Ringing Forums

Bob Minor on handbells - Plain hunt can be taught in a single session — Graham John

Eh? I tried handbells, I simply can't get on with them, other acquaintances are the same. I know some pretty experienced ringers who took up handbells during COVID, it took them many months to get to QP level.

↪John de Overa
may disagree, but I think young people will, as a general rule, learn more quickly. — Jason Carter

None of the young people who started with or after me have got even remotely close to my level, and one of them who "ticked all the boxes" is still positively dangerous. I'm sure that others will have greatly outpaced me - but I haven't seen many of them round here. Age seems to be used as a (poor) proxy for a whole list of much more important factors, it's not that it isn't a relevant, I just don't believe it's the most important determinant.

I don't understand the focus on "learning quickly" either, why does it matter? Which is more use to ringing long-term, someone who learns quickly and then drops out, or someone who learns more slowly but becomes a solid long-term ringer?

Or is age irrelevant to some degree? Can much older learners progress rapidly with the right band to develop them? At what stage (again, ignoring exceptions) does that fall away? 40s, 50's...? — Jason Carter

I'm the wrong side of 60, I'm still working full time and and I'm still learning new things daily - it's my job. Ringing is just one more thing on the list. I think everyone should get the support they need, irrespective of age. Indeed that's one of the CCCBR's strategic objectives - no ringer should meet a barrier to their progress.

where are the young people? , and how do we give them the experience/help that they need...? — Jason Carter

Why is that specific to young people? What about the thousands of existing ringers who have got stuck and aren't able to make further progress? We don't have to recruit or do basic training for those people, they already ring. Why focus on recruiting new young ringers when we can't even maximise the standard of the ringers we already have?

That doesn't mean more mature learners should not also be given opportunities to develop — Jason Carter

Fine words, but in practice mature learners are usually discarded as being a waste of time and effort. The rampant ageism in ringing seems to pass completely without comment, indeed it's the accepted norm.

I think that it's down to all the 'gate-keepers' in our ringing organisations. — Roger Booth

I think you are right. Having watched the goings on in some associations via people who I know who are officers, having a position in them seems distinctly unattractive - not that I have the time anyway.

Whether it is a tower captaincy role or a District/Branch, or Guild/Association role there is little or no training. — Roger Booth

And also right here as well.

getting people to actually go on them — Tristan Lockheart

Being an Eyeore for a moment, I suspect the people who need to go on them the most will be the least likely to do so...

Teenagers. Because they learn so much quicker. — Jason Carter

Ah, that old chestnut. Some do, some don't. People tend to forget about the ones who don't progress and drop out, so there's a big chunk of conformation bias going on. For example, I can think of two teenage ringers who I've easily outpaced.

It's OK doing a survey, but you then need to turn it into action. Otherwise, it will just be ignored. — Roger Booth

I think this is a key point, without this follow-up it's a futile exercise. Although I think a survey is a good idea, I'm pretty sure I could write down the results now, on the basis that all the ones I've seen going back 20-30 years have the same answers. Yet nothing seems to have changed. Why? Perhaps that needs to be a question in the questionnaire?

it is very much dependent on each of the guild/branch/tower officers sending the email down the chain — Tristan Lockheart

It's also dependent on ringers being in the local association, and subscribes to the emails. The majority of our ringers aren't, and I don't think that's uncommon.

there's nothing to stop people subscribing, if they are interested.

I imagine the librarians and steeplekeepers/maintenance have networks — A J Barnfield

There's a Facebook steeplekeepers group, which works quite well.

yes, that's all I could find as well

I don't think they publish the data. There are 502 people on the ringing teacher's Facebook group, no idea how that relates to ART numbers though.

not having a recruitment initiative for the coronation would have been a very big missed opportunity — A J Barnfield

I agree that would have been a mistake, and with the rest of what you say - centrally, I think things have been done well. But I've also heard nothing at all from the four associations I ring in, I've also checked all four association websites and there's nothing on any of them either.

it is up to those introducing new recruits to make sure they are teaching people who see this as an activity that will continue for a long time — Simon Linford

Exactly.

We have a recently retired new ringer who ticks all the boxes - learns fast, making good progress and is now a fully integrated member of the tower. I can adjust my work schedule to give her 1 hour of 1:1 time a week on the simulator, the goal being to get her ringing PH by places as quickly as possible so she can join in with the rest of the ringers, who, after a 40+ year hiatus, are starting to learn methods. I'm not going to push her to one side so I can teach learners who's commitment might not even last to the end of the coronation ceremony.

Although I've been on the ART M1 course and am teaching "By The Book" I'm unlikely to register as an ART teacher as I don't have the time to teach people who might be referred to me. Plus the ART teacher who taught me has been burned out by the process, to the point where she talked about giving up ringing. I'm not going to risk the same.

If we were to actually recruit 8,000 new ringers, with about 6 months before the coronation we'd probably need 1-2,000 new teachers in place before Xmas. Even teaching 1,000 ringers would be a stretch, I think.

And of course if we ever were to digitise that sort of material, there wouldn't be much point unless we had secure, long-term digital archival in place already...

this discussion is about preserving information that's already in digital form, not digitising paper records, which would be a separate effort. But in any case https://www.whitingsociety.org.uk/old-ringing-books/old-books-menu.html shows that it's perfectly possible to digitise paper without vast expense.

And yes, I've already said that a key part of digital archiving is copying the content onto new storage formats as they become available. But that's really not hard - it took me around 20 mins of fiddling to figure out the best set of options for the 2 commands I needed to archive this forum and push it to cloud storage, cloud storage which costs me nothing. In fact I've just re-mirrored it, there's no reason why it couldn't be done automatically every day, with zero effort after the initial setup is done.

There's no justification for not archiving digital data related to ringing.

if you have any problems, let me know what bits you need and I'll copy them into a spreadsheet.

it's the full report in a form you can cut and paste the tables from into a spreadsheet, if you use fixed width column mode. I don't know exactly which bits you are looking for, there didn't seem much point in guessing! :grin:

What's the best way of us doing that? The current scramble around people's machines to get copies old survey and reports is a perfect case in point - "individual people's hard drives" is not a suitable archive strategy! :scream:

No argument with that from me!

Proof of Concept: a snapshot of https://www.ringingforums.org

http://bleaklow.com/www.ringingforums.org/index.html

You'll notice this post isn't present over there :razz:

Needs ~111Mb of disk space, hardly life threatening...

We all need to be fostering leadership and organising skills, even at an early stage — Tristan Lockheart

By running something along similar lines to this, perhaps?

https://www.globalgrooves.org/get-involved/future-leaders

Which, before anyone raises the money issue, is funded by The Arts Council. If they can get funding, I see no reason why Ringing couldn't.

the issue of money — Alison Hodge

I can't think that a few high capacity USB SSD drives are going to break the bank, and there are any number of free / cheap cloud based storage services.

There are 2 primary issues that would need to be considered:

• Content format. I expect most of the content of interest would be text based, in which case Plain Old ASCII Text is the best format - other formats such as MSWord or PDF require the corresponding software to render them, and take significantly more storage space. For example, the PDF of the 104-page 1988 survey that I re-rendered to plain text is 1/32 of the size of the original, and when compressed, 1/132 of the size. You could fit 26 copies of it on an ancient floppy disk, or ~19,000 copies on a nearly-as-ancient 1Gb flash drive.
• Storage medium. The principle here is to have copies in multiple locations and on different storage mediums, e.g. CD/DVD, USB drive, Cloud. And crucially, they need to be regularly verified, and new copies created as old technologies become obsolete and new ones become available.

It's all doable though, not doing it because of "issue of money" is ridiculous, on multiple fronts.