Make: Grow your own technology – 21st Century vegetable and fruit growing
Allotmentor (www.allotmentor.com) is a free online tool that Damion Young has put together in his spare time. Use it to plan your bed, allotment, smallholding or windowbox and replace that tattered vegetable notebook with something altogether more hi-tech. He will show you how it is possible to take freely available online technologies and resources (such as Google Maps, Simile Timelines, Facebook and Creative Commons images) and create something novel, without having access to a huge development team. He will also show you how, with remarkably little effort, and something called PhoneGap, you can easily transform a portion of a website into a free cross-platform mobile app so you can take your website with you, even if you do not have a signal.
Make: Turning Film Noir into Fun Noir
Pauline Woolley, (Medical Sciences Learning Technologies Group) played a key part in the creation of The Blackened Mirror, a film noir drama in the form of an online video series. She will be talking about the techniques used to create the series, the use of various forms of social media in publicising the show and driving the narrative forward (with characters having their own Twitter or Live Journal streams). She will also be talking about the evolving nature of the games and how they moved from practical rewards to rewarding with information with the ultimate prizes being the opportunity to enter the environment.
Make: Medlearn – it’s not just for medics
Medlearn is currently used by the Medical Sciences Division to provide interactive learning resources on a wide variety of topics. It is based on a free, open source content management system (Magnolia CMS), but has been adapted to enable easy creation of self-test questions alongside multi-media teaching content. Learning content is created and managed online, with no need to retain local templates, or upload completed packages, e.g. to WebLearn. Having recently made some significant improvements to the system, we are keen to make it available to other divisions/departments. Come along and see what you can do!