John Shercliff reports on this web site creation project for children.
HERCULE was conceived as a project which would allow children to become creators of web material rather than simply consumers, learn skills in web page design and multimedia creation and research the culture and heritage of their local communities.
Look at the Hercule website at <http://www.hercule.org.uk/> [1]. The main theme of the new HERCULE website structure due in March/April 2000 will be an interactive TV screen as shown in Figure 1.
 Figure 1: Theme of the new HERCULE website - an interactive TV screen |
HERCULE further develops the DG XIII Telematics for Libraries Programme by bringing together librarians, teachers, arts workers and young people in a trans national project that exploits the use of multimedia and the World Wide Web to:
The objectives of HERCULE are to:
The partners are Walsall Public Libraries (UK), Quest Business Technology Centre, Walsall (UK), Dublin Corporation Public Libraries (Ireland) and Biblioteca da Camara Municipal de Oeiras (Portugal).
Initially the partners prepared for the involvement of children by setting up the technical framework for the project.
The first part of the content for the website was the catalogue of websites which is a categorized and annotated series of links to sites in the partner countries and world wide on the subjects of the environment and education. A process of evaluation for the sites by librarians, teachers and children was also developed.
The creation of material by children started in September 1999 with different approaches being taken in different schools and countries. The children taking part are in the 11-12 year old age range and are not of very high academic ability. IT, research and presentation skills have all been developing along with Project HERCULE.
The aim of the project is to have the web material completed and installed in the web site by July 2000. The site is to be extensively restructured in March, when the material produced by children will be systematically uploaded into the structure. At present examples of different approaches (not all of them 100% successful!) can be seen in the ideas section on the HERCULE website [2]. The earlier attempts will be archived as the project progresses.
As a pilot project we are experimenting with different ways of presenting material, providing resources to the children, and encouraging a response from children who are often not highly motivated. The end result will be a prototype project which can be used as a whole or in part by others who wish to encourage children to create multimedia web sites on similar topics and hopefully the ideas will continue to develop after the end of the HERCULE Project in December 2000.
HERCULE is not a technically complicated project. The simple requirements are for a web site and electronic communication between partners, libraries, schools and the children participating in the project.
The HERCULE web site was first created early in 1999 as a framework with very basic information. It is maintained on First Class Intranet Server, which gives us easy access to update and add more material to the site. The creation of web material and its uploading onto the website has been a learning process for librarians, teachers and children. The documentation of this process will be one of the benefits of the project and should help others who are faced with the same process of discovery.
Participation by librarians, teachers and children in the process is a key element. It is very much a hands on project by people who are not computer experts (or who were not at the beginning of the project). We have learnt a lot from the experts but have not relied on them to carry out all the work involved. The processes and structures we have evolved must be capable of being operated by everyone concerned.
First Class Intranet Server provides the communication service. The server was initially used for the interchange of management information between partners and increasingly for communication through e-mail and chatline. The real advantage of FCIS is in work with the children since it allows resources and children's work in progress to be accessible from school and library and allows easy interchange of completed work from the children's desktops to the live website. Only the administrators have access to the website files!
The catalogue of websites was produced in the first part of 1999 and installed on the HERCULE web site in September 1999 [3]. The list was compiled by librarians to provide easy links for children to information on the web for their curriculum studies into the environment. The subjects covered reflect the different needs of schools in the partner countries at the time. There are also global sites which cover the environment and also national education sites.
The catalogue was never intended to be a comprehensive list of all the sites available. To some extent the sites were recommended by librarians; poor sites were not included and the sites had been checked by librarians for their suitability for the children taking part in the project. A variety of different types of sites were included.
Evaluation sheets were developed by the Dublin partners who coordinated this work package, and used by all three partners with children to evaluate the sites. This provided some useful insights into what children expected from an information website and the factors which were likely to encourage further use of the sites or put children off from using them. In general it was found that children's attention was kept by websites with interactive features and eye-catching features and that speed of response was important. For further information see the Users Response report [4].
As a result of this it was decided to change the format of the catalogue of sites to include ten recommended sites from each country plus ten global sites and improve the presentation of the catalogue. This work is still in hand and will be included in the new look web site to be launched in March.
The catalogue of websites will be checked to ensure that links are still operating and new sites added for the remainder of the project. Criteria for inclusion of sites have been developed.
The production of content by the children is integral to HERCULE and the creation of a process and environment to encourage and facilitate children in the creation of their own web content will form the main "deliverable" for HERCULE which will be capable of exploitation by partners and others in future.
Planning meetings took place with school staff in June, July and August in all partner countries to agree methodologies and details required for the project to take place. It proved difficult to do any detailed planning until September because there were too many undecided factors affecting the classes involved. Dublin librarians held a meeting with the teacher involved in October to explain the project and the website.
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| Figure 2 (a) Children working in Oeiras | (b) Children at Ballyfermot Library, Dublin |
The project was introduced to both schools in Walsall during trips to the library. The students were introduced to the concept of HERCULE. The topics to be included in the website were discussed and the HERCULE website and a few selected sites were looked at to give students some idea of what websites could look like. The sessions went well and the students were enthusiastic. The project was presented to the Portuguese children in September, some web sites were looked at and the topics to be covered were discussed. In Dublin the children were first introduced to producing content for the HERCULE website in October, although they had looked at some of the websites listed in the catalogue in July. These activities took place in Ballyfermot Library, with children from St. Gabriel's National School.
At the first session in each school in Walsall the students were organised in groups of 2, 3 or 4 to study and produce material on topics they chose. The larger groups have tended to split into pairs and some children have produced individual work within the group structure. The students chose their own topics such as transport, shops, the past, youth clubs, sport, etc.
Sessions for HERCULE have taken place using computers in local public libraries, exclusively in Oeiras and Dublin. Sessions in school have taken place in children's form classrooms, computer suites with and without internet access, and out in the community. Help has been provided by school staff with either IT or subject skills (or both), library staff from local libraries (librarians and supervisors), children from later years in school who have better IT skills and the Windows on our World co-ordinator. (Windows on our world is a similar project covering all the schools in Walsall but without any links to other countries).
In Dublin the children researched the local area and produced written work which was later reproduced on the web site. The focus of the work will be at the library as there is not as much access to computers in the school. The topics chosen were very similar to those in Walsall and Oeiras.
The children in Oeiras produced the icons for the menu of art forms to be used as the main structure of the HERCULE website [5]. Children and Librarians collaborated with the art designer to produce the Flash technology software for the menu.
The importance of planning the work, particularly information needs, quickly became clear. There was initially a lot of input on different topics from the children's own experience but the initial enthusiasm was slowed down a bit by lack of information. Planning where to get information from (books, interviews, photos, internet etc) was a necessary next step. The information skills of some of the children are not highly developed and this became another area for action. A simple quiz based on local information was used at Bloxwich Library to give some basic practice in finding information.
Some of the perceived information needs were not realistic and some children became disillusioned by their lack of progress. In retrospect it would have been better to provide a lot of varied information right at the beginning of the project. The lack of easily accessible material slowed the project down until it could be remedied. The use of First Class Server access for the children to material which had been uploaded by library staff helped.
Photographs provided a visual stimulus and an attractive way of presenting information. Some of these were taken using digital cameras by students on supervised trips into the community during school time, others were provided by library staff from local history collections and present day digital and scanned photos.
The printed sources for heritage information caused problems for many students due to the impenetrable prose in which many are written and the unattractive format of books published many years ago. Books of photographs with informative captions were the most popular ready-made sources of heritage information. There is a need for project staff to reformat information into easily digested chunks to make it more palatable to the less academic students.
Children in Oeiras are collecting information about the selected topics from books, magazines, Internet, CD-Roms etc. Help from librarians was essential as children's information skills are not highly developed. The children also had a bus tour of Oeiras as many of them were not familiar with the area. A tourist guide gave a commentary and provided documentation.
Some children found it difficult to come up with ideas to put on their web pages, even for topics they had chosen themselves. The original idea was to base the project on what children think about their communities in the present day and use that as a starting point for looking at the heritage aspect. Many of the children needed more stimulus to develop their ideas and a questionnaire "A day in the life of ..." was devised to help in this. The initial idea to "let the children's imagination fly" was not very easy to put into practice!
Photographs are a good way of presenting impressions of the community as it is now and carefully chosen old photos can give a vivid impression of life in the past, and its links to the present through buildings and roads that still exist. A series of "Then and Now" views is planned, with plenty of details of people and how they lived in the past and the present will encourage an interest.
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| Figure 3: Bloxwich High Street (Walsall) in the 1900s | Bloxwich High Street in 1999 |
One problem with using books for the project is that many of the photographs chosen by children may have copyright restrictions on their reproduction.
The initial web pages produced by the students in Darlaston were made using Microsoft Word, which was subsequently saved as HTML for inclusion on the website. This had the advantage of using software that the children were familiar with and allowed quite sophisticated use of fonts, colour and layout. Some of the pages had to be modified using Microsoft FrontPage to allow them to appear on the web browser effectively. This was initially done by library staff, but the children will need to be aware of how it was done so that they can take the requirements of webpage display into account and do the conversion themselves.
Some of the Darlaston students used Microsoft FrontPage to create a homepage with links to the other pages. This worked well, especially as this was a particularly able group.
The students at TP Riley used Microsoft Powerpoint to create their initial web pages, as suggested by one of the teaching staff. This allowed very attractive pages to be created on the PC with animation and sound but these did not convert at all easily when saved as web pages, and many of the features did not work on Internet Explorer. There may be ways round this but the structure of the files and HTML created by Powerpoint make it difficult to modify using any other software (see [6]).
More work will need to be done to allow the students to understand the limitations of the different ways of working and the effect on the final web page. The importance of quick downloading of images and other files from the website will also have an effect. Web page design skills will develop as the project progresses. It is also important that children who are not particularly interested in this aspect should be allowed to create content which can be presented on the web page by others.
In Dublin Dreamweaver was used to create the Ballyfermot web pages using material produced by the children. Children will be able to use Microsoft Frontpage at Ballyfermot Library to create their own web pages (see [7]).
The First Class server now plays an important role in the project in Walsall. The server is set up at present so that each student and teacher has their own desktop, which they can log into from school or the local library. Included on the desktop is access to Email and "TP Riley Students" and "Darlaston Students" conferences which give read-only access to information (mainly photographs at present). These can be downloaded and included in students work.
First Class has been installed on eight computers at Ballyfermot Library and will be used by the children for HERCULE. It may be possible to also install FCIS at the school but at present most of the work on the project is likely to take place in the library.
Students can also upload their work to the server to save it on their desktops and this also provides a route by which it can be easily uploaded to the HERCULE website which is hosted on the First Class Server.
The HERCULE website files are only accessible to the administrator (at present the technical partners, Project Manager and staff in Dublin and Portugal) It is relatively easy to add new sections to the website and, as the content increases, the structure of the website will be developed to make slotting in new sections, and links to them, as easy as possible.
The eventual content of the website has yet to be finalised. A structure for the site has been created by computer staff and children in Oeiras after consultations with the other partners. This will become the main access to material produced by children on the web site and the updated version will be installed by the end of March.
The structure is a modified version of the first menu of art forms [5] and is based on seven main headings:
It is not clear, however, whether it will be possible or desirable to try to produce a comprehensive coverage of every aspect of each community's heritage, culture and environment.
The initial web pages in Walsall were kept deliberately simple so that results could be produced fairly rapidly. The children are now showing more interest in using more advance techniques such as animation, sound and video clips and more interactive ways of presenting information. The students are not really aware of the complications and skills needed to use these techniques but expect to be able to introduce them. We will look at ways of introducing these skills with the help of arts workers as the project progresses.
Over the next six months content will be developed, methods of presentation will be explored and the material will be uploaded into the website structure which will be in place by the end of March.
Communication between the children involved in the different partner countries has always been an exciting possibility for HERCULE. As the children are now getting to grips with the technology and beginning to have something to show each other on their websites it is intended to set up e-mail, chat sessions and possibly video conferencing sessions between them. The important thing here is to ensure that access is controlled so that we know that the children are talking to genuine participants in HERCULE. There is a lot of potential for children to gain insights into the differences and similarities in the lifestyle, culture and heritage of other countries of Europe.
The main priority for the partners for the rest of the duration of HERCULE, apart from the completion of the content, is the dissemination, promotion and evaluation of the project. HERCULE has tremendous exploitation potential and the development of successful ways of working with children to create web material will have applications in many similar projects. There is potential to use the HERCULE website to include material from other countries or other regions within Britain, Ireland and Portugal. A package of suggested ideas, materials and procedures will be produced which will enable schools, libraries or other organizations working with children to produce web material.
This has been an overview of the progress so far on HERCULE. The first annual report, with detail of work packages, deliverables and progress is available on the HERCULE web site [8].
A lot of new skills have been learned by everyone involved and working with children has been interesting and entertaining. There will be real benefits from the project in enabling other groups to recreate similar projects in future.
The benefits to children taking part in this and similar projects cannot be overemphasized. Although it is generally held that children are highly computer literate and some have access to computer facilities and the internet at home this is far from universal. Many children in less affluent parts of Britain, Portugal, Ireland and other countries of Europe have little access to computers or the internet. Libraries can provide this and schools can help to provide the skills required to use them. HERCULE has shown children that they can not only make use of the World Wide Web but that they can add their own material to it. For the citizens of the future this will be an increasingly important skill, the children of HERCULE are beginning to make an important step towards that future.
John Shercliff
Walsall MBC
Bloxwich Library
Elmore Row
Bloxwich
Walsall
WS3 2HR
United Kingdom
URL: <http://www.walsall.gov.uk/cultural_services/library/>
Email: <shercliffj@walsall.gov.uk>
Tel: +44 1922 710059
John Shercliff is Project Manager for HERCULE and Library Services Manager for Walsall Public Libraries and Information Services. He also acts as chair of Walsall Libraries Flexible Learning Centre Group, responsible for coordinating Walsall's free public access computer provision.
For citation purposes:
John Shercliff, "HERCULE: Heritage and Culture through Libraries in Europe",
Exploit Interactive, issue 5, April 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/hercule/>
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