In November 2011, I attended Teachmeet London and gave a brief presentation on the use of postcards in teaching. I referred to my REAL wall, so here's a link to the presentation a little belatedly





This year I'm looking to get more young people sending postcards, connecting up my hobby of sending and receiving post and my job in education, so you'll see more stuff happening over on www.schoolswaps.net as well as here on my REAL wall

In my day job as an e-learning advisor at Roehampton university, my role is to advise lecturers on the best technology to use for teaching their subjects. Most the time this is something electronic, for example a forum or a blog, or a video camera, but sometimes the best technology is the most basic and I never draw the line at electronic learning tools.



This term I was asked by a lecturer to suggest the ideal tool for getting students to express their feelings about an event that happened to them at school when they were younger. I wanted for the students to be able to reflect on this experience and to use whatever they had to hand to express how the event made them feel, without fear of criticism.

For me, postcards have been an ideal vehicle for learning to express myself. The almost-anonymous nature of postcards (you choose whether to sign them or not) and the idea that the recipient is separated from us by time and distance has this effect of freeing the artist to express themselves in a way that real-time social media and face-to-face interactions can't, yet it still reaches out and makes a connection. For some applications, like Postsecret, this is perfect, and so I decided to suggest postcards for this project.



The idea is for students to illustrate on 5 6x4 inch postcards an experience or series of experiences which happened to them in school that they can remember. After they have done so, they will send these images in to their lecturer and share the experiences if they wish.

This idea came from a lesson I taught while I was schools, and so I showed pictures from this to the students and postcards which have been sent by you to my REAL wall to illustrate what kinds of stories you could tell using the limited size of a postcard.



I volunteered to introduce the postcard picture story project to the students and on Tuesday and Thursday, I went in to the classroom to present to 2 sets of classes, starting with an introduction to my REAL wall and human-human communications in the digital age and moved on to tales of teaching from my past, finally ending up on the task at hand, which was the creation of the 5 picture stories.

The students were really excited at the prospect of sending post and the talks seemed to go down really well. I was asked by the students for some tips on how to get into sending post and I recommended Postcrossing as a good place to start as well as of course, looking on the sidebar of my REAL wall for some great postal folk. In addition, I've added a link to my article "How to make your mailbox more interesting" in the sidebar, so if anyone does want more than bills in their postbox next week, why not give it a read.



Looking forward to seeing what delights the students produce and if I get permission I will stick some of the best right up here on this site.

When I was at school, I used to love writing stories until the day that I wrote a literary criticism of Macbeth for English literature, in which I drew parallels with the Ninja clans of ancient Japan. My English teacher ripped it to pieces verbally and I never wrote again. Perhaps I'll make a mailart piece about that some day...

I've been way behind on posting, but had a deadline on this one as it's bad luck to leave your Christmas cards up after Twelfth Night.

Happy new year!

As 2011 draws to a close, Andy and Elena want to wish all the readers and contributors to my REAL wall a HAPPY 2012!

Lately, my artistic output has ground to a halt as I've taken time to settle in to the new place. Since Dewi came over in October, I've taken up cooking, hence why this shot is taken in the kitchen. Elena kindly decorated the kitchen for me with her favourite postcards, which are classics, rather than the new ones that we've been receiving.

Hope you can all join me in the new year. See you in the post!

my REAL wall has been keeping a pretty low profile lately. The reason we've been out of action is because me and Elena have been moving house!

Now, the best address to send your posts to to get onto my REAL wall is

53 Haygreen Close
Kingston-upon-Thames
KT2 7TS
United Kingdom

The new place is much more befitting of a newly married couple. It's much bigger, has 2 rooms and a conservatory where this picture was taken where we have an art table. Yes, you read that right. We have a table dedicated to making ART!

So much has happened since the last post. Notably, we have met up with 3 mailartists and been to Turkey. We met Dewi last month, who is a mailart365 artist. He popped over from Canada via Tuscany and showed us his sketchbook. It was great!

Katerina Nikltsou, another 365 artist, came over from Greece and stayed in Notting Hill, just around the corner from our old place. We popped in to see her, and she gave us that lovely acrylic painted piece that dominates todays wall.

Mim, the other 365 artist who is on track and whose piece is on the wall below Katerinas, came over earlier on in the year, so technically that means we've met every artist on the 365 who is set to complete the project on December 1st. Only 26 pieces left to go for those heroes!

Another notable artist on the Mailart 365 project that I've met is Postively Postal, who is currently running a project in conjunction with the Royal Mail called "The A-Z of the UK". Check out his site for details of how to pick up some exclusive stamp packs from the Royal Mail

One person who could easily be on 365, but isn't is the great Ruud Jansen, who runs IUOMA. He came over from Holland last month on business and I very nearly met up with him, but he ended up too busy, which was a shame. However he did send some mailart through, which you can see here.

That lovely cut out butterfly is from Spopod, the index card is a classic Lindsay Killin piece and there's a new piece from the Keep writing project by Hope, who's work keep making me smile. This time, I've got a recipe for chocolate cake from her, and I need to dig up a decent recipe of my own and send it back. If you've not seen the Keep writing project, check it out RIGHT NOW at www.keepwritingpostcards.tumblr.com