NomadWarMachine

“postcard board” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license Dear Data is a beautiful book that tells the story of how two people became friends by sending weekly postcards to each other for a year while living in New York (Giorgia) and London (Stefanie). In 2016, when the book was first published, a global group of educators called CLMOOC read and were inspired by it. In the original project, Giorgia and Stefanie choose a different weekly theme (as you might guess from the title of the book their postcards chronicled the type of data they had chosen to collect each week). In CLMOOC we began by choosing and announcing a monthly theme. After a while we slowed the pace and began choosing a new theme as a topic occurred to one or several of us. During the covid-19 pandemic we chose Post Pandemic Postcards as a theme, when the war in Ukraine broke out we sent Postcards for Peace. The way it works is this. People sign up to be part of the postcard project by completing a very simple Google Form with their name, address and email. Once they submit this, they are given access to the Google Sheet containing everyone’s details. What they do next is up to them. They can send a card to everyone on the list, or just a few, or just one person. They might choose the current or recent theme, or not. They might make a card, or buy one. There are no rules. Sometimes I send regular ‘tourist’ cards when I’m on holiday, and I usually make a bunch at Christmas and send them across the globe. In my PhD thesis I talk about how this activity helped our community to forge deeper connections, and the joy I feel when a card pops through my letterbox. I’d like to suggest that we set up a similar activity for this writing collaboration. There’s a few ways that we might do this. I’ve set up a Google Form to collect contact details of anyone who’d like to participate in sending physical cards – either by sending from their home address across the pond, or by using a service such as Moonpig to manage the delivery. Alternatively, or as well, people might decide to make digital postcards and send them to each other, and there’s lots of ways of doing that, such as this digital postcard app. I promise that I will send a physical card to everyone who completes the Google Form – I’m already getting my stationary ready!