The Volks Railway event

Four cars were running on the Saturday opening of the railway, and at the depot halfway along the line the Connect project was given two of the cars to present in. The Volks railway is the oldest electric railway in the world. To bring attention to this fact the town major was there to unveil comemorative plaques in a small ceremony.
He came over for a look at the presentation and showed genuine interest in our project. The team working with the decorations for the cars put together posters and banners to hang around the depot and in the cars. Posters were put up on the running cars to attract visitors to the exhibition.There was a lot of people who came in to have alook and talk to the participants.

The participants walked around the exhibition with the visitors showing them the pictures and explaining what the real experience was like. This gave a more personal impression of the project. One part of the event was a running powerpoint presentation showing pictures from the Achill experience. This is just one way of showing what uses the new technology can have. The presentation gave the visitors a feeling of what it had been like and of the work put in by the different workshops on the island.

To get the visitors connected and actually involved in the project, a simple writing exercise linked together with the train concept was arranged. An idea was developed with a map theme to show the visitors from where the participants are across Europe. This was also a way to illustrate the hypertext structuring work of a webpage. The visitors were asked to participate by sharing their stories of travels and plotting it on the real map. This was then taken further by following though with the hyperlinking of an actual webpage connecting these stories on the web. During the week a webpage was designed and a running travelogue was produced to record the work during the week to let the participants not present and the public get an idea of what was going on

Dr. Elmar-Laurent Borgmann
Rhein-Ahr-Campus, FH-Koblenz