Alternative Campus Tour

This page will document the process around creating an alternative campus tour for the University of Guelph.



View University of Guelph Alternative Campus Tour in a larger map

Everyone knows that the campus tours provided by the university administration are just huge PR events geared to selling the university to high school students. They shuffle kids around to all of the impressive buildings and drone on and on about how great the experience is. They don't mention skyrocketing tuition fees, they don't talk about the cut women's studies program, and they'll never mention the time students stormed and occupied the president's office. So we decided we would.

We wanted our tour to be:
-relevant and easy to update
-available to remix and open to participation
-not too ridiculous to put together
-subjective (ie. include personal stories and reflect our voices)

PHASE 1: We started off with a podcast, envisioning prospective students plugged into their MP3 and wandering from building to building, listening to our commentary as they stumbled down Winegard walk. We decided to research the radical history of the major buildings and encourage new students to pick up where previous student activists had left off. Since we had an indeterminate number of people interested in the project, we figured we could leave everyone to do their own research and then come together to record everything.

Didn't really work. Without clear deadlines and tasks, people were confused about what the expectations were for the project. And the history behind campus buildings was tedious to track down and boring to document. We became more interested in sharing our own stories and our own experiences, the places we wanted to share became too numerous to fit into a tour...


PHASE 2: We decided to sit down and record an hour's worth of audio. Our podcast would be a casual conversation about campus, rather than rehearsed informative segments. We wanted to put it up on a site and give anyone the option to remix it.

Three of us recorded 55 minutes of audio. It ended up being pretty scattered and more about our first-year experiences than campus. Therapeutic, yes. Informative, no. Plus, there were a lot of tangents (ie, at one point I ventured into an explanation as to why there weren't any old buildings in Saskatchewan), and it wasn't very inclusive to group members unable to come to our recording session. We also couldn't figure out a good way to make it available and accessible for remixing.
We abandoned the concept, but you can still watch the first five minutes our original recording session here.

PHASE 3: We decided to return to the original idea of audio clips, but for simplicity's sake, we'd only do a couple of recordings as examples. We had made a google map early on with the intention of using it to illustrate our tour route, and we decided that we would attach a download link for the audio clips to the marked locations.

Turns out, editing the map was a helluva lot of fun. We began marking down more and more locations on campus, and then, off campus. We marked buildings, secret paths, epic views, personal stories... We had recorded the audio clips for two locations, so we turned them into short videos, uploaded the to youtube, and then linked to them from the map for the sake of adding another dimension.

So we decided that the project would be an alternative map of Guelph, rather than a podcast. It would be open for anyone to edit and so we created a facebook group to connect people to it. The map had a lot of advantages: it was easy to modify, links could be attached, paths could be drawn, icons could be customized, anyone could collaborate, etc. It seemed like the best format for the project.

 In the last week, our map has had over 2000 views and our facebook group had grown to 38 members.