A Guide to Using CAGD

Introduction

Hello.

My name is Graham, and I'm one of the lecturers on the Graphic Arts and Design undergraduate degree in the School of Art, Architecture and Design at Leeds Beckett University. I've been building CAGD since December 2005, and so I'm probably in a good position to explain what it's all about and how to use it.

One of the easiest ways to explain what CAGD is, is to explain what it's not. These days, almost everyone coming into Higher Education has had some contact with education software, software that's usually referred to as a "Learning Management System" (LMS) or a "Virtual Learning Environment" (VLE).

CAGD is neither of these things.

LMSes and VLEs have their place in Higher Education, but if you think about CAGD as being something like that then you're not going to get the best out of it.

CAGD is a community. It's a way for people who share some common interest -- whether that's through their practice, their research, or their studies -- to find each other, communicate and give and receive feedback on the work that they do.

Ultimately, the very core idea behind CAGD is that it is a space in which you can take some work that you've made, and put it in front of people and say:

"Hey, I made this. What do you think?"

Obviously there a bit more to it than that, but if you keep that idea in your head the whole way through it then it should make a lot more sense.

This idea of sharing work and getting feedback is what made us make CAGD in the first place. Back in 2005, students on the Contemporary Creative Practice BA at (as we used to be called) Leeds Metropolitan University, were starting to make a lot of digital work and had no simple way of sharing it with each other. To help them with this, I knocked together a quick website that allowed them to upload different media types, and see what each other was up to.

Over the course of the next few years, as the idea took off, we added more and more things to it that let us share things more effectively and with a larger group of students and staff, and before we knew it we had a rapidly expanding social network on our hands.

CAGD has been through three major re-writes in its time, the current version (version 4) being the result of about three years of work. It's not perfect (of course, and it probably never will be), and at the time of me writing this there are quite a few loose ends that need to be tied up and dealt with, but this current version is stable, secure, and flexible enough to be able to cope with the current load of 15,000 student accounts, and lets us do a lot more with it than we could do back in 2005.