EduFeedr — Redesigning the Feed
Reader for an Open Education
Hans Põldoja
Tallinn 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
link and tag
Course wiki and blog
link and tag link
link link
Student blogs
RSS

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