Tuesday 12 April 2011

Emerging ideas from the History Division #QRCodes

Following on from the "QRTour Generator Sprint" and a small round of user testing, the Elevate Team are continuing the dialogue between the Division of History at UCS and the Ipswich Maritime Trust.

We are looking to support and enhance the work of the two with the use of our new QR Code based Tour Generator, following a very productive meeting on 7th April the History lecturers are going to be building up scenarios around the Historic Ipswich Wet Dock, with the supporting materials/resources coming from the Ipswich Maritime Trust's archive.

During the 7th April meeting we were treated to a very informative presentation by Stuart Grimwade from the Trust.  The Trust have a wonderful photographic archive, with photos going back to the 1850's, showing the Ipswich Wet Dock through different stages of its life.

Below are a couple of these wonderful images:

[caption id="attachment_637" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Neptune Quay c1860 - Ipswich Maritime Trust"]Ipswich Maritime Trust[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_636" align="alignleft" width="277" caption="Shipyard c1857 - Ipswich Maritime Trust"]Ipswich Maritime Trust[/caption]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are planning to look through a number of these photographs to pick out a few locations to create a tour, with these locations being points of interest for use on our tour generator.  We will be working with staff from the History Division to select the most appropriate locations for this proof of concept.  We will be working with these lecturers to write scenarios, to give a story to the points of interest.  Wrapping around this will be the use of these photographs, as we will be using QR Codes to link to these scenarios, we will know the users location, as they will need to scan the codes, we can really start to tailor these scenarios, giving people a look at the past of the location they are standing in.  As well as the use of these fantastic pictures, we will also be adding a voice over, telling the story to give these pictures a voice.

Some of UCS's history students are working on a project where they have been taking audio recordings of the last surviving barge captains, we will be looking at hopefully using these stories/recordings in one of our points of interest along the tour.

We will be looking to host the materials/resources for each point of interest on a blog style system, allowing users that take the tour to leave their own comments and thoughts immediately, from the location they are in, therefore allowing the next person to look at the materials to also see previous peoples thoughts.

We are very excited about this project, both for how it will technically work as well as something usable for the Ipswich Maritime Trust and to see how the tour can be written to support the learning outcomes of our history modules.

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