My data suggests the world is definitely post-SPLOT, it’s fallen to the bowels of the hype curve? I am almost ready to offer bribes to what I thought was a major accomplishment, blogged here a month ago.
But the SPLOTs go on in development right here. I have as of this morning a working prototype with all the working parts to remove the need for special hidden logins for media uploads.
That’s Another Post! This one is about a new feature added to TRU Collector, the SPLOT originally created for quick sharing of image media. I have that history pegged at January 15, 2015.
The idea came from TRU Instructional Designers Kelly Warnock and Melissa Melissa Jakubec who will be doing a workshop next Friday on finding openly licensed images (and we will have a version of this Tuesday for the You Show). What they described was wanting an online image gallery where participants could share the images they found.
Again, the idea is a way people can build a shared pool of images, organized by maybe categories and tags, with some extra data for license and source info, but that would not require any accounts or selling of one’s data tracks to [fill in the name of your not favorite data overlord].
The use cases have grown as many people have put it to work (see examples). especially colleagues at the Coventry University Disruptive Media Learning Lab. Daniel Villar-Onrubia used it in ways where people were writing longer than image captions, that led me to add a rich text editor- e.g. for students and/or conference participants to do intro bios.
For my own uses in #netnarr I bent it into something almost like an assignment bank.
This expanding of possibilities is what I called enabling the unexpected which I think is rather exciting, especially compared to LMS lathering and textbook pounding.
As I did a bit of contract work for DMLL this summer, one request was to add, like in TRU Writer, the ability for authors to enter an email address so they could be sent a special link. What is special? Why it allows them to edit the thing after publishing.
This again is optional, as part of the SPLOT DNA is not requiring personal information. But email was really the most workable means to provide an post publishing edit link.
Originally I thought of offering the edit link after publishing, but expect most people would not save it. For this new one, I thought about asking for a passphrase, but it seemed to prone to easy breaking into the site.
First of all, this is a feature site owners can turn on and off- the default for TRU collector is OFF since it was never there in previous versions.
If left off, then your site users never will see a form field to enter the email, nor the special button on a published item that will send it to the email address entered to the form.
You will see another field, and this too was a request from Coventry. They thought it a good idea to nudge students to use their university email, not personal ones, so even as collected data, it will not be personal emails (this feature was added quietly to TRU Writer too).
The link is emailed right after publishing, but can also be triggered. If active, when published- a Request Edit Link appears on an item only if the author added an email address.
The button will send the email (I guess there is a chance to be annoying and click the button a lot, I may lack enough time for all the jerky things people might do to be annoying).
I also tossed in for good measure, the ability in the theme options to select the Pages that have special uses on the site (e.g. so they are not required to be specific ones by URL, e.g. /collect for the form.)
The newest version of the theme is now in play at my main Collector demo site (the one that has been running since 2015) http://splot.ca/collector/ and is available for your SPLOT toying from https://github.com/cogdog/tru-collector
I hope soon to push some updates to the sites that use the single click installers from Reclaim Hosting… I’d like to make sure these new features work. Which means I really need some people to poke around, and enter an email address, try the post publishing editing.
How much do I have to bribe to get someone to try on their own site?
SPLOTs are getting to be a lonely outpost.
Oh well, no time to mope. I have exciting work to do on this new drag and drop media uploader.
Featured Image: I found this nifty public domain picryl image Daily News. ANS to the editor [1851] Mar. 31 and decided to add some script of my own. My paint strokes were horrible so I used the Cursive Letter Generator and added a SPLOT logo of my own making. Lob this all as public domain, if anyone is really counting.
This is awesome and timely, literally had a professor email me about how they could have students easily edit posts TODAY. They currently use the single click installer from Reclaim but I’d be happy to help test the plugin version for a different project I’d like to use TRU collector for…
Thanks! I’m fairly sure all the features work, but it helps to have a few more eyes and hands on the functionality. It’s easy to update the reclaim installer, and it propagates updates to all sites made with it. So your prof could get the feature real soon.