List8D – Interview: Simon Yeldon and Ben Charlton

Sep 5, 2009 by michelle-pauli

Simon Yeldon, web developer, and Ben Charlton, computing officer, both from the University of Kent, talk about their dev8D award-winning List8D project for managing reading listsWhat is List8D?It is a user-friendly reading list management system. We’re aiming it at three different groups of users:  academics, to make it easy for them to manage reading lists; librarians, who need stock management tools to allow them to predict demand from texts; and students, to present the information in a way that’s seamless eg in their VLE or portal so they never knowingly need interact with the system.What problems/issues is List8D tackling?This came out of dev8D. We’ve had problems managing reading lists at Kent and other univesities seemed to be facing the same problems and it’s hard to get the data out of the systems people have and into the learning environments that students are actually using.How would you like other software developers and users to get involved in what you are doing?We’d like them to use the system. We will release early and often to get people enthusiastic about what we’re doing and play with it and give feedback. We’d like to run an event to get people to come and hack into it and add cool features for their own systems.What developer communities have you been involved in and if none, why not?Dev8D is the major one as that kicked off the project and we talk to people on Twitter and in the sectors we work in and via mailing lists. We’ve made some interesting connections at this meeting.What is the coolest or most exciting thing in educational software development?Ben: the community. The fact that we have events like this. JISC is doing some amazing things with funding exciting projectsSimon: the freedom to experiment with new tools and technologies