Talk:OLPC Rochester, NY/Usability testing class project

Developer collaboration with teachers and students

Hi Team,

I have a challenge that may fit your project.

I want to setup an interface where teachers and students in XO countries (focus on Uruguay right now) can interact with developers to define requirements and priorities for development. We also want an interface that will allow teachers to share best practices and ideas with each other.

So its two different but related "sites".

1 - The goals of the user - developer exchange are as follows:
- Have teachers and students say what they want to do, what they are teaching, how they use the XO and related infrastructure, suggest ideas and explain challenges that they have.
- Allow developers to ask questions, send links to try out new software or interfaces and in general gather feedback from real users on design ideas and software.
- Create a dialog which allows cross training in education and software and helps uncover the right themes for development and education with the XO.
- Have space for teachers to ask questions and get support or file bugs. An online "help desk" but also a general learning space for resolving short term issues.

I started hashing out some examples of input on a site at:
http://meta.fuentelibre.org/trac/wiki/DesarrolloInternacional
see the links under the report activity section.

2 - The goals for the teacher to teacher exchange are as follows:
- Have teachers give examples of what has worked and what has not for them in teaching with the XO.
- Allow teachers to re-use each others work
- Allow teachers to ask each other questions and get support on details and at a high level
- Allow teachers to build the site choose the threads and identify the themes which are important to them.
- Enable consensus building on priorities for development which can then be shared and pushed for on site 1 above.

That's the main idea. My intention is to support my very user centric development methodology which I have briefly explained on my wiki page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Gregorio

The challenge is that I can't seem to get to any teachers or get them comment. I have some leads in Uruguay but its still at the systems integrator level. If/when my contact identifies some lead teachers to start to interact with us, I need to send them to a site in Spanish that encourages this exchange as outlined above.

I don't know why teachers and others have been reluctant to share their experiences. It may be that they don't realize the importance of their input and don't want to appear uninformed. Th truth is, I don't know why more users from developing countries have not commented yet and I would like to find out.

In any case, I need to pick an interface and ideas so far include:
- Blog
- Wiki
- e-mail list
- forum
- other?

The teachers are not technologists and don't want to be so it has to be very intuitive and easy to use. They were trained on how to use Blogs but so far they have not posted to Blogs on their own. They did get a lot of blog input from kids and ther but all posts were sent to one person who used their account to do the posting.

See Uruguay blogs at: http://www.blogger.com/profile/06134894806578234196

Let me know if you can help do some testing to pick from the options above or find another choice which will provide an interface that encourages this exchange.

Let me know if you have any questions or if this does not seem like a well defined test subject. Its an interface to help gather input on how to develop interfaces so we better nclude a variable to pop us out of this recursive stack or we'll never see the light of day :-)

I'll reply on the dev list and you can e-mail back directly from there if you need more info.

Thanks,

Greg S

Gregorio 09:49, 14 March 2008 (EDT)