CSC300 Service Learning: Website for the Global Roots Garden

I met with our service partner Sara and another classmate Andrew yesterday.
Up to this point, we have built a prototype of the website for the Global Roots Garden.
Andrew and I were both super busy during these two weeks. Fortunately, the website
does not require any fancy function. Web users can listen to the stories of the gardeners
by using the Google reader mp3 player embedded in the web page. Inspired from the website
http://mycitylives.com/, people can view the gardeners' profiles by clicking on a "seed" icon
spread on a image. They then will see the photo of the gardener who is telling the story so that people feel more connected to the story as if they are told by the gardener himself/herself.
I am also responsible for creating a different language version of the website, allowing people from different countries to access.

As a result, our contribution to the community and the neighborhood is positive. We can not see any change or consequence right away since the website is not online and the stories have not been uploaded to the server yet. However, our service partner Sara is quite satisfied with our cooperation. Due to the deadline of this course, our service also comes to an end. I hope this project will help foster the improvement of the cultural diversity within the city.

CSC300 Service Learning: Storytelling

This should be posted a two weeks ago but I was too busy to write the thing down. I went to the the garden at St.Clair West & Bathurst to help our service partner, Sara, with interviewing a Chinese Woman, from Dongbei province in China. Surprisingly Sara learned Chinese before when she was teaching as a TA in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in Shanghai.
Since Sara had difficulties fully understanding her words, she asked me to help translate the story and any questions/answers from the Chinese woman. This is very helpful for the story recording because there may be a chance the woman tell the story without understanding Sara's question. We still spent a whole afternoon to make sure the woman's telling the story relevantly. She mentioned her experience of growing food fifty years ago in China. She also told us what is her life like after she moved to Canada. She told us how different was the food grew locally in Toronto from the food she grew in Beijing. Eventually these stories will be visible to the public through the web. I was pleased that I helped collect the story and build the interface for more people to access to the story in this project. It was quite an amazing experience.