A long Winter's blog...

This blogging beat is not for the faint of heart -- take your eye off the ball for a minute and six weeks goes by! I guess I owe you one...

We have endured -- and apparently survived -- our first Winter storm. And more importantly, after tomorrow, the days start getting longer again. Now that's something to celebrate!

Over at ECA we're working hard on our next edition of Road Kill Radio (to be aired on Jan. 22 on WPKN -- 89.5 FM). http://www.wpkn.org/

The show will include a lot of goodies, such as street interviews, an interview with Diamondayze (a student band), a report on The Forum (a New Haven-based youth group), poetry from the ECA writers and a report on a new oral journaling project being undertaken by the Radio Class in collaboration with the Creative Writing Department.

This year we received an ACES Foundation grant to purchase six digital voice recorders to be loaned to students for the purpose of keeping oral journals. This past month, Radio Class students began taking the recorders home and thus the project was launched. Here are some preliminary reports from four Radio Class participants.

Blake:
When I started, I thought to myself, "How am I supposed to do this?" I have never actually sat there and talked to myself. I mostly express myself with art and stuff -- like drawing. I never write down things - like a journal. So I just decided to go like a diary and go very deep into it. Some things that people don't know about me, I actually said in it...Like things I don't share in everyday life...I took it as more of a very deep project, rather than like, you know, "I'm just going to play around with this cool tape recorder."

Caroline:
I ended up taking my recorder a lot of places. I took it to school, to the ECA bathroom where I was playing my flute, and I spent a lot of time recording at night.. I really enjoyed this experience because I got to say a lot of stuff that doesn't come up in conversation much but really bothers me or really interests me... I felt like I really opened up and it was a lot of fun.

Skylar:
I ended up doing most of my recording at 2 or 3 in the morning. It was actually really interesting. I ended up saying a lot -- it was fun.While doing it I found that a lot of the stuff that I ended up saying is stuff that I had wanted to say for a while but it's not the sort of thing that you can say in every day conversation or gets brought up every day -- so that was really cool...

Lezlie:
When I did it, I actually found myself not knowing what to say -- should I be casual or more deep, but overall it was fun, a new experience.If I had to do it again, I'd probably go deeper, hearing other people and what they did sharing their personal experiences.

Meanwhile, in class... we have been discussing what to do with the oral journals -- e.g. whether to post the audio or transcripts on this website; or broadcast edited versions on Road Kill Radio. Any thoughts?

And coming soon: a report on the Lincoln Middle School broadcast radio project which has been up and running for five weeks.

Have a peaceful holiday -- talk to you later.