Leah attends NESTA’s People Helping People

Posted on by Wendy

IMG_3608Leah had a hugely informative day attending NESTSA’s latest event, ‘People Helping People: The Future of Public Services’ in collaboration with NESTA and the Cabinet’s Office Centre for Social Action. This is part of the UK wide new agenda to connect organisations doing social good with public services and government. Goeff Mulgan, Chief Executive of NESTA led a packed schedule of talks, workshops and networking.

A key note speech from Rt. Hon. Brooks Newmark MP, Minister for Civil Society marked his first public speech since taking his newly appointed role, nice to meet you! We met with some of the most exciting innovators working in the UK and overseas who are committed to their organisations making contributions to society. Leah had some very interested conversations with CodeClub, Spice, Shared Lives Plus, FutureGov, and The Thought collective (all the way from Singapore!) amongst many more.

CARIAD are committed to designing new innovations which have a positive impact on society. The Breaking Bread project will be following these initiatives closely as the project begins to scale up and work with volunteers in the community, we are excited to extend our reach to work across public services and government in Wales. Maybe even next year CARIAD will be one of the exciting new innovators.

Leah has a chat with Radio Cardiff about Breaking Bread

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Leah met up with Luke from Cardiff Voluntary Services Cardiff this week when he asked her to appear on their volunteering broadcast to talk about her latest project Breaking Bread. She talked about recent innovations with CARIAD and new plans to extend her recent successful workshops.

Leah has received some extended funding from Cardiff Met Alumni and development fund in the interim and the Breaking Bread team are exploring new opportunities. Watch this space! We shared our air time with @BulliesOut an award winning Charity providing help and support to people and organisations affected by bullying.

Thanks Luke, really enjoyed it and looking forward to working with you in the future 🙂 You can listen to the cast here http://www.mixcloud.com/CardiffInAction/

First trial workshops of Breaking Bread hosted at Cardiff Met are a massive success!

Posted on by Wendy

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Thank you thank you, to ALL of our Breaking Bread participants who fought through the heat to attend our first trail workshop of our brand new service, Breaking Bread! Marion, Leslie, Jane, Liz, Gerri and Lyn teamed up with Daniel, Steve, Gareth, Helena, Ilid and Deirdre and made some delicious bread and pea and mint soup for lunch. A big shout also goes to Rhys (master baker) for hosting the session and Ray and his team at Food Technology, we couldn’t have put it together without you!

Our group also provided us with crucial feedback, tips and suggestions for the future of Breaking Bread. It seems that we have some very eager stakeholders and a very much needed and wanted service for the future. Lots of possibilities! In the immediate future we will be launching our new website where you can find information on what Breaking Bread does, our history, and where we want to go from here, keep an eye out for that. You can also follow us on Twitter @Breaking4Bread and a Facebook page is coming this week as a sharing platform for all things Bread! We hope you will all join us on the beginning of this exciting journey 

First performance of Somability held at Millennium Centre

Posted on by Wendy

Thank you very much Digital Innovation week for hosting the first live performance of Somability in action. It was a wonderful event and opportunity to showcase our service users performing with Somability. DSC08483The biggest thanks of all go to Cath, her staff and the service users at Gladys Resource Centre Aberdare, who put on a wonderful show demonstrating some of their newly learned choreography and gestural movements as a part of working with Artis Community, well done Artis Community you are certainly making movement irresistible!

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Thanks also to Eluned Parrott AM for stopping by to have a look at the project development thus far, lovely to see you and to have your support. Wendy and Mareck from CARIADinteractive also gave a talk about (co)-creation, giving us all some insights into inclusive and participatory design. Filmmaker Dan was also on site, he has been awarded funding from Cardiff Met to make a film for Somability.

Nice to meet you Dan and looking forward to the end result! Finally thank you to Steven from the BBC for organising the event, coming to see the performances in Aberdare, and making us all feel a part of Digital Innovation Week, I hope the rest of the week’s antics go well!

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Video tagging project a success

Posted on by Wendy

20140430113038.m2ts.Still001Thanks to everybody involved in our recent SIP success, exploring performance analysis tools to help teachers capture and evidence engagement in special needs schools. We have developed two templates for you all to use and test out, as well as some helpful tips and hints for storing and managing your video files. You can find all the details on the brand new project website here.

http://videocodingasd.wordpress.com/. Please take a look around and tell us what you think?!?

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Thank you Anthony Rhys and Gesture Based PLC (Professional learning community) at Trinity Fields School

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A big thank you to the Anthony Rhys and the Gesture Based PLC (Professional Learning Community) for providing some feedback on the Alpha versions of Somability last week at Trinity Fields School http://www.trinityfieldsschoolandresourcecentre.co.uk/. Sequence 01.Still002As always the day was a great success with teachers, carers and professionals coming together to share evidence, discuss new technologies and provide a genuine support networked group for educators working within special needs http://gesturesen.wikispaces.com/. If Anthony’s movements are anything to go by, Somability will provide fantastic exercise for all those using it! 🙂

Looking forward to catching up in the new term! 🙂

 

CARIAD wins two new SIPS (Strategic Insight Programe) awards

Posted on by Wendy

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Congratulations to Leah and Cathy for being awarded another two SIP (Strategic Insight Programme) awards. Cathy will work with the company Stillwalks http://stillwalks.wordpress.com/ to create a series of drawings through video. She will also scope some potentials of using some Stillwalk videos to promote wellbeing by ‘bringing the outside in’.

Leah will be working with AnalysisPro http://www.analysispro.net/, Andrew from Exeter House http://www.exeterhouseschool.co.uk/ and Dawn from St Luke’s http://www.stlukes.herts.sch.uk/ special needs school to scope ways of tagging videos of Intensive Interaction sessions. Thank you very much to Cardiff Met and everybody who helped on our bids!

CARIAD works with Connected Studio at the Millennium Centre

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CARIAD has a fantastic day at the Millennium Centre today facilitating Connected Studio developing ways of making classical music more accessible to audiences through digital content and platforms. We also learned about new technologies and ideas to further establish links between academia and the media. We were reunited with Peter from PDR, Emily from School of Education and Katherine from CSAD.

We had an eventful day designing our new ‘Classy App’, a prototype to condense and consolidate some of the content on BBC 3 Radio, to renew and reinvigorate an audience with an interest in classical music but perhaps a bit shy about taking those initial first steps into the genre. Thank you Connected Studio, BBC, Hannah, CEWN and everybody else organising such a successful dynamic day, lots of possibilities!

CARIAD visits Exeter House School to discuss potentials for video tagging

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Thank you Andrew from Exeter House School http://www.exeterhouseschool.co.uk/ for hosting such an eventful day yesterday: exploring the possibilities of video tagging to capture Intensive Interaction sessions with young people with learning difficulties. Leah from CARIAD and Jon Moore from Analysis Pro http://www.analysispro.net/ had an eventful first meeting at Salisbury yesterday. We looked at some videos of ‘Intensive Interaction’ with the lovely Dawn all the way from St Luke’s Foundation School, Hertfordshire http://www.stlukes.herts.sch.uk/tv_radio/index.html showing us the amazing work they are doing capturing evidence of their intensive Interactions with young people with learning difficulties. Lee from IT and Rachel another teacher from Exeter House completed our group.

DSC05102We started by discussing some of the problems encountered particularly with evidencing children’s engagement and communication. The focus was on the Intensive Interaction sessions, a widely used model to encourage communication and one that has had incredible results. We also learned about some research into capturing these Intensive Interaction sessions using video, and the strategies and recommendations the teachers have developed. This ranged from the angle of the camera to the size of the frame. We learned that the focus is always on the face in Intensive Interactions and that it has been argued that video can capture nuances and idiosyncratic details within these sessions more effectively than other measurement models.

Then we discussed some of the problems with capturing the sessions. Many many issues were discussed from technical problems (for example not enough room to store HD data on school servers), to aesthetic and communicative features of video (for example a bird’s eye view coupled with a close up, narrative within the clips, and a sense of the environment with less than perfect filming)to much more conceptual and challenging problems (for example subjective interpretations of behaviours, how much detail and history of the child is needed to make a claim for improvement)…and this was just the morning!

Later Jon took the floor and gave a very brief overview of some of the software tools and packages he has been developing in partnerships for his entire career. Originally used for sports analysis we discussed some of the potentials of adapting some of the strategies, tools and software to begin to code and manage some of the video from the Intensive Interactions. To pick out key moments, file information and use it to build up layers of metadata of rich and dynamic visual evidence of the children’s engagement. Looking forward to the next stages!