EduFeedr — Redesigning the Feed Reader for an Open Education

Hans PõldojaTallinn University / Media Lab Helsinki

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Introduction

Understanding open education

Open educational resources

Open and personal learning environment

Open courses

Learning environment

Learning content

Student blogs

Course wiki and bloglink and tag

link and tag link

link

RSS

link

Problem

Problem statement

Standard RSS readers lack the features for monitoring and analyzing learning activities which cross the borders of different Web 2.0 applications.

Design methodology

Methods

• Lightweight prototyping

• Scenario-based design

• Participatory design sessions

• User stories

• Paper prototyping

Prototyping a course database with Bento

Scenario-based design

(Carroll, 2000)

Scenarios

• First experience with EduFeedr

• Student is posting an assignment on her blog

• Exploring the connections between student blogs

• Setting up course feeds

• Archiving course posts and comments

• Using the offline client

Scenario 3: Exploring the connections between student blogs

John has been using EduFeedr for a few weeks. For him the most exiting feature is the way how connections between the blogs are presented. EduFeedr has a visualization where all the blogs are displayed as nodes. Lines between the nodes show the links between the blog posts. All the students have linked to the course blog. Some of the student blogs have a lot of connections while others have not been so active.

It is possible to switch on a different view and see who has commented which blog. This time John finds out that some student blogs have actually more comments than his blog.

The same information is also displayed as a table where it is easy to see how many pingbacks and comments each participant has made. EduFeedr has also aggregated all the comments. It means that John can see all comments that one student has made on a same page without visiting all the blogs. This will save him a lot of time, because commenting is part of his grading scheme and students get points for that.

Evaluating the scenarios

• Mozilla Foundation / Creative Commons open education course

• Two participatory design sessions

User stories

(Cohn, 2004)

Paper prototyping

Research-based design

(Leinonen et al, 2008)

Key features of EduFeedr

Signing up for the course

Visualizing the progress

Visualizing the social network

Writing notes about the blog posts

Archiving the course

Conclusions and future work

Conclusions and future work

• User stories and paper prototypes are currently in progress

• More design work is needed on aggregating group assignments and content from Web 2.0 environements

• Choosing a suitable open-source development platform and components

References

• Carroll, J. 2000. Making use. Scenario-based design of human-computer interactions. Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

• Cohn, M. 2004. User stories applied: For agile software development. Boston, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley.

• Leinonen, T., Toikkanen, T., and Silfvast, K. 2008. Software as Hypothesis: Research-Based Design Methodology. In Proceedings of Participatory Design Conference 2008, Indiana University, Oct 1-4 2008.

Photos

• Dov Harrington, http://www.flickr.com/photos/idovermani/3809348377/

• Sander Veenhof, http://www.flickr.com/photos/sndrv/3329968159/

• Sheila Thomson, http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheilaellen/2335636153/

Thank You!

• hans.poldoja@tlu.ee

• http://www.slideshare.net/hanspoldoja/

• http://www.edufeedr.org