Homeless+in+Adelaide

We met our rpr class and teacher, Ms Mcinnes. she told us what our task was and how to research more efficiently. We were able to work independently on a project or form a group. I wanted to form a group with Colin and Cindy.
 * week 1: 26.01.10**

Our class was introduced to DLSOPE. D: define L: locate S: select O: organise P: present E: evaluate
 * week 2: 02.02.10**

We also learnt about Wikispaces and were asked to sign up and make an account. Wikispaces enables us to record our actions and thoughts on our project. Our group finally came up with the topic, technology revolution.

We watched an animated slideshow that quized us about plagiarism and its consequences. We also learnt about the advantages of wonder wheeling. When we began researching we also realised that we couldn't gather much facts or information on our topic, and this became a problem.
 * week 3: 08.02.10**

Its the end of week 3 and we have promptly decided to change topics, because Cindy left our class and it was also difficult to find information. We decided to change from technology revolution to "depression and suicide among Australian youths". However we then thought this would also be difficult so we changed again to "homeless in Adelaide". Colin and I agree that it is a a big issue that doesn't receive enough attention from our age group, and it is also close to home.
 * week 3: 12.2.2010**

We were given a demo of how to use webinspiration by Chris & Darren. Webinspiration allows us to create concept maps which helps us build ideas on our topic.
 * week 4: 8.2.2010**

I spoke to my oldest sister about this topic because she volunteered part-time as a lawyer at "//housing legal clinic"// she offered a few ideas and suggestions. Our current idea is to research about homelessness in Adelaide and volunteer at a 'soup kitchen' and interview a few of the homeless people. We are hoping to voice record or make a video out of this.
 * week 5: 22.2.2010**

During the interview we are planning on asking them: - what problems they encounter from day to day - about their past and how they became homeless - what their feelings are on their life - where they live at the moment

Our questions for the research are: - what age group, nationality, gender and occupation are the homeless people from - rate of homelessness per annum - how many people are homeless currently - risk (%) of becoming homeless - what is the governments attitude towards the homeless, how are they helping? - how they get by - how does SA compare to the rest of Australia - how does Australia compare to the rest of the world

this week we're preparing our interview questions and survey questions (seen above). We're now considering doing a soup run for St Vinnies, that allows us to make contact with some of the homeless.
 * week 6: 1.3.2010**

We were able to find the contact details of Tim Taylor who helps //the St Vincent De Paul society// and we asked him a few questions via email. Hopefully we will be allowed to volunteer and find some people to interview for our project.
 * week 7: 12.3.2010**

We received a reply to our email from Tim. Unfortunately we will not be allowed to conduct any interviews because he would like us to respect the dignity of his clients. However he is willing to give us information and advice to make our project better.
 * week 8:**

We've emailed back to Tim and we are now hoping to receive another three emails from him with attached radio interviews.

we've confirmed the student induction day during the holidays, monday 12th, and are hoping to gather information from mr. Taylor.
 * week 9:**

After going to the St Vinnie’s student induction day during the holiday, I was able to gather some useful information about homelessness for our project. There were only 10 students and myself and we had Mr Tim Taylor as the host? We were also joined by Kate who was a volunteer from the St Vinnie’s in Victoria. Mr Taylor began the day with a great media presentation about homelessness and telling us about the origination of the St Vincent organisation. It was amazing to learn that the whole organisation began with a group of University students. After the presentation, we walked a few blocks to the St Vinnie’s men’s shelter. The Shelter is currently managed by Mr Mike Wockel, who is an ex warren at the Adelaide Men’s Jail. He told us a bit about the shelter. He then took us on a tour of the shelter. It was surprisingly clean, open and comfortable. We returned to the first building, the Ozanam House, to have our break and view a video. The video was of homeless youth on camp with teenage volunteers who were a part of the ‘big brother, big sister’ program.
 * term 2 week 1**

We emailed Mr Taylor again to thank him for providing us with the opportunity to attend the induction day in town. We’ve decided to change our hypothesis to: ‘what are the contributing factors and how can we reduce homelessness in Australia’. Colin and I both feel more comfortable with this than our last: ‘we can raise awareness of homelessness of Australia’.
 * Week 2**

We’ve completed locating our information and have decided to do a multimedia presentation instead of a written report, because we received some audio interviews we think would be good to share. We’ve begun organising the information under subheadings for each slide and hopefully our presentation will answer our hypothesis.
 * Week 3**

we are preparing our draft for our presentation. It's proving to be quite difficult because we have many 'holes' in our presentation as we are missing some valuable information. We're not sure if our last email to thank Mr Taylor was received but I'm hoping to be able to email Mr Taylor again because he showed a lot of great video's, pictures and information that would be a helpful to us and would be great to share with the class. In our presenation we wish to do a cross cultural comparison, where we can compare Australia's homeless population to other Nations like Denmark and the United States. However we cannot locate any statistics over the internet, so we are beginning to look at other sources.
 * Week 4**

After viewing our draft, Ms McInnes suggested we change our hypothesis from a question to a statement. Our hypothesis is now changed to 'we can reduce homelessness in Australia by reducing the contributing factors.'
 * week 5**

She has also asked us to include more information on homeless youth. I do remember a great video Mr Taylor showed us at the induction day, of homeless refugee children on camp with their 'big brother' or 'big sister' organised by st vinnies. i will email him again and ask for the video and permission to show it to the class. hopefully he'll say yes =).

we created another concept map to help us organise our presentation.**week 6** We received a reply from Mr Taylor and he has said that he is sorry, but the St Vinnies organisation cannot give us a copy of the video but instead he could come to Woodville to show the video. Colin and I have decided to decline his kind offer.

Ms McInnes has reminded us that our class is due to present next week. i believe Colin and I are almost ready, with a couple of slides left to complete as well as the designing and animating of the presentation. We've planned to finish everything and rehearse over the weekend.

while finding recent news articles of homelessness on ebsco host we found one about 'hush for homelessness' which is the biggest fundraiser in Australia which helps homeless people. the event occured on the 14th of may, unfortunatelyand if we had found out about it earlier we could've gotten our school involved.

Colin and I were first to present our power point on Monday. I was lucky that Colin agreed to do the speaking, because he is a much better speaker than i. =) To improve our presentation i think we should've rehearsed more because it ran for quite a long time; much longer than we expected. Although if we shortened the time, we would've had to cut out a lot of our information. Overall i think our presentation was better than i expected, but some things could've been improved to make it more effetive and 'flow' more smoothely.
 * week 7**