Great piece, Mara. To my mind, this point is particularly critical:
“Another challenge in creating applications for academia is that many of the user goals are embedded in pedagogical methods that may be discipline specific or not expressed in a generalizableway. Instructional designers and faculty are rarely part of a development team. In the highereducation community source environment we have an opportunity to remedy this. It may require reaching across local organizational divides to ensure that the user and instructional goalsare adequately being met: Often, instructors don't speak the language of technology, so the instructional designer can help translate, generalize, and communicate their needs. In turn, theinstructional designer often doesn't speak the language of the application programmer, and theUI designer can help translate and represent their needs within the design and work flow of theapplication for the developers.”
Programmers are from Mars; teachers are from Venus.
Given the distributed nature of Open Source communities, what realistic, low-barrier-to-entry methods can we employ to narrow the communication gap?
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