QR codes starting to make sense

photo credit: Flickr derivadow

We had our first online meeting with the other partners involved in the JISC LTIG QR code project today. It was good to put some names and faces together with institutions (even if the faces were only there for while until we had turn the video off!).

We mainly reported that following up on the substantial number of projects that we thought we could do had been a little dispiriting in that we had met with a number of barriers to adoption. it was good to know that other people were sharing some of our problems and that Andy Ramsden was keen for us to document barriers as much as the successes (phew!). We will definitely write these experiences up as one of our three case studies.

The session gave us some good contacts to follow up and some ideas to inspire us. We will talk to Graham at Sheffield about our tentative ideas for using QR codes in museums. We liked the idea of an audio induction linked to a floor plan and are thinking about if we could do this within our School of Biological Sciences for first year students arriving in October. A treasure-hunt style tour could direct them to the main places of the three buildings that the School works within, showing them the locations of the main teaching labs, departmental offices for handing in work and the open access computing facilities.

Another idea resulting from the session was for us to think about working with a social media postgraduate student we know to promote the use of QR codes via a charity event she is involved in.

Alan and I suggested that we start to use a tag (on blogs/twitter/delicious) for the project, to bring the various discussions together, so #jiscqr (twitter RSS, delicious RSS, blog rss) was born and is now in use.

We are now looking forward to kicking off some new projects and meeting everyone face to face in June.