Miro
Our exhibition will be hosted in Miro, which describes itself as a whiteboard space that supports collaboration. You might have explored Miro during another course on the Digital Education programme, encountered it within your own professional practice, or be coming to it now for the first time. We are starting from the position that you do not have prior knowledge of this space, not least as we will be using it as a persistent exhibition space rather than a whiteboard for supporting synchronous meetings.
There will be time to become familiar with this environment in Week 1, before we begin to add content at the start of the Cyberculture block in Week 2. Within our shared exhibition you will also find there is a cafe where you can experiment, share tips and seek help from other members of the class as you look to work in Miro or create digital content more generally. In order to do any of this, you will need to create a Miro account (assuming you don’t already have one), which we encourage you to do using your student email address.
As Miro has become firmly established as an educational space over the last year we don’t have any reason to assume it will suddenly disappear from our screens, however do try and keep a back-up of any original content your create: the University does not keep a back-up of work in this space.
Pointers to support clarity, exposition, and accessibility on Miro
It is really important when working in our shared exhibition that we pay close attention towards clarity and accessibility. To help achieve this we have created an Example Gallery on our Miro board, will provide an introduction to the space during our Week 1 meetings, and have set out the following guidelines which we urge you to follow.
- A new exhibition will be created for each block of the course and you will be assigned a gallery within it, identifiable by your name within the space. Please do not alter the size of your gallery.
- Approach each of your gallery spaces as a single wall within an exhibition dedicated to a specific theme. Avoid adding frames, borders, dividing lines, or sub sections.
- Avoid the temptation to add a background image or colour behind your assigned gallery space. Keeping the space white helps to support contrast.
- All the material in your gallery should be directly relevant to the course: avoid adding arrows, lines, shapes or any others extraneous content or media.
- Use the Example Gallery on the Miro board to guide the layout of your own space. Your work should be organised in a logical and clear way, with plenty of white space between artefacts. If you are feeling the need for sub-headings or arrows, this suggests that your work is presented in a way that will be hard to navigate.
- To support legibility and screen-reading software, please only use 24pt IBM Plex sans font when writing on your gallery space. Please use black type colour to support contrast.
- A short piece of explanatory commentary should be situated directly next to the corresponding artefact. If it is not immediately clear which artefact a piece of commentary aligns with, you probably have too much content in your gallery or need to rethink the layout.
- Beneath each piece of visual content in your gallery, please add a short image description e.g. ‘Image of students in a classroom’
- Add a ‘sticky’ when you want to comment on an artefact in another student’s gallery (and if there is already a stick attached to that artefact, post your response within beneath the previous comment).
- Comments (within sticky notes) are the only types of content you should add to another student’s gallery.
Following these guidelines will help the exposition of your ideas while making your work more accessible to other members of the group.
Help
We used Miro within this course for the first time last semester and found that our group quickly became oriented to the space through a mixture of use and experimentation. However, it is still relatively new as a learning environment therefore if you experience problems using Miro, or find the content difficult to access, please don’t hesitate to contact Michael or James who will be glad to help. There is also a Miro community page where you might your question has already been answered.
Some useful resources can be found below:
Miro Academy: a collection of any number of tutorials on how to use Miro