Twitters, Tweets and Facebook – Oh My!

Everyone seems to be talking about social networking. Here at Riverside Publishing, we’ve even noted that many of our parents are signing up for Facebook accounts – a sure sign that social networking has hit the mainstream.

As we think about “next generation” systems, we are exploring the extent to which educators want to incorporate social networking experiences into their usage of such platforms. In an increasingly mobile MySpace’d-Facebooked-Twitter’ed world, do such communications tools have a role to play for K-12 educators?

The example at left is a concept we’ve been playing with. Cleverly (and with a knod to Facebook users everywhere) we’ve called this rough concept  ”My Wall.” Within the context of an educational assessment delivery platform, such as our own Edusoft or DataDirector, would educators want the ability to post messages to each other or status updates within the application itself? Or, would busy educators just view this as “one more place to check” for such messages?

Should we link our assessment delivery platforms to popular tools, like Twitter? Would it be helpful, for example, to “tweet” the beginning of your district’s newest benchmark exam, or to inform classroom teachers that the latest set of academic standards (think: Common Core Standards) are now available within the system?

What’s the appropriate role, if there is one, for such social networking tools? Post your thoughts and ideas. We’d love to engage in some online dialogue with you on this topic…

Simplicity

From "The Laws of Simplicity" by John Maeda

We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about where things need to go next in terms of educational assessment platforms. Educators, like all of us, are being asked to do more, more often, and with less time and resources in which to do it. Clearly, this environment breeds a need for simplicity.

I’ve just finished reading a wonderful book by John Maeda called “The Laws of Simplicity.” In this book, Maeda explores the tensions that often exist between the need for systems to be robust, yet also easy to use. How many of us, for example, really use all of those functions and features in Microsoft Word? Yet, I bet we all have our favorite set of features in Word that we would argue Microsoft must never remove. Spell check comes to the top of my mind.

As employees of an educational media company (and in many cases, also former classroom teachers), we constantly struggle with this tension between “How Simple Can We Make It?” versus “How Complex Does It Have To Be?”

Maeda offers an approach for this dilemma. He suggests: “The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.“

Riverside currently enjoys the benefits of providing two major assessment delivery systems to our customers: the Edusoft Assessment Management System and DataDirector. Each are wonderful in their own way, and each have their own relatives strengths and weaknesses. I’m curious, however, if our users could really play the role of despot and determine which functions/features in either of those systems “lives” or “dies,” what would they remove?

My first official blog entry serves as a challenge to our users of sorts. If you had to, what function(s) or feature(s) of either system would you place on the chopping block? Any thoughts?

Follow Me On Twitter

You can follow my Tweets about our product innovation efforts on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/RPCMikeMNextGen and be among the first to know what we are working on and thinking about at Riverside Publishing.