The power of two

How a drink in the bar at the SHP conference - and discovery of a shared interest in ICT - led to the campaign for a Blue Plaque for an eighteenth-century abolitionist.

What do the 1970 Brazil World Cup-winning team, Charles Darwin and Vanilla Ice all have in common? This was the question that Dan Lyndon and Donald Cumming posed to the delegates in a workshop at the 2012 SHP conference in Leeds. The answer provides a powerful tool for motivating students, engaging them in projects that take them outside the confines of the classroom, and challenging them to work like professional historians and campaign activists. Using the opportunities provided by Web 2.0 and combining them with more traditional collaborative methods (the post office!), students from Halifax and London were able to work together to campaign for an English Heritage Blue Plaque for Olaudah Equiano, the leading Black activist against the transatlantic slave trade...