The VINE is a Drama Australia project, initiated by Drama Victoria, involving local and international sharing of performance making processes through web based technology. This project takes place in the lead up to the IDEA congress, Planting IDEAS, Hong Kong, 2007.

About The ViNE (Very Interesting Networking Experience)

The ViNE a Drama Australia project, initiated by Drama Victoria, involving local and international sharing of performance making processes through web based technology. This project takes place in the lead up to the IDEA congress, Planting IDEAS, Hong Kong, 2007.

The SEED. Using a common starting point or stimulus, groups of drama and theatre students or participants and their teachers or arts workers across all ages (primary/secondary/tertiary), all educational and community settings and from all states and territories of Australia and neighbouring countries are invited to create a performance based on a theme:

Planting human IDEAS: global vision in local knowledge.

The theme is inspired by the IDEA (International Association for Drama and Theatre in Education) congress theme for 2007 and it is hoped that the theme will be inviting, challenging and open enough to inspire a broad range of performances that will also reflect what young people in our region (Australasia and SE Asia) are thinking about themselves, their world and their place within it.

The VINE project aims to share the creative processes of performance making through a multi-user blogging environment – it is the vine that links the performing groups. Groups create a blog (web log), journaling the process of developing their performance. These blogs may also include images and pod casts. All participating groups (and interested non-participants) are able to visit the blogs of other groups and gain insights into the different approaches to creating a performance and the different outcomes. Through the blogs participants from the different groups involved are able to post comments, ask questions and contribute thoughts and reflections on each other’s performance making and their own experience of the process.

Many blogs were created as part of the VINE pilot project in semester 1, 2006. We’d love your drama group/class to be a part of the growing VINE. Go ahead and create your vineblog at http://vineblogs.net or visit some of the others listed there. You can begin now and/or join us in the build up to the IDEA congress in semester 1, 2007.

Aims

The VINE project aims to provide:

• An opportunity for drama educators to gain insights into a range of creative processes set up by other drama educators.
• An opportunity to make visible the performance making processes and share the different approaches taken up and resulting performances by groups of different ages, from different settings, places, cultures and circumstances.
• An opportunity to promote intercultural understanding/ cultural exchange through the sharing of responses to a performance making task on a shared theme.
• An opportunity to explore the potential of ICT in the journaling, reflecting upon and sharing of the performance making work.
• An opportunity for young people to show initiative, inventiveness and lead the way in the exploration and uses of ICT.
• A focus for Australian drama educators and students and others from our region in the lead up to the IDEA congress 2007.
• An opportunity for the presentation of drama/theatre processes and work from our part of the world in an international forum (IDEA congress, Hong Kong, 2007).

Information for participants:

Vineblogs potentially have a worldwide audience and this presents opportunities as well as responsibilities. The vineblogs community itself will involve a diverse range of participants and will need to be respectful of differences in age, gender, culture and religion. It is expected that each group involved in the project will have a designated teacher/director who is responsible for generally over seeing uploads/downloads.

The responsible person may need to remind participants not to post anything that may be offensive. If inappropriate content is posted bloggers will need to be requested to edit their posts to remove such material or teacher/directors can contact the vineblogs moderator Justin Cash to remove the offensive material.

Most vineblogs do not include details that identify particular students (eg. choosing to use only first names). It is expected that teacher/directors will make decisions within their particular settings in regard to how much information is included within blogs. Participants must be fully informed of the web based sharing and where appropriate or necessary, gaining consent from parents or guardians. Participants should also be aware that contents of the blog may also be presented at IDEA 2007 in Hong Kong.

• The ‘about’ tab on the right hand side of the blog site is a place to list some basic information for example, the type of group, year level/ages, number of participants involved, details of performance task set, time spent on the performance project etc. Please take some time to include some appropriate information here.

Vineblogs Privacy Statement:

Vineblogs takes your privacy seriously and this page outlines what sort of information we collect from you, how we use it and for what purposes.

What information does Vineblogs collect?
Vineblogs administrators and moderators have access to the information Vineblogs bloggers see on the profile page of their dashboard, or blog administration panel. This includes your login username and email address, but does not include your password. We need to have access to this information so we can ensure Vineblogs is being used properly. Occasionally our moderators edit or delete offensive blogs or posts for the benefit of all users.

Does Vineblogs share this information with others?
No. Vineblogs does not share your username or email address with third parties for any purpose.

What is Vineblogs’ policy regarding the use of cookies?
The WordPress blogging software used at Vineblogs does not place cookies on the computers of the vast majority of our users. Cookies are only placed on users computers who enable the password protection feature in their blogs. While password protecting blog posts seems contradictory to the very nature of blogging, some Drama educators using Vineblogs may wish their blogs to be visible only to a select number of people for the purposes of research in drama education. In this case, cookies are placed on the user’s computer to store the password.

How does Vineblogs share information?
While the Vineblogs site involves blogging by Drama students and teachers or leaders on many performance making projects, it was initially set up for projects using the 2007 World Drama Congress theme of ‘Planting IDEAS’. As a result, some information already publicly available on users’ blogs may be presented as blogging examples at conference presentations. No personally identifiable information about you will be shared with others.

Will I get spam or other annoying emails because I use Vineblogs?
As your email address is not shared with third parties, you will not receive unwanted emails from others as a result of your blogging on Vineblogs. Spam is an unfortunate reality of the web, however anti-spam measures have been put in place on the Vineblogs site. If you find unwanted spam is getting through please inform us as other anti-spam measures are available.

From time to time, you may be invited to participate in surveys initiated by Vineblogs administrators for the purposes of better understanding your use of Vineblogs, helping us further improve it for yourself and other users. Survey responses may also be used at conference presentations, but no personally identifiable information about you will be used.