I will say up front that my reach for a Western Movie metaphor will fall flat and two short of the original. But look at the lovely horses, beamed directly from the Icelandverse.
Last week I lobbed a presentation for the Open Publishing Fest — It Goes SPLOT! TRU Writer as an open, shared, privacy respecting Writing Space. What I submitted was
One in a collection of nebulously abbreviated Simplest Possible Online Learning Tools (SPLOT), the TRU Writer (https://github.com/cogdog/truwriter) is a flexible and versatile platform for creating a space for students, guests, anonymous visitors to compose rich media content. As a WordPress child theme, it provides all of the publishing capability of WordPress without requiring a log-in or access to the WordPress interface. It’s interface offers options for managing access and capability, plus a simple way to customize the form for collecting responses.
I have used it as pseudo journal where each year students post final reports– see http://journal.arganee.world/ Others have used it as a place for students to submit assignments (https://biol420.opened.ca/) , a conference proposal system (http://conf.owlteh.org/contributions/), an open space for contributions to the #femedtech community (http://femedtech.net/), and a space for sharing stories of facing the pandemic (https://livetogether.openlcc.net/covid19stories/).
I will share examples but more than that, will do a live demo and show how these sites are easily customized to purposes I can’t even imagine.
https://openpublishingfest.org/calendar.html#event-74/
My main interest in Open Publishing Fest (which I believe I stumbled into via a tweet from Laura Gibbs) was a curiosity about the splendid online unconference format that I stumbled into. It just seems like the best way to understand how something like that works is to jump in, not just retweet from the sidelines.
My quote/unquote plan was just to run an informal demo, but then the thought my me yacking for an hour sounded drab, so I sent out a flurry of emails to colleagues that have user TRU Writer in the past to join for an information conversation.
This is a huge shout out of appreciation to Brian Lamb, Ken Simpson, Grant Potter, and Daniel Villar-Onrubia for answering that call (yes, I ended up running a manel, not the plan…)
In my pursuit of self-perceived cleverness, in lieu of (ugh) slides, I assembled a collection of stuff about TRU Writer in TRU Writer. In the past I would have tossed out the word “meta” but that word is retired.
As I have been saying TRU Writer as if you know what it is… well the answers are within.
And again, to be different and also learn something, I opted to go Un-Zoom and I apprenticed myself to learn how to use Streamyard (free version) where I could invite co-presenters into a “studio” and stream the thing to YouTube. I was about at the 60% confidence level it would work (it did), and ideally, the stream was saved right there as an archive.
Just for more grins, I did set up a few scheduled tweets to go out during the show.
It was great to see all these folks and hear from them. I had no idea if the email I found in my Gmail was valid for Ken Simpson, and so glad he enthusiastically joined as his needs for using in his TRU English courses was a key inspiration for the first ideas Brian and I hatched. And I have not talked to Daniel in a long time, and so appreciate what he and his team at Coventry have done with all the SPLOTs- their ideas and suggestions greatly expanded the feature set.
I am rather humbled that this bit of experimentation that was fully enabled by the Open Learning Fellowship Brian (and Iwin Devries) wrangled for me in 2014. It was maybe the most full focused time I had to just experiment with edtech projects without any mandate but exploring.
So yes, I had a few of many magnificent people who have taken on this silly SPLOT thing.
And it was very much worth it to get my hands into StreamYard- I have experienced it from the presenter side for a few online conferences.
Cue the music as we ride off into the sunset.
They SPLOTTED like Five Hundred!
Featured Image: My remix of The Five Horsemen Of The Icelandopacalypse flickr photo by Trey Ratcliff shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license with some text added in the sky and the ever glowing SPLOT logo.
