| title | presenter | presentation-date | event | location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
A Five Minute Introduction to the Local Preservation School |
Eli Pousson |
2015-12-01 |
Openlab unconference |
Crystal City, Virginia |
In mid-October, I saw an announcement about the NEH-funded Openlab unconference/workshop on Twitter and thought it might be a good opportunity to share an introduction to the Local Preservation School with a broader audience of GLAM professionals with interest and expertise on open source projects and technical innovation in the cultural heritage sector. The Openlab organizers accepted my proposal on November 12 and I just spent the last few days preparing my slides and notes. What is Openlab? According to the Openlab Concept description:
Openlab is envisioned as a solutions lab, convener, and consultancy designed to accelerate the speed and impact of transformational change in the GLAM (gallery, library, archive, and museum) sector.
The presentations (including this one) are all in the style of an Ignite talk: 20 slides with automatic transitions timed to 15 seconds per slide for a total presentation time fo 5 mintues.
The Local Preservation School is a new online school to share the skills and knowledge you need to get your neighbors excited about local history, protect threatened landmarks from demolition, or secure resources for reinvestment in your historic neighborhood. Taking inspiration from new approaches to online learning for data-wrangling, digital history, and computer programming, we wondered how can we use the web (and open-source tools) to make it easier for people across the country to learn about historic preservation? How can we do a better job sharing the skills and knowledge needed to save historic places? This talk is a quick introduction to the project, an invitation to potential contributors and a discussion of how open education can support the effort to integrate technology into small, volunteer-led history and preservation efforts.
- 15 seconds of spoken text is about 30-40 words (assuming around 130 words per minute)
- The slides are currently available as a PDF via Google Drive (with future plans to convert the presentation into a reveal.js HTML presentation)
- I still need to add links to related sources or references for this presentation. I'm unsure if those links should be included in the Notes text or kept in a separate section of this document.
Note: These notes were prepared to be delivered as a spoken Ignite-style lightning talk so the text includes notes about pacing and selected words are marked with italics for emphasis. The numbered sub-headings indicate the slide —each slide is displayed for 15 seconds before the next slide appears.
1: Local Preservation School
Hello! My name is Eli Pousson and I work for a small nonprofit in Baltimore, Maryland dedicated to historic preservation advocacy and heritage education. I’m here to introduce the Local Preservation School, explain why I think open source matters to historic preservation, and invite you to get involved as a student, a teacher (or maybe both).
2: What is historic preservation?
Let’s start by asking: what is historic preservation? Preservation is inspired by the idea that important stories are found not only in museums and libraries. Important stories are everywhere around us—in parks and public art, buildings and neighborhoods.
3: Saving places that matter to people.
Good stories about places are really about people. Historian Eric Sandweiss explained it neatly:
“[the history of a city street] means little if it’s not tied to the story of the farmer who sold the land, the developer who bought it from him, the families who campaigned to have it paved, the men who laid the asphalt, or the children who rode their bikes on it.”
4: Changes in preservation from 1960 to 2015.
Over 50 years have past since a group of civic-minded activists and historians established Baltimore Heritage. In 1960, we fought against highways and urban renewal with sharply worded letters-to-the-editor. In 2015, we fight for revitalization with creative public programs and social media.
5: How do you save historic places?
In most American cities, saving places starts with education. Preservation planners at public agencies teach coworkers, volunteer docents at a historic sites teach neighbors, and nonprofit advocates teach everyone we can. We teach people why old buildings matter and why it makes sense to fix them up.
6: Laugh to keep from crying. Do what you can.
When you are a preservationist in a city with over 16,000 vacant buildings, it can be tough to feel like you are making a difference. Have you ever wondered what you get when you cross a program director, a volunteer manager, and a janitor? The typical situation in most nonprofit organizations.
7: You use free and open tools.
One of the most important lessons we’ve learned at Baltimore Heritage is that free digital tools are key to overcoming the limits of a small staff and budget. Open source projects like WordPress or Omeka empower us to connect with our neighbors. If we relied solely on costly, proprietary tools, we could spend twice the money and reach half the people.
8: Good news. You're not alone.
The good news is that local preservationists are working hard around the country—maybe you are one of them. The bad news? Many volunteer and professional preservationists are struggling to learn the new tools and approaches they need to achieve their own goals.
9: What is the Local Preservation School?
The Local Preservation School is based on the idea that historic preservation succeeds when we can empower people to save places that matter to their block, their neighborhood or their city. The Local Preservation School is for people who want to save historic places to teach and learn together.
10: Free, open online learning environment for local preservation.
There are many excellent online resources available on preservation. But they are often overwhelming—especially for volunteers who do this work on evenings and weekends. Our goal is to provide these volunteers with openly licensed, self-guided lessons and tutorials designed to teach the knowledge and skills people need to save historic places.
11: Local Preservation Knowledge
Historic preservation is not just a job for “experts” or professionals! You may be one of the thousands of volunteers working to restore a park, revitalize a main street business district, or help homeowners navigate unfamiliar maintenance challenges. The Local Preservation School is for you (and your neighbors): a place to find new resources and a place to share your hard-won knowledge.
12: Beginners Welcome!
We are committed to created open educational resources that are accessible to beginners – not overwhelmed by jargon or requirements for expensive software. We are making our lessons activity-based – teaching you how to document a threatened landmark, prepare and deliver a walking tour, or create a digital map of local historic sites.
13: Engaging & Accessible
Historic places should not be boring. Taking full advantage of the web means that we can make it easy for interested learners to share their progress—whether they are crafting the perfect caption for a Throwback Thursday photo or making an interactive map of vacant buildings on their street.
14: Open for Reuse & Remix
Why make this open? Open educational resources reduce barriers to access, ensure educators have the rights to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute educational resources – without having to ask permission. We also hope inspire other members of the historic preservation community to recognize the transformative potential of open licensing and open source approaches.
15: Owned by Everyone
With funding from the National Park Service and plans to adapt a variety of public domain resources for our teaching materials, this project couldn’t exist without public support. We want to pay it forward by dedicating nearly all of our work on this project to the public domain under a Creative Commons Zero license.
16: How can you join the Local Preservation School?
The Local Preservation School is inspired by myriad open education and open source projects from everyone from Peer 2 Peer University to National Public Radio. At their best, such projects are an open invitation for people to get involved and share their time and talents to help make something bigger and better than they could ever create alone.
17: Local Prototyping
We opened the Local Preservation School at the beginning of October and we're working to launch our first course in January. The power to tell your own story is fundamental to effective historic preservation. With Explore Baltimore Heritage 101, we plan to teach Baltimore residents, students and scholars how to research and write about historic places.
18: Research and Collaboration
But, at this point, we still have more questions than answers. We are collecting ideas for lessons and mapping out topics we’d like to cover. If you’re interested in learning about preservation, teaching preservation, or you just love older towns and cities, we would love to talk to you about the Local Preservation School.
19: Working in Public
And you can even just watch us work. I’m inspired by a phrase from the 1966 publication, With Heritage So Rich:
"The past is not the property of historians; it is a public possession. It belongs to anyone who is aware of it, and it grows by being shared."
By making this project open and public from start to finish, we hope to reach the full potential of this vision.
20: Connect with the Local Preservation School
I’ll end by asking you to submit a pull request on GitHub. Share a question, link or comment on Twitter with the hashtag #localpast. Give me a call and say hello! We want to work with you and your neighbors to make the Local Preservation School into a resource for communities across the nation. Let's save historic places together. Thank you.