Some months back, I was hired by Kate Pullinger and Tony Newman to help out with their wonderful Ebb & Flow schools project.

Andy Campbell (the genius behind Dreaming Methods) has done a fantastic job of capturing the energy, wit and imagination with which the kids tackled their digital writing assignment.

Inspired by a single trip down the River Orwell, they’ve come up with loads of different ways of telling a story digitally – from short films to newspaper layouts to geolocated content to hand-drawn pictures.

Inspired, in part by Ebb & Flow, I thought it would be salutary to take the sounds and images I’d garnered from a recent walk and try to shape these into some kind of audio slideshow:

All the sounds and images I gathered that day are available to you all online on Audioboo and Flickr. And I’ve also created a map that shows you where we walked:

What you’ll notice is that I’ve described this as ‘fairly basic’ and, as with quite a lot of my development work of recent years, you’ll find I’ve tried to cover my professional arse by (sort of) apologising for the amateurishness of my approach and the poor ‘quality’ of the media I’m using & making.

What Ebb & Flow demonstrates to me, though, is that ‘quality’ is very definitely in the eye of the beholder. Some of the drawings, the composite images and texts that the children have produced for this project are what I would call ‘pretty rough’. But thanks to the care and professionalism of Andy, Kate and others, it’s still been possible to develop perfectly acceptable sequences of collaborative digital writing.

We need to find more ways to allow people with different levels of ability and varying skillsets to come together in this way, I say. And we need a new aesthetic also, I’d suggest – so that the slick, high res world of professional TV and film doesn’t set a standard of production & broadcast that could make it quite difficult to develop meaningful & energetic grassroots audience participation in a narrative project such as this.