Sweeney's website selling premium Irish knitwear. Since the expertise in the group was very diverse we decided to give him 3 perspectives starting with the non-techie customer perspective, following by the technical web site builder perspective and ending with the view from an experienced Internet consumer.
As to the URL for the travelogue itself, that will have to wait until I am certain that it is in a fit state to be consulted!
It was not all plain sailing. I witnessed people getting upset with each other based on language misunderstandings for example while some of my colleagues experienced what could later be diagnosed as mid-week blues in their group dynamics. Huge numbers of us, including me and both girls, fell ill in spite of the good weather. It is traditional for the students to present their findings at the end of the week to the Achill community and I must say that the standard of the presentations was much better than I remembered and that was probably because groups tried out different delivery modes apart from just Powerpoint. So there were role plays and movies as well as a couple of powerpoints.
