Everyday it seems that parts of our local community are fast disappearing, new developments, council cut backs, road alterations and the changing world we live in all seem to play a part in changing the landscape of our towns and villages. It is left to the older generation to stop major historic buildings and traditions from being forgotten forever.
Kids and the younger generation want excitement, something they can identify with as being theirs, but they are a vibrant active generation with new ideas and skills that can help catapult protests and campaigns to save our fast receding heritage if you can harness their interest. But how do you get them to take part? After all, digging things up or spending hours researching in old books and libraries is a little boring for anyone, let alone the young.
If they have no respect for the past, they will not give a second thought to vandalising any part of it.
First we have to look at what’s already out there,
Existing local history websites mostly are just a collection of photos and text about when buildings or names of areas were formed and demolished or what they are today, very few show what it was like to live in those days and most are updated so little that you can visit them every 6 months and not a lot will be changed.
How can we make them more interesting to the young?
First and foremost, it has to be fun, Look at modern day documentaries on TV, they are no longer the hard sell in your face educational programmes that they used to be, new ones now have actors to portray the events of the past telling the story in an entertaining way so you take in the information in an enjoyable way.
Websites can also be produced to entertain the young and keep coming back time and time again, try to produce it as if it’s from their angel, what do they enjoy to do, how can it be inter active?
A few ideas I have developed for my own site is to form a story updated weekly or bi-weekly, this will help to keep an interest which hopefully will increase and hopefully catch their imagination, secondly a forum is ideal way of obtaining lost information about the history of local events, people or buildings. Sites built this way can also be used by older people who have excellent memories of the past, sometimes vital information that has not been written down anywhere. Games can also help to entice kids to the site, and a notice board for local events and groups to promote events and club nights for free.
If the young of today have no interest in the heritage of our towns, where will be in ten or twenty years time, they are our future, the reason why we care and bring them up to know the difference between right and wrong. We all want a better future for our kids than we had, but to know how we lived in the past will help them to understand why we want this. If it stops one child from vandalising a building because they took an interest in local history it would be worthwhile.
Source: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?barry hutchinson
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