I ran the QR Codes Ideas Factory at Leicester on the 26th January . The attendance was really good from across the institution. Thanks to Jo Badge for organising it. There were QR codes all over the building. The one on the meeting room enabled a link to the supporting documentation on a Blog. I quite liked this idea. It meant as I entered the room I could scan the link, get a handle of the workshop aims, leave comments etc., (link to image).

The outcomes of the session are available in two mind maps;

How might you use QR Codes? (png file)
What are the barriers to the use of QR Codes? (png file)

A couple of things struck me from the session. I was particularly interested the underlying theme … “using QR codes to enable people to access the required information as efficiently and effectively as possible. However, this quickly becomes a pointless activity because on many occasions we might direct them to resources and activities that are not appropriate for small screen devices. Such as web sites that do not render, or documents / pdfs which can not be read. Therefore, if the implementation of QR Codes is to be effective then we need to ensure that our material is accessible and usable on small screen devices”.

There was some discussion about student generation of QR codes and sharing these with each other. An interesting thing to observe was the sharing of QR codes in the session. Quite a few people had iPhones, and one individual captured as a photo a QR code included in my presentation. The person they where sitting next to then read the QR code from the iPhone and not my slide. This made me re-visit the scenario of collecting and managing QR codes from presentations. If I can’t scan the image (for what ever reason) then perhaps I should photo the slide (this is something that I regularly undertake during presentations) then upload them to Flickr, and later read them on my computer screen.

In terms of improving the support material, there were a number of questions raised. Firstly, the issue of size and the need to accommodate error handling, and secondly, the use of different colour QR codes.