An Otago Polytechnic course blog
by Andy Fogg
Next Tuesday the year two diploma students are going to take you on a guided tour of the northern cemetary so make sure you wear some sturdy shoes (its always muddy up there) and bring a jacket. By the time you finish this course you will know how important it is to be prepared. Not only for yourself but for your clients.
Tour guide in action
An early start for all students this week. Frosty mornings and 8am classes do present some travelling issues but good to see everyone. Great to hear what everyone had been up to in the holidays…lots of travel to Australia from students on all our courses – would be good to see some photos. Students were introduced to the use of hand held microphone in interpretation and I can see that through the next 4 weeks the microphone will be just part of everyday use.
Please keep looking at the course schedule on the wiki – it is a work in progress and there are some updates regarding a guided tour by our year 2 students and dates for your first aid course.
Take a look at some of the posts preceeding this you will find them relevant to your learning in the next 5 months.
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2010. That’s about 3 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 22 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 27 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 53mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.
The busiest day of the year was August 12th with 48 views. The most popular post that day was Update.
The top referring sites in 2010 were wikieducator.org, wordpress.com, mail.live.com, facebook.com, and search.conduit.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for tour guiding techniques, history of tour guiding, principles of tour guiding, tour guiding, and tour guiding techniques tourism industry.
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Update August 2010
1 comment
Introduction July 2010
1 comment
Interpretation July 2010
About June 2008
Course July 2008
Thanks for making the comment below Jacqui
“I love being a tourguide I been doing this for a couple of years on the weekends the pay is good and you always meet interesting people. I hope to be able to see more on this subjet here on this blogg.”
Where are you working and what type of guiding are you doing? We have finished this course for the year but hopefully will have another group of students for 2011. We also run another advanced course for tourguiding – http://adventuretourism.wordpress.com/ take a look.
Hope you have been learning something – maybe you could suggest some topics we could design an activity around.
Cheers Hillary
As promised here are a selection of photos taken as part of your interpretation activity looking at signs and panels. Some great photos (thanks Shannon) – have put them up on the facebook page as well (Otago Polytechnic Travel and Tourism). I am sure we will get some more visual evidence of your growing practical skills on Friday.
http://flickr.com/photos/76074333@N00/281830849/”A tour guide is a person who leads groups of people around a town, museum, or other tourist venue. The tour guide provides a commentary on the features and history of the location, the tours can be from as little as 10-15 minutes to extended periods over many days. Considerable importance is placed on the guide’s knowledge of local stories, history and culture depending on the location of the tour – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_guide Wikipedia:Tour Guide August 2007
This is a course for learning or validating the skills and duties involved in tour guiding for a tourism organisation.
Your lecturer’s David Seath and Hillary Jenkins welcome you. We will be guiding you through this course – hopefully challenging and inspiring you and bringing to life just exactly what a tour guide does.
David has a varied background (as you will no doubt find out) but currently he spends most of his time taking groups rock climbing, tramping and mountaineering in the wonderful NZ outdoors.
The following slideshare is an overview of the different job opportunities available in the guiding industry.
This year we want you to contribute to the blog so in our first session we will sort this out and I will invite you to make your first post.
Tomorrow Chris (one of your fellow students) will be showing us some map reading and compass skills and then we will be trying using our communication skills a different way eg. hand held radios – “This is Hillary signing out” Over.
Interpretation as defined by Freeman Tilden – is “an educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information.” It looks at the larger truth behind a statement of fact and should enrich the human spirit and mind. Tilden’s Principles of Interpretation outline the six basic rules of interpretation, which you need to become familiar with.
