Karyn Ainsworth / Liz Egan

Gifts of the First People

Documentation Group: Final Presentation Summary

In the past years of the sayuyay Plant Project, now Gifts of the First People, students have been required to write weekly journal entries that detail the insights, connections, and learning they had obtained through their involvement in the project. Our work within the Documentation Group this quarter has focused on reading and organizing these entries so that they can be used in future projects. By the end of the quarter, we will have compiled student journal excerpts from the year 2002-2003 and, at least partially, from the year 2001-2002 into a series of .html files. Ultimately, these files will be added to a project file on Evergreen’s server (another future endeavor) so that they can be referenced by students, added to the web-page, or used in future project work.

Our original vision was to make a year-round planning calendar incorporating journal excerpts, photographs, and seasonal garden care tips, but simply organizing the information consumed the entire quarter. Liz has also done a great deal of work this quarter to organize and label photographs that have been taken throughout the span of the project. In the past few weeks, she has begun to match up journal excerpts to pictures that they compliment. After all of this preparatory work, a year-round planning calendar will be a tangible project for next quarter.