Educational Objectives
“BLYTHING”
A prototype knowledge system for community networking on ‘the web’
This new web network is the outcome of an E.C. LIFE environment programme to boost the environmental management capability of communities. The major participants have been the UK Conservation Management System Consortium, the University of Ulster, the Schools and Communities Agenda 21 Network of the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff Bay Development Corporation, the Countryside Council for Wales, and Chevron Texaco. The Going Green Directorate, an informal association of volunteers throughout the UK, who have produced and tested its various modules, is carrying the project forward. It has continuity with a basic idea of building IT community networks for environmental improvements, which originated in the St Clears Teacher’s Resource Centre of Dyfed County Council in 1994. It is a follow-up to a people’s history of Halesworth www.halesworth.bravehost.com and Parham Millennium Parish SCAN, a community appraisal carried out by parishioners to mark the new millennium.
The basic components are:
BLYTHING-Pages
A public web space journal to communicate ideas, achievements and provoke discussion about how people can become involved in surveying and managing their local environment to promote neighbourhood action for sustainability.
BLYTHING-Classes
Holistic education frameworks linking development with conservation management.
BLYTHING-Action
Practical protocols for people to research their community’s history and environmental issues and produce and operate conservation plans for improving the neighbourhood’s greenspaces.
A virtual journey around the Blything Hundred in the form of a geographical information system to which people can extend and attach multimedia walks through their community to illustrate environmental issues and solutions.
BLYTHING-Net
Links to other networks with similar aims.
The above text was written in the late 1990s when Blything was invented as an outcome of the Internet revolution in information handling. Blything began as a set of Hypercards on the Macintosh computer and was subsequently developed as a wiki on the Wikispaces educational platform. With the closure of Wikispaces in 2018 the pages have been transferred to Google sites. The only one of the original basic components to survive these migrations is part of Blything Walks.