Hanging around in Dortmund?

This blog is about a project for an e-learning seminar of the TU Dortmund called “Becoming e-literate: Language Learning in an Electronic Age”. The seminar is a cooperation with the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. The use of new media and web 2.0 in schools and in the EFL classroom has become an important and controversial topic. For that reasons the students of the e-literate seminar learn how to deal with new media in the EFL classroom in a critical way. Besides, they extend their own skills in using new media and foster their didactical knowledge.

Every student of the seminar develops an media project on his own, which will be presented on the internet. A group of students (including me) decided to deal with the topic ‘Dortmund’ as this is the city most of us live in and where our university is situated. We want to introduce our city to the rest of the world as well as to our cooperation-university in Halle-Wittenberg. One unit of this project is the role of Dortmund as a part of the “European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010”. 

This blog is my contribution to our seminar project. It mainly deals with a multimedia art project called “hanging around” that is connected to the European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010. It was originally founded in 2006 by the artscenico e.V and was part of the EU-CULTURE-Programme from 2007 till 2008. Their partners and artists are found in France, Italy, the Czech Republic and Romania. The pieces of art describe the motive of “spending time without activity” and are based on photography and videos. People spending their time with hanging around ,not doing anything particular, can be found in probably every culture and time. But why are people doing this? Did the rising number of unemployed people influence the culture of hanging around? Are there any differences between hanging around outside or in your own private home? Is the youth hanging around in a different way than older people? As our project needs to be related to Dortmund, I went outside on my own to take some picture of people hanging around and to find out more about the “art of hanging around in Dortmund”. Every picture has its own meaning and background story. I will present them in this blog and tell you about the places and occasions in which they were taken.