Postcrossing Blog

Earlier in February this year, we asked you to send some postcards to a school in Guimarães (Portugal), whose students were working on a European Capital of Culture project. They’ve received an avalanche of cards from all over the world – so many that they decided to do several postcard-mosaics instead of a single one! :)

As you can see, the mosaics were displayed in several windows of the school, so that the postcards were easily accessible from both sides. The project was very well received – so much so that it is still being displayed, months after it’s conclusion date!

You can see the four mosaics below (click for bigger images):

Did you spot your postcard? :)

The students have also made thank-you postcards themselves, which they’ve sent back to some of the senders during their English classes.

A big congratulations to the students and teachers of the Escola Secundária Martins Sarmento, and a huge thank you (from them and us) to all the postcrossers who sent a card to this school!

Recently, Postcrossing has been featured in some very interesting scientific essays, focused on the study of people interaction through communications. Today we’d like to share with you one of these papers.

Ryan and Daniel are PhD students in Computer Science at the University of Bath, United Kingdom. Both are interested in how people interact with, and through, information technologies. Daniel’s PhD research looks at support for intimate communication between people in long-distance relationships. Ryan’s research is about understanding fairness in collaborative work tasks, and he has been a postcrosser since March 2011.

Ryan writes:

"The inspiration for our research came back in June 2011. We were interested in learning why people enjoy using Postcrossing, and what they value about correspondence through postcards. We hoped that such knowledge might allow us to derive some design criteria to help improve digital communication systems.

Many of the things we found in our study relate to the treasured elements of paper-based correspondence that are lost during digitisation. For example, we found that people value things like stamps, postmarks, wear and tear from travelling, as well as personalised postcards. We also found that people love the random aspects of Postcrossing: not knowing what you’ll receive, who it will be from, or from where it will come. These are the things we believe could be useful in certain digital technologies, and we are currently developing ways to use our design criteria to build new systems that help to connect people together.

One of the other things we found, but didn’t have space to write about in the paper, is linked to reciprocity – the expectation that others will treat us as we treat them, and will respond to our actions in kind. From reading our survey responses, people said they loved knowing that recipients enjoyed their postcards, but what we also observed was a clear dislike for empty 'thank you’ messages in the hurray email. This tells us that, even though Postcrossing encounters are essentially one-off experiences, we still expect others to treat us in kind and to thank us for our efforts. People don’t like it when the norm of reciprocity is broken, even in a setting where it seems like it might not matter all that much.

In the future, we hope to do more studies involving Postcrossing, and we hope to look at other practices like online pen-palling and use of christmas cards. These will give us new ideas about how to link digital and physical technologies."

Very interesting results – thank you Ryan and Daniel! If you want to read more, you can download a free copy of the paper from Ryan’s publications page at: http://people.bath.ac.uk/rmk22/RyanKellyWebsite/Publications.html

They say Guimarães is the place where Portugal was born, the cradle of the nation. This small city in the north of the country has a lot to offer and is this year’s European Capital of Culture (along with Maribor in Slovenia).

The students and teachers from the local secondary school “Martins Sarmento” in Guimarães want to involve Postcrossing in the celebrations. Their idea is to build a heart-shaped mosaic resembling the logo of the European Capital of Culture.

And for that of course, they need your help! The school invites all postcrossers to send a postcard until March 9th to the following address:

Escola Secundária Martins Sarmento
A/C Cristiana Cerdeira
Alameda Prof. Abel Salazar
4810–247 Guimarães
Portugal

You can write a personal message, your thoughts on Guimarães or just “I am part of it!”.

Write your e-mail address as well: you’ll receive an e-mail from them with a picture of the finished mosaic. The first 20 postcards received will also receive a postcard from the European Capital of Culture.

The students from the school “Martins Sarmento” thank you for your collaboration, and welcome you into their city!

From time to time we get requests to help many different causes by spreading the word about them. While we would like to help them all, that is not always possible. However, today one of our members brought to our attention something particularly touching and we had to share it with you all.

Here’s a text about it that explains it much better than we can:

“I am a fifth grade teacher in London, Ohio, and one of my most sincere and joyous students, Reagyn, has a brain tumor. It is now in stage three, and her family is being forced to move to Virginia for a few months so she can receive proton radiation from one of the best doctors in the country. Reagyn remains optimistic and spreads positive energy everywhere she goes. She helps others and puts everyone before herself. In fact, last week she headed a school wide campaign to start saving pop tabs so that Ronald McDonald would visit Children’s Hospital in Columbus. Needless to say, there are a few thousand pop tabs already. Recently, we had a conversation about what she collects, and she said nothing, well except for SillyBandz; but what fifth grader doesn’t? Then I asked her what she has always wanted to collect but never got the opportunity. She told me she wished she could receive ”postcards from all over the world." Let’s make this happen!

This is where my favor comes into play. We are asking anybody and everybody to send a little note of support and/or telling her something about your location on a POSTCARD. My entire class and our wonderful secretaries are helping Reagyn fulfill this dream. Please, please pass this email on to everyone you know. It would make a huge difference in Reagyn’s life. She received her first postcard today from London, England!

She now has her own website at www.reagynsworld.weebly.com. Feel free to leave her a short blog of support on her website.

All postcards can be sent to London Elementary at:

Reagyn Semler
c/o London Elementary
380 Elm Street
London, Ohio 43140
United States of America

Thank you for your support!
Chad Reeser
5th grade teacher
London Elementary School"

I don’t think there’s a better match than cards from Postcrossers for someone who wishes to receive postcards from all over the world! Grab a postcard and send her a bold Happy Postcrossing! Tell her about you location and make her smile! That’s it! As simple as a postcard.

Note: We want to underline that this is a request for postcards only. Please do not send any money – only postcards are being asked for. They also request for postcards to not be on envelopes so that it’s easier for Reagyn to go through all of them.

We have mentioned before how Postcrossing as a school project can be a great idea. Teachers all over the world are discovering how to use Postcrossing as an educational tool. English, geography, culture – there’s so much one can learn through postcards!

Adriana Salim is one of those teachers and we are happy to be able to share with you all how her experience has been.

I am an English teacher at a public school in Petrópolis, RJ, Brazil. I teach classes to teenagers who keep me busy trying to get them interested and motivated. The dean of the school where I work found out about Postcrossing and here we are, the students and I, involved in sending and receiving cards.

I surely couldn’t have run into something more helpful! Everybody waits anxiously for the mail and the school mailbox is checked every single day. Isn’t it fun to learn English this way? Each student is a single user. They write and receive their own cards. Our enthusiasm has also hooked the Biology teacher who has joined Postcrossing with his own kids at home.

We have many projects at the school: theater, dance, environment protection, reading and Postcrossing! Some of the students take part in more than one project.

Before Postcrossing, the students used to swap cards among themselves to practice their English skills. Nowadays we realise that it’s much more fun to write real postcards with Postcrossing.

This is where we have our Postcrossing meetings once a week.

Our postcards are mailed to the school address. The mail is always brought by the same mailman. We go to the main post office downtown for stamps. We usually post our cards once a week at a smaller facility. The students keep their own cards at home in albums or on a wallboard. Now and then we display all the received cards at school.

This is our mailman delivering some mail and the school mailbox.

This is the board we keep the cards sent to the group as a whole.

This is the main post office where we buy stamps.

We once had a picture of the cards exhibition we prepared to celebrate the 18th anniversary of our school on the first page of Petrópolis newspaper.

As part of that commemoration a school postcard was created and is now available to be send by the students.

Thank you Adriana for sharing this with us!

Have other stories on how Postcrossing is being used on education? Then let us know! We love to hear about them.