Jonatan@natanoJ.dk

During this last three week internship at the 8th semester of the information architecture study I worked together wit a fellow student on a case proposed by the Networked Learning Conference. The Networked Learning Conference is an International, research-based conference that focuses on “technology enhanced learning” and is administrated by Lancaster University (Networked Learning Conference).

The conference website has for the different years been made using HTML files and it has recently been decided to switch into using the content management system Joomla for their site instead. They had started this work but wanted to make the website support collaboration among the participants and strengthen the participants relationship to the conference. We were therefore asked to find solutions for Joomla that allow the construction of a community. In addition we were also asked to find a solution for organizing papers from the different conferences in a database.

In order to create a community we found a community extension for Joomla (JomSocial) that to some extent could be compared to Facebook as the members have their own wall, can join groups, add friends and many other things. This solution was well adopted and it was decided by the conference to invest in using this extension. To solve the issue of organizing papers we found a range of extensions that could be used for that purpose. But the conference decided to delay this decision partly because it would be time consuming to add all the papers and partly because they wanted to be sure that the conference will continue using Joomla for upcomming conferences such that the paper database could be a consistent used database.

As our main role in the assignment to some extent was developers my main lessons from this case is an understanding of the importance of finding good ways to communicate the wanted functionality for developers. It might be difficult for developers to understand a weak description of what they should develop. As I see it in retrospect it might be good with short usage descriptions like use cases as they are easier to understand for almost anyone. Apart from this lesson I also got glimpse of the various aspects that need to be considered during the construction of a community.

At the end of this case I decided to continue working for the conference at a student job. You may read about this student job at this page.