Teaching Theological Ethics

Goal: To give students agency in course planning; design term 2 teaching around student-led presentations.

• Low-fi beginnings: whiteboarding topics
• Going digital: Fed 35 topics into a digital survey
• First roadblock: canvas survey tool stinks
• Second roadblock: central IT unwilling to deploy lightweight, open-source alternative without "a business case"
• Solution: rolled my own instance of LimeSurvey on personal webhost (reclaim.com)
• Example: http://sccs-survey.org.uk/index.php/162945

• Third roadblock: Need to level playing field for students without tablets and smartphones
• Solution: Thanks to Arts IT! Discovered a big box full of iPads

Results?

Worked well. iPads had trouble with wifi, but students just shared the 8-10 that worked.

Really interesting differences in engagement styles with the tool

Have a fantastic store of data I need to parse through to see how topic choices map onto student demographics

Research?

Topic: climate change and low-carbon action in religious communities

Digital solution: Generate a map to consolidate practitioner relationships; resource third sector groups; parse demographics

Research challenge?

Data exists, but huge problems with transparency, accuracy, sustainability

Technical solution?

OPEN EVERYTHING! Source! Data! Tools!

Mapping tools: QGIS, CartoDB, D3.js, carto.css

Project website: Jekyll via github

Sample: http://mapping.community

The next few rabbit trails:

• Decision time: Hacking resources list vs. Hacking a canvas wiki page
• Moving everything to github/gitlab
• Writing some "reproducible research" using RMarkdown
• Social network analysis
• Getting a discourse server (https://github.com/discourse/discourse)