foolfillment: the blog

I went along to my second eduBuzz meeting this afternoon, and there was again a lot of interesting discussion which covered a few different topics. I think it is a great sign that these meetings are open and the likes of me are welcome to come along and take part (or just listen as I mostly did), it shows a great deal of openness, but also gives them the chance to hear a perspective from outside East Lothian.

One of the first areas discussed was the edubuzz site itself. There was also time talking about how to get more people on board and push it beyond those who are already using it. I’ll try to cover these in more detail below. Since the first days of the project it’s gone through a number of different looks (First exc-el site, Second exc-el site, edubuzz site) and today there seemed a feeling that the current front page doesn’t offer quite the access that it might. David Gilmour has done a sterling job in getting the Wordpress MU software running so smoothly and that side of things was discussed later. The edubuzz home pages are set up separately from that at the moment. It is still very much an evolving project and the focus of the site is changing alongside that.

My own thoughts are that it is good to make the first page that users see quite simple and open clean and the current page is good at this. At the same time though is must give an insight into what the site is all about. What it certainly shouldn’t do is turn people away after just a few hopeful clicks, which it sounds like it is doing. I think there are a few things that could be done to quickly improve the usability without much difficulty.

First I feel that having two big obvious links at the start is great but there also needs to be some succinct tagline that explains what it is all about. Secondly, the two main links – share and explore – are great, but the impression that the user gets after clicking either is that edubuzz is just a portal. These pages hold links to external sites without obviously showing that they are related to edubuzz. Some additional explanation, for example, that the pageflakes link takes you to a place where you can explore all of the edubuzz content, and offers you a way to start using feeds. Thirdly, there are a few little bits of the style that are bugbears of mine (although they are doubtless ones that I’m guilty of myself) mainly these are where some things aren’t consistent throughout the site – things like using the same style for links throughout, sticking to one font and size, using the title attribute on each page. Usually when people are on the net they are very target driven – they are out to find something so a good website will give it to them straight away without them having to hunt for it.

That said, it is incredibly difficult to design a site that will work for everyone, especially when the content is ever changing, and when the purpose of it is still evolving. It is made even harder when the target users range through all ages of school pupil to staff and parents on different levels of connection speed.

A couple of related links come from the site of web usability king Jakob Neilsen: top 10 mistakes in web design, and home page design guidelines. Some useful things in there, but not all of them apply to edubuzz, or the edubuzz front page.

On other matters there was discussion about how to get edubuzz to a wider community than those who are currently using it. There was the point that people are perhaps put off by the perception that this this is extra work but without realising what the benefits are. A point that came up a couple of times is that teachers and pupils are already doing a lot of the things that their blogging could be made up of. What edubuzz does is gives this work a platform for others to see and contribute to. Teachers are already engaging in reflective practice or are already making classroom resources, by making this work available to an audience through blogging they would be opening up themselves to a huge and growing community that can help them develop these resources even further. I think it is a key point that can’t be iterated enough that blogging and many other read/write tools need not be extra work for teachers – the activities that go on in blogs can be what teachers are doing already. It just happens that there are huge benefits to come with doing them in front of an audience.

A final topic that didn’t get left with much time was the idea of a conference to push edubuzz to the people who maybe are just that little bit afraid of making the step to it themselves. A wiki was set up at elconference.wikispaces a number of months ago, but could be used again to develop the idea a little further. I think this could be a really good event but needs some input to make sure it would deliver what is needed.

This entry was posted at 8:22 pm on the 14th of May, 2007 and is filed under East Lothian, blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.