Shrouded in mystery?
Started with Alan Levine’s 2014 Thompson Rivers University Open Learning Research Fellowship.
An Ambiguous Acronym
SPLOT comes from the conviction that there is great value in learners and educators sharing their work on the open web. All too often, doing so gets derailed by two problems. First, open web tools are perceived by users as difficult to use, and by organizations as complicated to support. This is why most organizations direct or even restrict activity into a consolidated Learning Management System (LMS). Second, online identity and privacy concerns (and laws) scare people off. Not every learner is ready to share their work with the world on a medium that “never forgets”. We know that most free online communication tools capture and exploit the data of their users.
So the tools on this site are designed with two core principles in mind:
• make it as easy as possible to post activity to the open web in an appealing and accessible way• allow users to do so without creating accounts, or providing any required personal information
https://splot.ca/about/
Mostly* WordPress
Primary ones are WordPress themes with all functionality and customization options built in to create sites where visitors/learners can easily contribute content without seeing the WordPress interface.
Three prominent ones include:
*Not limited to WordPress see a GitHub based SPLOT and Tom Woodward’s splot.tools
Yet Even More Links
- What The SPLOT is That? (Alan Levine, Reclaim Hosting Workshop, 2018)
- What The SPLOT is That? (Alan Levine, PressEdConf, 2018)
- SPLOTS? Huh? (Jim Luke, Lansing Community College)
- SPLOTS! Creating simple, collaborative WordPress sites for your teaching (Brian Lamb and Tannis Morgan, BCcampus webinar, 2020)
- Posts tagged SPLOT (100+ of them, Alan Levine, CogDogBlog)
- FLO Tech Tool Tip: SPLOTs (2022, BCcampus)
Workshop Parts
Next, move on to another section or return to the entry of the workshop.
