Between April and August 2002, I was teaching Flash once a week at Mobilatorij, the Mobitel’s mobile classroom.
Mobilatorij was initially Marko Peljhan’s project transHUB 01, which, after heavy sponsorhip by Mobitel, was christened Mobilatorij. The project goal was to raise the level of digital literacy, especially in places without the necessary infrastructure. It functions as an autonomous unit that can be, after being transported by a truck, connect itself to local communications lines or use its satellite connection capabilities.
The container travelled around Slovenia and stayed in each town for about 3 weeks, hosting free lectures given mostly by students working part-time in the telecommunications and internet industry.
Since Fry didn’t want or didn’t have time to participate in the project, he recommendedme to Živa Frelih, who was the programme coordinator of Mobilatorij and I aggreed to give one lecture a week.
I was in a very bad state at the time, motivation-wise. I felt stuck in the same position, the work I was doing started being less and less creative and more like an assembly-line. So when the challenge came to travel to different parts of the country and give lectures about what I thought I was really good at, while making the more money for a lecture than I got for a day’s work at Parsek, I jumped at it with all force. And in a way, I was closing a chapter of my life that was Parsek.
As it turned out, my lectures were extremely popular. They were one of the few, that were completely booked most of the time. In Maribor, I even had to do two groups back-to-back. How’s that for a boost in motivation and self-esteem?
Usually, the lectures were repeated each week, but I thought that Flash was such a wide subject, that I broke the workshop into 3 parts, so the same group attended the lectures for three weeks. Each week, we concentrated on a different aspect of Flash:
- Using the Flash authoring environment
- Animation, sound and basic scripting and interactivity
- Scripting in Flash
Of course, there was a lot of improvising involved, because I had never done such lectures before and because the people that attended them ranged from computer illiterates to those who wanted the more advanced stuff.
I gave lectures at the following cities:
- Trbovlje, April 2002
- Maribor, May2002
- Koper, June 2002
- Nova Gorica, July 2002
- Tolmin, August 2002
Tags: Flash, Mobilatorij, Mobitel, workshop