First things first: starting Fab Academy is a shock to the system. A heady mix of fear, excitement, trepidation and wonder. Wrap this within a shell of underperforming internet, and a language barrier, and the learning curve appears even more oblique. But, hey, i didn't subscribe to something that I thought would be easy.
My background is in Music Technology. As a founder member of The Nerve Centre, Northern Ireland's premier creative media arts centre I have been involved in the creation of numerous performance and recording spaces both within the centre and regionally. In latter years i had become principally engaged in the design and delivery of hands on training programmes in all aspects of music production.
Then, the culmination of both lots of hard work, and just a healthy slice of luck resulted in the Nerve Centre, in partnership with the Ashton Centre Belfast, accrueing the necessary funding to open and operate Fab Labs under the heading of FabLab NI. Operational since May 2013, the primary focus of the Labs was to develop new models of peace building and inter-community co operation through participation in creative, collaborative activity, and also to act as a springboard for social enterprise within areas of high economic deprivation in both Derry and Belfast. A mixture of due dilligence, and the wonder of FabLabs re-introducing people to the thrill of making has helped us exceed all targets that we had originally set for the programme, and we continure to grow and expand regionally.
Then, at a meeting in CBA with Neil Gershenfeld, it was suggested that we should consider the setting up of a "Foundation" to assist in the development of further Labs throughout the island of Ireland. A working group was established, and with help from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, we secured both a place to hold meetings, and also to gain access to Government decision makers. This resulted in the formation of Fab Foundation Ireland. At present there are 6 Labs operational, with a further Lab and Aquaponic Farm project in Derry, but we expect this number to rise to 12 within the next few years.
One of the main problems we encounter here in Ireland is a lack of Labs within which Fab Academy is hosted. There are no local tutors here. Also, there are no current locations in UK offering Fab Academy. So, as a policy of Fab Foundation Ireland, it was decided to tackle this head on, as participation in Fab Academy is seen as essential for the effective development of future Labs. So with this in mind, I was selected as the candidate to both participate in this years Academy, and then put this to further use in the development of future Irish sites for hosting f Fab Academy.
All of the above is a long winded way of saying that I have little or no experience in many of the subject areas within Fab Academy syllabus. And that starts this week. I have never used either html or git! As a remote lab, this means that a lot of the development will need to be tackled on my own, or with the other participant taking the course from FabLab Nerve Centre.
First thing was to follow a tutorial on git. This has now been completed, and whilst i know more now than i did at the start, I am still very far away from understanding both the complete concept and the operational use of that particular vcs package. So, i will follow the tutorial again tomorrow, in order to remove a few more layers of the confusion.
For html, as suggested, i browsed a few of the platforms brought forward in the lecture. I decided early on not to use one of the pre-formatted packages like Wordpress, as I believed if I was going to learn about html, i may as well start from the beginning. And, leading from that, I also decided that downloading a template for Fab Academy would also be counter productive in the long term. So, for reasons that i cant fully explain, i settled on brackets as the platform of choice. I liked the simplicity of the layout and also the live preview.....remember i have never done this before, so instant confirmation is a wonderful learning tool. Since deciding on the platforem, I have been studying tutorials in easy html, and this has resulted in the site you are now reading. For now i will be keeping it simple graphically until I learn a lot more particularly with regards to css, but it is a long road, and hopefully the look of this site will change many times over the duration of the programme as my knowledge base expands. So forgive the look at the moment, and come back on a regular basis to share in my development. So far i have learned how to lay out headings and paragraphs, how to align text, how to introduce images, multiple linked pages and also external links to other sites.
I only really knew that I would be a participant on this course last week, so i have not had much time to think of a final project. I will however outline a few possibilities. In order to maximise the benefit of all the skills i will gain on this journey, i will attempt to limit the scope of my aspirations to projects that lie within the areas of music technology / sound art, or potential future projects that i can subsequently roll out within a community context as part of my daily work within FabLab Nerve Centre.