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EduFeedr
 — 
Redesigning the Feed Reader for an OpenEducation
 
Hans Põldoja
 
Tallinn UniversityNarva mnt 2510120 Tallinn, Estonia+372 6409355
hans.poldoja@tlu.ee
ABSTRACT
 In recent years educators have started to use blogs in onlinecourses. Current RSS feed readers lack special features for monitoring the process of collaborative knowledge building inthese type of courses where each student has a personal blog. Inthis paper we present the conceptual design of an educationallyenhanced feed reader EduFeedr that is currently work-in-progress.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
 D.2.2 [
Design Tools and Techniques
]: Evolutionary prototyping,User interfaces.
 
General Terms
 Design, Human Factors.
Keywords
 Open education, personal learning environments, feed readers,research-based design
1.
 
INTRODUCTION
The term ‘open education’ has carried several meanings over theyears. In 1970’s it was used to refer to the informal schoolingmovement in the United States. The ideas of informal and openeducation were popularized by several authors such as Charles E.Silverman [1] and Ivan Illich [2]. In recent years this term has been often used in the context of open educational resources andopen courseware initiatives such as MIT OpenCourseWare
1
. Still,we must point out that open education has a much wider meaningthan just openly available educational content. According to theCape Town Open Education Declaration, “open education is notlimited to just open educational resources. It also draws uponopen technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learningand the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educatorsto benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also growto include new approaches to assessment, accreditation andcollaborative learning.” [3].In recent years also the learning environments have changedtowards openness. Educators have started to move away fromclosed and institutional learning management systems such asBlackBoard. Instead, they have started to use blogs, wikis andother Web 2.0 tools to build up learning environments. These new
1
MIT OpenCourseWare. http://ocw.mit.edu/type of open and distributed environments are called personallearning environments (PLE) [4]. There is a wide range of onlinetools that can be used to set up a PLE. The scope of this researchis limited to blog-based courses where each student has a personal blog for posting the assignments.Several educators have taken the openness one step further. Inaddition to openly available content and open learningenvironment they have provided also free and open registration tothe course. One of the first examples is Introduction to OpenEducation course that was organized by David Wiley in fall 2007[5]. Course syllabus and weekly assignments were published on awiki page. All the participants were able to add their names and blog addresses to the same wiki. The success of this courseinspired several other people to organize similar courses. In spring2008 a similar course was organized in University of Art andDesign Helsinki. On that course Wikiversity was used as a coursewiki [6]. Both of these courses started with more than 50 participants. Number of people who sign up for the course maygrow rapidly if the course has received enough visibility in the blogs. More than 1200 people signed up for the Connectivism andConnective Knowledge course in summer 2008 [7].Learning environment in a blog-based course is often morecomplicated than just a set of blogs and a wiki. The author has been organizing four blog-based courses in recent years. VariousWeb 2.0 environments have been used in these courses and thelearning environment has changed with each iteration. In the lastiteration the learning environment may be divided into three parts:(1) student blogs, that are typically hosted in Blogger,WordPress.com and Edublogs.org, (2) course blog atWordPress.com and course wiki in Wikiversity and (3) variousenvironments for learning resources. Reading material is typically published in LeMill
2
and presentations in SlideShare
3
. A specifictag (e.g.
oercourse
) is agreed between the participants and used inall environments that support tagging. Course blog has a blogrollwith links to all student blogs and tag pages in the environmentswhere the learning resources are published.One of the complicated issues in blog-based courses is to followall the student activities. These activities do not take place only intheir blogs. For example in the last course that the author organized the students used 11 Web 2.0 environments in addition
2
LeMill. http://lemill.net
3
SlideShare. http://www.slideshare.net
 
to their blogs to share course-related content. The problem is thatcurrently available web-based and desktop feed readers are notsufficient for monitoring and analyzing learning activities whichcross the borders of different Web 2.0 applications. Typicaldesktop feed readers are scalable enough to follow hundreds of RSS feeds, but they are designed only for personal use. In large blog-based courses there may often be more than one teacher.Web-based feed readers such as Pageflakes
4
and Netvibes
5
can beshared, but they do not scale well for large number of blogs, because each feed that is followed will require an individualwidget. Therefore, the aim of this research is to design a web- based feed reader that has special educational enhancements for monitoring and analyzing learning activities that take place inopen web-based personal learning environments.
2.
 
DESIGN METHODOLOGY
The study is based on the research-based design methodology [8],involving iterative scenario-based design [9], user stories [10] andlightweight prototyping [11]. The first phase of research-baseddesign process is a contextual inquiry. In this case we canconsider organizing the actual blog-based courses as a contextualinquiry. The main limitations of current feed readers came outduring these courses. For each course a lightweight prototype for saving and managing students’ blog posts was built using Bento
6
  personal database application for Mac OS X. These prototypeslacked network connectivity but they helped to clarify therequirements for managing blog posts in such courses.The second phase of research-based design is a participatorydesign. In that phase the designers wrote six scenarios thatdescribed how teachers and students used an educationallyenhanced feed reader named EduFeedr. These scenarios wereinitially presented in the Open Education course
7
organized byMozilla Foundation, ccLearn and Peer 2 Peer University. A set of questions was prepared about each scenario and it was possible tocomment the scenarios in a wiki. Later two participatory designsessions were organized with people who have been teaching in blog-based courses. In these sessions the participants read thescenarios and we had a structured discussion based on thequestions about each scenario. The participants agreed with mostof the scenarios but they were quite critical about some details.For example it came out that they do not expect that most of their students will start adding tags to their blog posts.Currently we are in the product design phase. Based on the resultsof the design sessions a set of user stories were written and published in the project website
8
. Based on the user stories wewill develop paper prototypes which will be tested in the next participatory design session.
4
Pageflakes. http://www.pageflakes.com
5
Netvibes. http://www.netvibes.com
6
Bento. http://www.filemaker.com/products/bento/
7
EduCourse. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/EduCourse
8
EduFeedr project website. http://www.edufeedr.org
3.
 
KEY FEATURES FOR ANEDUCATIONALLY ENHANCED FEEDREADER 
In the current phase of the research we have indicated five keyfeatures for an educationally enhanced feed reader. Only teacher should need a user account for EduFeedr. Anybody could useEduFeedr for browsing the course blogs but only teachers couldwrite notes about the blog posts and archive the course.
3.1
 
Signing up for the course
Currently the students sign up for the courses by adding their information to the participants’ page in the course wiki. Coursesign-up should be carried out in EduFeedr so that the teacher doesnot have to add all the feeds manually. EduFeedr could also provide a widget with links to all student blogs. This widget could be embedded to blog sidebar as a blogroll.
3.2
 
Visualizing the progress
Blog-based courses are often organized so that the students have acertain assignment for each week. They should write a blog post based on the assignment to their personal blog. Typically some of the students are late with submitting their assignments. It becomescomplicated to follow the blogs when reports for differentassignments are posted at the same time. Therefore EduFeedr should feature a chart that displays a progress bar for each participants. This way the teacher will get a quick overview of the progress. Also it should be possible to filter blog posts byassignments. In order to implement this feature a connection must be made between student’s blog post and the original assignment.We have considered various methods [12] and decided that the best solution is to ask students to include a link to the originalassignment in their blog post.
3.3
 
Visualizing the social network 
EduFeedr will contain a link-node diagram that displays theconnections between all the participants’ blogs in the course. Aconnection is made when a participant is linking or commentinganother participant’s blog. This diagram will help to indicate people who are not active in the social network. Teacher could pay a special attention to integrate these students with the learningcommunity.
3.4
 
Writing notes about the blog posts
Design sessions indicated that some teachers write draftcomments about the blog posts and notes for assessment.EduFeedr should contain a special form field where the logged inteacher could write a note about the blog post. The note can besaved for personal use or copied as a comment to the student’s blog.
3.5
 
Archiving the course
Teacher should have an easy way to archive all the blog posts andcomments. We have experienced that some of the students deletetheir blogs soon after the course is over.
4.
 
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK 
This paper described the design work that is still in progress. Inthe current phase we have indicated key features that are neededfor an educationally enhanced feed reader. The work will continuewith prototyping and additional participatory design sessions.Current features are focused on aggregating and monitoring blog
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