{"id":2509,"date":"2010-05-11T16:25:14","date_gmt":"2010-05-11T20:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=2509"},"modified":"2010-05-11T16:25:14","modified_gmt":"2010-05-11T20:25:14","slug":"holidays-from-home-volunteering-introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2010\/05\/holidays-from-home-volunteering-introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Holidays from Home Volunteering: Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A scene from one of the many amazing vacations I've taken just this year, something I do indeed take for granted<\/p><\/div>\n

Though I would have liked to do something related to my paper on English identity, I wasn\u2019t confident enough that I could get deeper into the issue through interviews of participant observation, especially with a topic so latent and personal. Instead, I chose to look for volunteering opportunities around Norwich, hoping I could learn more about the community and ideally have it relate to my topic. Though I\u2019m happy to have helped out (and want to continue to do so) at\u00a0 Holidays from Home<\/a> my (fairly long) search for a more relevant volunteering opportunity has actually shown me valuable things about the nature of charity and volunteering in the Norwich area and in Britain as a whole, which I’ll be addressing in subsequent posts.<\/p>\n

Holidays from Home, as Sarah, who’s also volunteering for this group explained in her blog<\/a> is a Norwich-based organization which provides \u201cvirtual holidays<\/a>\u201d to people who are ill, disabled, elderly and homebound. These holidays are multifaceted; they use books, sounds, the internet, films, and other media to give the traveler a comprehensive, intimate, life-like experience. Though just a few full holidays have been created in its four year existence, HFH just received a lottery-funded grant to offer 400 holidays to people in Norfolk.\u00a0 Volunteers were needed to develop new holidays and tweak the old ones to be a bit more user-friendly.<\/p>\n

Though I volunteered to do research and give notes of my travel experiences (that\u2019s what Sarah\u2019s doing) founder Claire Wade wanted me to spend time looking into how to incorporate Google Earth technologies (cheers, KQ) into the existing holidays (with which I\u2019ve had mixed results). The idea is to provide a quick one link that could either lead directly to a tour or to a Youtube video so as to simulate views or travel in a more lifelike way than before. Any input from any Google Earth specialists or anyone who managed this for 310 would be much appreciated. More on HFH upcoming along with my thoughts on some similar organizations I came across in my search for volunteering. Also, I hope to throw in a few posts on some interesting parts of my English Identity research I didn\u2019t get to address in more than a few sentences in my paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though I would have liked to do something related to my paper on English identity, I wasn\u2019t confident enough that I could get deeper into the issue through interviews of participant observation, especially with a topic so latent and personal. Instead, I chose to look for volunteering opportunities around Norwich, hoping I could learn more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[728],"tags":[2034,2526,2021,2579],"class_list":["post-2509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aidan","tag-elderly","tag-holidays-from-home","tag-volunteering","tag-volunteering-search"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}