So it seemed like everyone had the SPLOT love going on today. Whilst I was waxing lyrical in a meeting with some students, Jim Groom was knocking one out on the blog after spending time with Daniel at Coventry.

I was meeting with some students who are working on a project to design a cross-disciplinary credit-bearing course based around engaging with the city. It’s a very cool project and again I am just so impressed at how smart and creative our students are. I’m pretty sure I was mostly drunk on cheap cider and reading too much Lukacs to be good for my health at that age. We were meeting to talk about how they could mock up a sample of the course in the VLE, and also providing them with a website on a University domain to put up the writing they’ve done to document their process (I really wish we had some sort of centrally supported WordPress based blogging service, because that would be really useful for this kind of thing*).

I was covering off some of the assessment tools within and linked to the VLE and talking about some of the ideas they have for activities within the course. Because this course is about exploring the streets of Edinburgh through various critical lenses, they had been thinking about something involving photography, so I showed them the TRU Collector SPLOT and some examples in practice.

We ended up imagining a world where every cohort of students on this course contributes to an image crowd-sourcing site on the open web as part of their activities, but they don’t just submit images, they submit metadata in the form of tags. They have some structured tags that relate to the themes of the block of the course, but they are also free to add in their own. Over time, not only does this build into a really rich resource of images of the city, but the tags themselves become another way of navigating and exploring the city. We were pretty excited by this point. Pretty much we just wanted to build this site now and forget the rest.

We’re meeting again next Monday to check on progress building the VLE course and moving their project site onto WordPress. I’ve promised them if they’re making good headway with both and on target, that I’ll build them the SPLOT site to include in their showcase to our Assistant Principals and Senior Vice Principal. In reality, pretty much as soon as they send me their domain name choice I’ll build it. It’s going to happen – even if just in this prototype stage at the moment.

* This is sarcasm. I am spending all my spare energies and efforts trying to push this one across the line with my team. I think it’s fair to say we’re going to be taking an iterative approach here – basic service for the start of term, with various rounds of additional functionality. I love GDPR, but holy crap, cookie audits.