SOCIETY: a social reading application to join education and social network experience

Abstract. This paper describes a social reading application designed for education and school communities based on electronic book reading experience. Both design and evaluation followed a user centered approach in order to obtain a custom made application called SOCIETY, to be used by community based groups with similar reading interests, running both on IOS and Android System. A special emphasis was given on personal and social aspects in writing and sharing notes with the community groups and the “facebook or twitter” large community to better understand how that can improve the learning process. Beside showing a high interest on society@school app our trial evidenced the need to separate school community from wider social networks, a need which seems to be important for students. That stresses the importance of privacy management in school applications design, because students seem to be worried about sharing information and mixing school and social networks contexts.