I just read an article by SRI researchers that reports on a user study of the Math Tools DL. As one of the participants in the study I was interested to see what they had to say. The basic structure of the report was to: (a) summarize the results, (b) propose representative personas, and (c) propose a metaphor and a set of design principles.One thing that was not really touched on that I hope MTDL can become is a place for people to DO stuff, not just find and talk about stuff. I’m working on a proposal for adding functionality to MTDL for using TADRIOLA to adapt existing lessons, activities, and mathlets and then sharing the derived works.
- Searching and Publishing – People come to the MTDL to find and share resources
- Overcoming Isolation – People come to the MTDL to help overcome isolation
- Discuss Development – Talk with others about the development of math software
Personas
- Teacher Developer
- Professional Developer
- Educational Researcher
- Inexperienced Developer
- Hobbyist Developer
Metaphor and Principles
- Workshop metaphor
- Design for multiple roles
- Design for multiple levels of expertise
- Provide activity indicators
I like the workshop metaphor, though I think that perhaps there are better. I can’t really discern the implication of designing for different roles and different levels of expertise. I lilke the idea of activity indicators. I realize that this is an area of recent interest throughout the field.
Posted on March 1st, 2004 by joel
Filed under: authoring tools, interactive online math, math education, web development
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