Archive for April, 2008

Tutortrac/Learning Center Mashup

Students don’t distinguish between the Learning Center and Tutortrac. In their minds it’s one and the same. For this reason, where Tutortrac goes so does the Learning Center. It’s incumbent then for the Learning Center to be as involved in the development of Tutortrac as is possible. This thinking leads me to consider existing and ideal models for application development. It seems to me that the manufacturing model that consigns the user’s role mostly to signing for a receipt upon delivery is increasingly being abandoned for a more fertile and participatory end-user assisted development process. This latter process involves the user in every aspect of the development phase. The downside is a possible longer development time on the back end and the need to facilitate expert/non-expert communications, which is not always easy. The benefits would be an application with a better fit-for-use in both form and function. Greater buy-in from users and fewer calls for product modifications. It seems to me that one aspect of this shift to a modern application design model is the increasingly ubiquitous developer blog, eg., (1), (2). These blogs serve not only to keep users up-to-date on work being done on an application, but also humanizes the people and process of application design, which may seem mysterious to the uninitiated. Photoblogs are especially useful in this regard, eg., (3).