Matt's 3rd Personal Commentary

This week I met with a few people on Friday and with nearly everyone over the course of Sunday. In those meetings, we finished off the consolidated sequence models and the last little bit of the affinity, and started the visioning process. Because of a dam cold that seems to be floating around, I missed a meeting on Tuesday and Thursday.

On Friday, a few of us met up without much direction. Some of us looked at our consolidated models and some of us gravitated toward the affinity. Ultimately, we ended up working on the last few details of the affinity. This was somewhat difficult as the last few post-its were the least understood. Some information was re-organized in a way that might be useful to us later and other information was removed or placed somewhat awkwardly into a category if we deemed that information not essential to our design. It's important to recognize the point of diminishing returns, and I think we may have only slightly pasted that point as our affinity has been quite useful for future understanding of our users.

On Sunday, I met with a few people at the beginning of the day and the rest of the team showed up a few hours later. At the beginning of the day we worked the consolidated sequence models and then started on visioning. I enjoyed visioning as I and the rest of the team felt really productive doing it. Everyone had a lot of idea's to propose, nearly all of which were generated from the affinity wall and most of which seem like they might be pretty cool. This seemed to remind the team why we had decided to do a project on this subject in the first place and to refresh a few people's interest in the project, myself included.

Over the next week, we are going to get as far along as we can, and really try for some prototyping, which will require a lot meetings and logistical gymnastics. Since I am much healthier now, I am planning on being at all those meeting and running as many prototyping sessions as I can. Towards the end of the week, we will be starting our presentation and therefore our paper. It's going to take a good amount of time, but judging for our visioning session, we will be presenting some very interesting ideas about improving the work of students.

week 8 commentary

Our group met several times this week, each time with a different combination of people. We started the week by completing our affinity diagram; I felt like we would take a step forward at one meeting until a member who had missed that meeting came back with their own opinion, in which we would have to step backwards to undo and redo what I thought we had finished. The disagreement about seemingly minor issues on the affinity wall became frustrating to me to the point where another group member and I began working on other models to use our time more productively. Though it took longer than expected to finish the affinity diagram, I am now satisfied with the end result of the affinity wall's evolution.

We also completed most of our consolidation including the flow models, sequence models, and cultural models. I am pleased with our newest version of the consolidated flow model in which we shifted our center focus to the Web instead of on a student because it put all of our research in a different perspective. There was nothing too suprising about the consolidated sequence models or the consolidated cultural model. I also added a few physical models this week and we are currently trying to collect more data for artifact models.

Yesterday we met up to begin our visioning, which turned out to be a successful and efficient use of time. I think this is the part of the project that we have all been waiting for. After observing and interviewing other students, as well as being students ourselves, we have all these ideas inside that we have been anxious to put out as design visions and technologies. One idea would trigger another, and it was exciting to see the morale of our group brighten after having trudged through the affinity wall and consolidation challenges.

I think our group is aware of our time constraints and what needs to be done before the quarter ends. The next step is for us to work on our storyboarding and paper prototypes. Hopefully, the newly revitalized enthusiasm for this project will pull us through the final stretch of this project.

Andrew Alexander Wk 8 Commentary

I must express that although some of my group members have doubts about the project regarding time and application to the U.P. system, I myself am absolutely confident that our redesign will be supported by the data and more importantly, make extremely signficant recommendations to Ubiquitous Presenter. That being said, I will proceed with my commentary.
This week felt a little scattered with multiple meetings involving multiple members. Overall, the main goal of this week was to consolidate models and complete the affinity wall. I feel that we have succeeded in accomplishing these two goals, with the exception of a consolidated artifact model. The affinity wall seemed like a very slow process, and there were times where people were arguing over seemingly trivial details that I just had to take a step back and work on something else. One thing I have noticed is that group projects require everyone to make concessions, but some people feel like their opinion is the right one. Thats all and well, but if it is holding back the progress of the entire project then one should simply move on. I am glad the affinity wall is done, I felt like some of the group members were slightly distracted in their quest to make it perfect.
This week I personally took part in the consolidation of the flow model, creation of two sequence models that had not been completed, consolidation of the sequence model, and the creation of the affinity wall. On Sunday several group members met up for what felt like the most productive meeting of the entire quarter. When we walked the affinity wall and began the visioning/ redesign process I finally realized the importance of the affinity wall. It seemed as though great design ideas were bouncing all over the room and I was happy to capture them on the wiki as well as facilitate further development of ideas. I knew that we had plenty of great design ideas for U.P. from the very beginning, the challenge was collecting data that would support the kinds of requirements we all sort of had in mind. Actually seeing the data spawn these design ideas was very...satisfying...to say the least. Overall, I feel like the group members that were present on Sunday received a sort of revitalization, and now I am almost sure that everyone shares the same confidence and great feelings about our project that I have felt throughout the entirety of the process. If there was some way to implement and actually create a system like the one we have in mind, I feel as though it would almost revolutionize the way people look at school and learning. The next week includes development of design ideas, prototyping, storyboarding, and the initiation of the paper. All is well.

Bryan's 5/27 commentary

This past week has seen us finish our affinity wall and most of our consolidated models, with the exception of the artifact model and perhaps one other.
I was really surprised at how long the affinity wall actually took to complete. I can't recall off hand how long the book said it would take but my instincts tell me that the authors sorely underestimated the time needed to complete it. On the other hand I also feel that we have an area of focus that does not allow seamless application of the contextual design process. So perhaps that is why the affinity took so long. That, and the fact that some of the group members seemed unwilling to compromise on certain issues during the affinity's development. However, those issues were eventually resolved and work proceeded. I guess what I feel that our strange area of research and dissenting opinions all combined to make the affinity harder than it really had to be.
For the next week I think the group and I really need to have a sense of urgency about trying to wrap the project up. We really haven't even discussed design ideas as a group and I feel like we're really expected to make some kind of recommendation about the system as a whole, or provide a fix to some kind of problem. The hard thing about it is we've been studying how people study, and to do any more than apply our data to the UP system would take a lot of work. More work than I feel we have time for.
The goal for this week should be to have a design idea or problem to work on all picked out by the end of the week. That way we have the weekend to work on it and then the next few days to write the paper and do the power point final presentation. Just saying it now almost sounds like it's too much to get done in that amount of time. The group met today without me. I can only hope they made lots of headway.

Week 8 Commentary, Ben Lotan

This week we met three times, with various members in attendance.
We had a meeting on tuesday and two meetings on thursday.
these were primarily focused on consolidation of the cultural and sequence models, and the completion of the affinity diagram.
Then today (sunday) we had a long meeting with most of our members there for the core session in which we took the first explicit steps to form a vision.
First there were four of us. We flushed out two sequence models and made a consolidated sequence of group study we thought would be good to have. Then as more people arrived we got to visioning.
We "walked the data" and used the affinity diagram to guide us.
something i found interesting:
When we made the affinity diagram we had some difficulty, there were many disagreements and stepping backwards... it took us a while, and every little detail seemed crucial. Eventually we just had to finish it. I thought that it wouldnt be so helpful somehow as an artifact, that it would be helpful in the process of creating it, but no more. When we got to visioning however, i realized how good it was to have, and also how much the smaller details didnt matter. and all our organization issues could have been brushed aside much faster....
The visioning felt very productive and now we are all comfortable with our project.
So much of studying is organizing, and compiling and navigating through media... these necessary issues which are not ACTUALLY studying... we want a system which will allow students to Study when they "study" forgoing the slew of activities necessary as class structure works now...... we want people to be more effective, and make better use of time... or we at least want to allow them to do this. Also not just in a way that prepares them for the test. but which allows them to LEARN better....
so as we compile our data, we see many ways we could do this... but its a hefty problem... the system could easily get mixed up and confusing...
we are starting to see how necessary this whole process is. and thus we are happy.
so right now in the project we are ready to make our visions concrete and begin to storyboard.
good.
sorry this was scattered and a bit childish. I hope you saw the important stuff buried within all of this.
Good

Wyatt's Week 8 Commentary

I didn't post a week seven Commentary.
Of course, I had not noticed until today. I was out of town almost all of last week as I saw on our meeting last Tuesday I was very behind because of that. I came back to see that most of our models were consolidated and the affinity diagram was all but finished. I really wanted to be a part of this process and i regret having missed so much. However, I have been working diligently to make group meetings and provide what ever help I can. The result has been promising as we are just about ready to start the visioning and design phase.

I feel like i have mostly been working as a mediator for our process. Just like the last two weeks we are still getting more of our arguments about the process of design and not the data. For example we had a major disagreement on the precise word that need to be on the affinity notes. Because of the Hierarchical feel of the diagram i didn't feel that every note had to be explicit. Rather they would only need to summarize the categories and help us understand what we should be looking at overall. Eventually we did come to the agreements to make a valid and useful affinity diagram.

I think it will be very helpful at this point to make sure that we have usable copies of all our diagrams and notes so we can put those in our final folder with the final paper. I know that we have spent so much time as a group working on the idea of design, that we have a break in between each step. Because each one feels like a separate process we separate the procedure to concentrate on one part at a time. As a result when it came time to consolidate we needed to track down all the models and go over them again to remember what we need to draw into a consolidation. Just to double check we need to have all the models, our artifacts, the consents, and the design ideas all in one place so we can reference them easily.

This is the basic irony of our project.

We are trying to develop a system that will give this accessibility of information to students and we are trying to do that in the absence of the program. We have a Wiki, but there are a lot of problems with it as well:
It fairly disorganized, requiring a large amount of search to find a specific piece of data.
It needs to have a similar structure for every member of the group to fallow, otherwise the data is presented in many different ways adding to the organizational problems already mentioned.
It is hard to use the Wiki for consolidation. We need to be able to reference all the models we have to get a clear picture so that we can and the Wiki will only allow for one to be viewed at a time. This just goes to show the need for this sort of design focus even outside of the study process.

We meet on Sunday to begin visioning and we will continue on Tuesday.

Matt's 2nd Personal Commentary

This class has dominated my time like no class before it. I've met will at least some people in my group at least four times this week. Over the course of the week, we have prepared for a presentation, finished off the last interpretation session, nearly finished the affinity diagram and started consolidating.
Preparation for the presentation was a little rough as we had not done the affinity yet, and therefore didn't have a board understanding of the data as a team. For times sake, I offered a number a categories that I use to think about the data, and the group liked them a lot initially. This became problematic very quickly because people have different boundaries for categories, and they did not have examples in front of them to support my personal division of the data. I knew we were a attempting a verbal affinity in reverse, something the book warned against, but I found it to be an excellent lesson in sticking to the process the book recommends, or at least not doing something they warn against. There were however no other options at the time as we did not have the time or materials to get the affinity mostly completed. During the presentation, I learned the importance of having well made slides and a working computer. People that spoke before me said somethings I was planning on saying, so I had to modify my bit. I found that I forgot to say a few points and added a few new ones. This could have been remedied by presenting a slide with all the points I wanted to cover, but I did have that in the first place as one person made all the slides and then the team slightly modified and assigned them. In any future presentations, I'll try to have each person create their own slides and have the power point on 2 or 3 laptops.
On Thursday, the team started the affinity diagram. In some logistical confusion, two team members met in the morning while the whole team met in the afternoon. Although jumping into the affinity half way through can be daunting, the two members were very productive, as is common when we meet in groups of 2 or 3. I created affinity notes for my two users, and helped clean up the organization of the diagram. Aside from trying to understand the half of the affinity I didn't help create, as a team, this was one of the smoothest as most revealing processes we have done yet. Some team members wanted to start adding categories in the middle of the process, but I reminded them that it's suppose to an inductive process and that at first every note needs to be placed with another note, only then should we start categorizing. This was met with little resistance as we just had to keep doing what we were doing, and we found the whole process rather engaging. I do wish there was a program that did affinities as getting access to our affinity on the weekend proved impossible, and I would like to use the process in other classes and situations.
Friday through Sunday we met a number of times and finished off our last interpretation session and begin consolidating. Our first attempt at consolidating went somewhat well, but when everyone needed to head home, there was a feeling that something was missing in our flow model. On Sunday, I met with Brian and Andy, but the one with the flow model we had been working on did not show. Knowing that the flow model was incomplete, I recommended that we try and bang out the flow model how the book says it should be done. They thought it was good idea, so I divvied out the flow models and we followed the steps in the book. We did re-cover some ground, but we learned a much faster process and a few ways to tweak it to suit our needs, and Brian created a simplified consolidated model with few things written in it to aid his own thinking. Andy and I really liked this idea with addition of side reference with the all the roles, responsibilities, and problems. I plan to apply this process to all future consolidated models and the diagramming technique to at least the cultural model as we move as quickly as possible through consolidation and onto developing our design ideas.

Ben's Week 7 Commentary

Ahh To break through the madness of minute to minute life to communicate past events to others, such tasks at times hurt bad, but i should be able to tweak this so as to be of some use also to myself. Or Yes, i remember now, the act of writing is helpful to my as an end in itself, so let this work-out begin...
This past week was about consolidation.
Tuesday we had to present our data to the class. While the presentation may not have gone as planned, this deadline proved to be very useful as it got us started on consolidation. We met up monday and took an approach not explicitly following the book's plan. We wrote up some bullets for each of our users trying to capture things we learned that were specific to that single user. Then we went though and categorized them into some basic domains. These domains were to be the core of our presentation. But then there were issues. I felt like it was sort of invalid, because it seemed as if we were glossing over the consolidation process and maybe we should just sort of focus on what data we had, and not try to make it seem like we were further along than we were, but ultimately i think it ended up being a helpful process.
We had been posting most of our stuff up on our wiki, and as a group i think we were getting to be a bit proud of it, so we thought i showing it off a bit during out presentation. We decided not to and opted for a full powerpoint, but when we failed to have enough foresight to get this fully ready to go (missing adaptor), it seemed to be a good chance to bestow the wiki to the class. unfortunately, one of our members had updated and changed the organization of the wiki that same morning and the rest of the group was unfamiliar with the changes, so we could not even pull that off.

Some of my group was worried that Prof. Hollan's response to our presentation meant that we were going about the whole project wrong, and that we were not focused enough, etc. But i think he actually understood what we had communicated and that we were on the correct path, with our looking at people's study habits...

Thursday we worked on our affinity diagram and almost completed it. This was a helpful step for all of us, and actually somewhat enjoyable. Really showed us that we actually had done a good job with data collection.
When we initially started this project we had tons of design ideas, and in talking to another teammate i realized that the opinion was shared that we might not be able to find data which would explicitly support some of our ideas. As it turns out we are finding lots of our ideas appropriate, and expanding on many of them in unforeseen ways.

Saturday we had a productive meeting with four group members in which we interpreted the last group contextual interview, and worked on consolidating the flow models. We also talked about some design ideas. And got our priorities straight for the upcoming week. We realized how productive it would be to get some of our informant's notebooks and make some artifact models. This will be done...
I worked a bit more after the meeting to clean up and capture the consolidated flow, and also to put a long sequence model posted on the wiki into a more appropriate form so we can work on consolidating some of those.

there was a meeting on sunday night, which i completely slept through (napping gone wrong) I was upset about this.

One issue i have been trying to voice, is that i know there is more data that is not evident in our affinity diagram... Data we havent collected in any of our interviews. Example: I have used facebook to contact people in classes i have taken in which i do not know anyone. I have done this a total of three times in my undergraduate years here. This is not represented in our interviews, but is real for me (and must be for others), and i know its relevant. How can i get it in there? It seems as if i should just be able to make up some affinity notes about it, and just throw them in, but that seems not right. Perhaps stuff like this will just come out in the design of the system....

The Other thing i realized that made me happy was the idea of designing a system. And we dont necessarily have to deal with the specifics of implementation right away. This will allow us to deal with abstract ideas, so when we think of things like, A study lock, to force students to study and not be distracted, we dont have to necessarily theorize that it should be implemented by making their laptop stick on a certain application... because possibly it could also be implemented by throwing a student into a dungeon with only their study materials... (dont know if that idea was articulated correctly, but thankfully its not very important.

Onward.

Andrew Alexander commentary

This week was hectic as usual. As the summer and the deadline for our redesign nears I have become quite aware of why Prof. Hollan attempted to talk us out of taking this class during the first week. I have met with group members for at least two hours everyday this past week, Monday through Sunday. Although the contextual design process is engulfing much of my free time I can honestly say that I am glad I stayed in this class. I feel that I have learned many helpful tools that I would not have even considered before. Additionally, I feel that this course has sparked my interest into the Human-Computer Interaction side of Cognitive Science, an area of specialization that I had previously ignored.
To begin this week, we met Monday and Tuesday to prepare for our 10 minute presentation on Tuesday. Although in the meetings I felt that we were more than prepared, a combination of technical difficulties and general confusion created a trainwreck of our presentation. However, as bad as it may have seemed, I must admit I am not disheartened. I know that we have gathered a lot of useful data and that ultimately, our redesign will be a success.
Last week we almost completed our Affinity Wall with some small organizational activities remaining, which I hope to complete tomorrow. Furthermore, the affinity wall I feel was the most helpful activity throughout the contextual process thus far, with many design issues and study trends becoming particularly salient throughout the process. As we worked on organizing our affinity notes several design ideas were running through my head which I have begun working on developing.
Over the weekend, a few group members including myself began to work on consolidating our models I feel that last night was particularly productive, where Bryan suggested a structure for our flow model that I feel will prove to be very helpful. From here we must complete our consolidations, begin our visioning and redesign, and ultimately outline a prototype in our paper that will transform the function of U.P. into a study tool rather than lecture tool. I think our ideas will be very beneficial to the actual Ubiquitous Presenter development team on campus.

5/20

Monday afternoon the group met for several hours trying to finish up the work models and interpretation sessions for our last few interviews. We felt like we should have started the affinity already but the fact that we had to give a presentation the following day actually seemed to set us back because we had to attend to its details. Some of us met again briefly Tuesday morning to finalize the power point slides and pick the sections we wanted to speak about.
Later that day our group presented a few of our interviews and other data to the class despite horrendous technical difficulties. While watching the other presentations I came to the conclusion that some of the other groups have chosen projects that are better suited for the contextual design process. After our presentation it wasn't immediately clear if the lack of questions was due to our running over the allotted class time or because people really had no questions or comments. Even the professor and TAs were unusually quiet...
On Thursday morning i think the group met. I had other commitments and could not be there, but was around for the afternoon meeting where we actually made a great deal of progress on the affinity. Much of the time was spent deciding how small each section of notes should be and how to categorize each note. Some of them proved to be very similar in character.
The group met again Saturday without me as I again had obligations. From what they tell me they only had maybe three people show up and only made a little progress on the consolidated work models. The affinity was still locked in the Cal IT building and could not be worked on.
I met with Andy and Matt Sunday evening and we hammered out the consolidated flow model. We first attempted to do it the way the book suggested but this proved slow as only one person could work on listing a particular 'player's' responsibilities. While I was waiting for Andy to finish his list I started making a mock drawing of what i thought the consolidated model might look like. I put 'the web' (Internet) in the center instead of the student this time, though i can't remember exactly why now. Andy and Matt seemed to like what I drew, so we stopped listing each "player's" characteristics and started critiquing my model. This save a lot of time and after a few revisions we had what we thought was a good consolidated flow model. Matt and Andy said we made more progress in that hour and a half than in the two and a half hours they spent the night before working on the same model. Sometimes it's nice to have only a few people, but i would really like a time during the week that everyone could attend for 2-3 hours...

-Bryan DB

5/20 Weekly Commentary

Within the last week, I feel like our Augmented Learning Group has been able to get a better grasp on what needs to be done. Our group met five days this week; in the beginning it was to prepare for our 10-minute presentation and then we went back to working on our contextual design.

To be honest, our presentation was a disappointment. It seems like everything that the professor warned us might go wrong, actually did go wrong. We had a rocky start with technical difficulties, and I think it threw off our entire presentation. Our 10-minute presentation was a poor reflection on the real status of our group at this point in the quarter. The powerpoint that we were unable to show would have given a better portrayal of the hard work put into our contextual design thus far. However, it seems like we used this minor setback as a motivation to work even harder.

We were able to finish up our 13 contextual interviews, create an affinity wall, and begin consolidation. Personally, I enjoyed the process of creating the affinity wall. Each of us wrote affinity notes on post its and organized them on the wall in groups. I do not think that we have finalized the affinity wall yet, but even at this stage it has helped to clarify trends and differences amongst our 13 interviews. Our affinity wall has been a useful tool for us to understand how each aspect of studying is important and must be taken into consideration. I know that a large concern has been that our scope is too wide for this quarter's project, but it would be incomplete if we did not take every observation into account. For example, a student might not understand a concept and she does not go to section because she does not find the TA to be helpful and the section time conflicts with her work schedule. She is also not aware of other office hours because she doesn't know the available times since they are not posted on the class website. Therefore, she uses the resources of her classmate to answer her questions during a study session (Group 3). This is an example of our users and the wide range of influences that we must consider, and that we cannot cut out a part of it since each part may be dependent on another. We also became much more organized as we began the process of consolidation this week while sorting through each interview and finding the gaps that needed to be filled.

Though not fully updated, much of our information is up on our wiki site (http://learningredesign.pbwiki.com/). Natan had the excellent idea of creating this site, and within this week our group has been able to post some contextual interviews. Though it is still under construction, I think that this site will be helpful to us as it becomes more complete.

In this following week, we need to finalize our affinity wall and complete our consolidation process. I think the last few meetings have been effective and we have been able to accomplish a great amount; we need to continue at this pace in order to optimize our last few weeks with the project. Hopefully we will be able to visualize and prototype by the end of this coming week.

Individual work is important for the success of our team, and I know each member of the team has put in their best efforts. At this point, I feel like our personal weekly commentaries should be about the status of the group, since I assume that each of us has put in our share to contribute to how much we have accomplished so far. For a while, it seemed like we were at a standstill, but now it feels like the ball is finally in motion and I look forward to seeing the results of this project.

Week 6 commentary Ben Lotan

this week, what was this week, it was a tuesday meeting preceded by and interview performed by myself and teamate jill on a structural engineering student. This interview was necessary i felt because the engineering popultaion is one we have not yet reached. I was stunned to find that she spends 45 hours a week on one class. This warped me for a few days reflecting on my own life.... could i do such a thing? do i need to commit more to such learning things, from books and numbers? we interpreted this interview as a group directly after.
Thursday i met up with andy and matt to interpret one of any's interviews. we also did some planning of the project and future thinking. i decided it would be a good idea to seek out some new ways of data mining. I think some less complete interviews which precicelly focus on specific sequences of a user could be very helpful, because we are certainly beginning to see some similarity within the models and i think the sequences are crutial. especially for students we need to tap who use technology that we have not seen in others.

Sunday we had a third meeting which is described below in a post by me from yesturday afternoon.

so far i have been the primary interviewer in 6 of my teams interviews. what i have learned is this, ethnography is the best method not only of getting the specific data, but also getting to know people. I have been thinking and writing about the connection which can occur in some of these interviews. I am happy that we decided to look at people studying because it is something that we all do here, A lot. Studying is a very significant part of a UCSD students life, yet it is often very private, and origional. when the engineering student told me how much time she studies i was very touched because i really felt like i was seeing who she was through her studying methodology.

if we are not what we do.
what else is there?

Other things have been frantically writing notes and posting on the wiki and organizing the group. we are on our way to victory. and we will be ready to present our data on tuesday.

Matt's 5/13 Commentary

Originally, our group formed under a general interest in education and supporting learning with technology. This spawned from a suggestion from Prof. Hollan that a group design the next version of Ubiquitous Presenter and/or Note Blogger. Our group, however, eventually learned that a limited number of students and presenters were using these programs at all, and most were using them only as an automatically archived digital white board. With limited and/or logistically challenging access to a community that underutilizes the the programs we hoped to have a multi perspective understanding of, we shifted our focus to the work Ubiquitous Presented hoped to support and/or automate: gathering, sharing, reorganizing, clarifying, and learning new information.

To understand this kind of work, our group has interviewed students alone or in various sized groups. Each individual or group chosen to be interviewed were studying for different classes with different content to promote a broad and diverse view of the population we hope to support. These interviews have provided especially good data for our flow and cultural models and useful but less revealing data for our sequence models. Physical models have been largely ignored as people create, consistently prototypical, study spaces on the fly were the chief physical constraint is the mobility of the content they need to learn. Artifact models have also been scarce as only some of us have the means or opportunity to photocopy or photograph the actual artifacts used by our users. We have, however, consistently noted the kinds of artifacts used, and as students ourselves, we are extremely familiar with their properties.

My role in the group thus far has been primarily to contribute to the understanding, discussion, interpretation, and modeling of the information provided by the interviewer as I have only interviewed one person with Ben. This is largely because all the people that I know that are not in my group are not students. I have, however, attended a number of addition sessions consisting of only three or four members, and I plan to dramatically increase the frequency of these smaller and logistically simpler group sessions in addition to the already planned lengthy full-group sessions on the weekends in order to speed our progress.

In the first half of this week, we will be finishing off our last few interpretation sessions and putting the data and models from those session on our wiki. This will be done, as least in part, as a group so that we can refresh our understanding of the users and the group perspective, determine if any holes can be filled with our raw data, and prepare us for our presentation on Tuesday and our consolidation sessions toward the end of the week.

Wyatt's Week 6 Commentary

We don't have time. That is really what it comes down to. There is so much that we can look into while observing how people study. This Becomes more evident with every single new model or every set of Affinity Notes. It's not discouraging, but it is frustrating to know that we only have a few more weeks to make this data into something that can be useful to our fellow students.
This week was a little unorganized for me.
I didn't interview anybody personally. Any time working on the project this week has been spent in group meetings. We are finishing our interpretation sessions and trying to get a handle on the Consolidation process. Just like creating a model for the first time, consolidation is not something we as a group can understand from a simple test description. We are going to need to take the time to get our hands dirty and feel the process out. I see now why Professor Hollan was saying that design is not an algorithm that CAN or even SHOULD be done step by step. The Bulk of our Project so far has been more concentrated on making sense of the analysis process and less on the purpose of our study. I was sure of this in our meeting earlier today when one of the interview produced a very shallow Flow and Culture model. Also we always spend a lot of time discussing the proper way to go through a procedure. I don't mean for my observations to sound negative. I feel like this is what we should be doing. If I can walk away from this class with a proper understanding of the procedure that the book is explaining then i think I will have accomplished something important.
Regardless I want our study to mean something if I can. The reason that I became interested in design was to improve these sort of systems. Ubiquitous Presenter still has a lot of potential, and I can help but get rapped up in the idea of using other systems to improve how lectures are done. The use of things like Digital Pens and Read-Wear could really make an Online study data base a useful tool.
I'm going to spend as much time as i can this week going over the student to instructor relationship to try and find the most appropriate and usable areas of this communication. As We discussed today we cannot assume that Instructors or students will use our system unless it appeals to both of them. This is for the most part going to determine if our designs will effect system use.

5/13 Weekly commentary

To begin, I would like to assert that the scope of our “Augmented Learning” project is much bigger than I had originally foreseen. With that said, I will begin documenting my participation in group activities throughout the last couple of weeks.
We began by initially deciding to focus on the techniques and strategies people employ when studying for a test, a class quiz, or just weekly homework. We decided to shift our focus to the modes in which people learn and study because we decided that U.P. was not being utilized in the classroom because that was not its optimal setting. Instead, we concluded that Ubiquitous Presenter and its supplementary NoteBlogger would be most useful in study/ review situations. In this manner, we are collecting data on the ways in which people study so we can suggest ways for the U.P. system to incorporate analogous tools within its requirements.
We begin each week with a meeting on Tuesday at CalIT2. We have recently decided to also have mandatory meetings on Thursdays as well because our time is so limited. In addition, I have been meeting with two to three group members several other times during the week to complete our interpretation sessions on the thirteen or so interviews we have. At first it was difficult to make the work models, but we have all exhibited a dramatic improvement in our ability to transform the data into work models. Furthermore, the interpretations of the customer-data have become much more useful as we have slowly but surely refined our focus.
I have taken two interviews this week with two more short interviews to come. The first interview I did was with a San Diego State accounting student. She had some great techniques that I felt provided some great data. On Thursday afternoon, Matt, Ben, and I got together to interpret this data and create the most appropriate work models. These models as well as interview notes, and interpretation notes are posted on our wiki, http://learningredesign.pbwiki.com . In addition, I interviewed another San Diego State political science student. I also went to CSE105 section on Monday of last week to observe how U.P. was being put into practice. Again, I was disappointed with the way that it was being incorporated into the learning experience, but I feel that this disappointment reflects important data. I will be attending this section again tomorrow morning to watch for possible sequence models on the one student within the section who utilizes a tablet PC. I additionally have a late (but important) interview on Wednesday of this week with a San Diego State student who has a Professor who posts all of his lectures in a video modality on youTube. This should provide some interesting data about the possible incorporation of a video system within the U.P. requirements.
Furthermore, the entire group met today (Sunday) for what I felt was one of our most productive meetings. We had a lot of time to sit down and really hash things out so to speak. We completed interpretations for two interviews including models. Additionally, I suggested that although our interpretation sessions have been really productive thus far, we haven’t had anyone documenting our verbal discussions in a manner that can be referenced. I noticed that Bryan had made a short bulleted list of the important aspects of one his interviews on the board prior to my arrival at the meeting. I felt that these notes were extremely helpful. I suggested that we take “Interpretation Notes” for each interview in the same spirit as Bryan’s, a series of important interpretations from the data in a list that we can reference in the future. This will allow us to have clear cut evidence of the way the data is shaping our design ideas. All of our interpretation notes will be posted on the wiki by our meeting tomorrow. This will enable any group member to look at any data whenever they need to. Ironically, our wiki is starting to resemble a ubiquitious presentation of all of our data. This illustrates to me that the idea behind Ubiquitious Presenter is really something special when it is actually put into practice the right way. Hopefully our teams work with the process of contextual design will ultimately aid the implementation of U.P. in a manner that everyone can appreciate.

5/13 Weekly Commentary

What is the best way for students to learn? There is not one answer to this question, but our self proclaimed “Augmented Learning Group” comprised of six Cognitive Science 102C students have decided to explore the possible answers to this question for this quarter. Initially, our team was created because of our shared interest in the Ubiquitous Presenter and the Noteblogger programs. We were intrigued by how each program sought to improve the learning experience for students, yet when we went to observe the Ubiquitous Presenter being used in a lecture, we found that its optimal capabilities were not being used, but it was only utilized as a white board. I contacted Professor Beth Simon who referred me to Roshni Malani, a graduate student working closely with the Ubiquitous Presenter and Noteblogger. I kept in contact with Roshni and I set up a time for our Augmented Learning Group to interview her. She answered many of our questions about the usage and effects of both programs, which made us realize that the programs are still at a very young stage in their development and implementation in the classroom and at-home study settings. After our interview with Roshni, we decided to shift our focus outward from the pinpoint of Ubiquitous Presenter and Noteblogger. With the knowledge of Contextual Design, we expanded our concentration to observe how students study and from there we will try to apply our research to find the optimal learning program.
My role in this group has been as a equal contributor to our research. In the previous few weeks, I have performed observations in classrooms, observed and interviewed an individual, and observed and interviewed a group. The classroom observations were to help myself get familiar with the classroom setting; even though I have been in a college classroom environment for the past three years, I had never taken the time to stop and simply observe roles and actions within a lecture hall. Along with a fellow member of the Augmented Learning Group, we observed a student studying for her engineering class. This last week we did an interpretation session for this user: discussing with our group and making models based on the way she studied for that specific class. The study session which involved two students individually and simultaneously studying in Geisel library for the same midterm will be very useful for our research. It was interesting to note their different styles of studying and their interaction, and fortunately I was able to interview both of the informants. The male informant was actively involved in cross referencing his lecture notes online, textbook, class notes, study guide, and an other notes from a student who had previously taken the class. The female informant was more laid back and using mostly her own notebook, while occasionally checking her textbook. The two classmates would sometimes ask each other questions. Our research group has yet to do an interpretation session for this data, but hopefully we will accomplish it at the beginning of this week when we plan to meet.
Our group has been able to compile a magnitude of robust data and create models which will be useful for our end project. We have been through at least five individual users and two group users interpretation sessions. However, having so much information has been difficult for us to get through, but we are able to derive a lot of seemingly important data from them. I think the amount of for each interpretation session has surprised us, and we have discovered that we need to meet more often than we have been meeting in order to conquer all of them on time. A quarter is such a short time frame so we need to make sure that we stay on schedule. We still have a few more interpretation sessions to finish by this week. A challenge that our team has encountered has been to look at our project at the same level. Learning covers such a broad scope of topics, but personally I think investigating all areas of learning will only be helpful in the end, even if it does require a little more time. Hopefully after completing the interpretation sessions and models this week, we can begin the next steps of contextual design to understand how to create a program that will capture a compilation of all the best ways to learn.

Week 6 Commentary Sunday 5/13

This week we met on Tuesday as usual in Calit. The group did a few interpretation sessions on some interviews from the past weekend writing up the coresponding work models but there were still more interviews that need to be done. I came late due to class. The group met on Thursday morning but i had other commitments and could not be there.
The most productive meeting we had this week took place this afternoon (Sunday). All but one of us were there and we had plenty of time to talk about things and not try to rush through the sessions like we do during the week. We started the session by going over the second of my two interviews (user 8) and writing out models for it. After this was done everyone was present and we lost a little bit of focus for a while. We then listened through my first interview (which was the first interview we tried to interpret and was not done well) and wrote out the most salient pieces of data on the board instead of doing an entire session for the 30 minute interview again.
After doing this we were talking about the presentation on Thursday when Andy brought up the point that the information we were getting from our interpretation sessions seemed to be spread across all the models and each interview, and that wasn't easy to see it all, let alone try to find common themes. He liked what we did with my first interview( that is pulling out the most important things) and suggested that we do that same process for each of the other interviews that had already been interpreted. Everyone agreed that it was a good idea and also that each person should post both the notes they took during the interview, and the salient data points form the interview that we began calling the "Interpretation notes," to our wiki so they could be accessed by everyone at any time. We decided that the Interpretation notes would make building the affinity diagram easier and the fact that all the information would be online would not make us dependent on one person with hard copies of notes.
We also got a chance to Interpret 2 of Natan's interviews and make some models for those as well. Natan even found a way to make the models on the computer with Visio so they could be posted to the Wiki as well under the appropriate user.
As much headway as we made today, we decided to meet Monday evening to try and prepare for Tuesday's presentation and do any remaining interpretation sessions. The plan for the coming week is to build the affinity diagram and the consolidated work models. We also came to the conclusion today that we may not have enough time to develop a working paper prototype. We may instead have to settle for a more general type of design and conduct interviews which would give the interviewee a description of the design.

U4?

Hey guys, I have two half completed models in my notebook for U4 (the structural engineer). i was wondering if anyone else has the completed flow model for u4. The cultural model in my notebook looks like it may be the completed one but its kinda skimpy. The flow model is definetely not completed. Let me know.

Thanks, Andy.

Beyond Sundays meeting

Hey team, today was a very productive meeting,
-we interpreted data for natan's group interveiw and bryans interview with kristen(?) in math 10c.
-We went back and revisited some interviews which we had not finished (dominic, and sarah h).

-we planned out our presentation framework for class tuesday when we must report the data we have taken.

-we did a bit of planning for consolidation of the models

-We specified our plan for capturing affinity notes for the diogram we will make this week.

- we disussed new methods of getting some data, such as phone interviews for specific bits of sequence models.

-basically the meeting really got us refocused on concrtete goals and planning.


Importantly:
WE MEET MONDAY AT 2 PM 2nd FLOOR CAL-IT if you cant come at two come as soon as you can after 2.

Everyone be sure to type up your interview notes and interpretation notes and post them to the wiki before tomorrows meeting.
everything you have that is written on paper should be typed and appropriately posted on the wiki.

Also i belive we have to do personal commentaries and post on the blog. check the class website for specifications. but i think concentrate on writing what will be productive for you to think about. I think that is what hollan ultimitly wants, hes always talking about how productive writing is, so he wants to ensure that we are doing it, not for his benefit but for our own.

i think thats it, anyone with anything more to tell the group, let us know...

ben

Hey can we all agree to meet on Sunday from like 12pm until whenever we have completed all of our interpretations?

flury Update, Thursday may 10

a fast flury before i am off to campus.

hello group, so i guess that some of the group (most?) met up thursday morning. can someone post about what happened? me and matt and andy met up thursday evening and interpreted an interview andy did with a san diego state girl.

for those of you who werent there in class we have to present our data in class tuesday, so we got to get together and cansolidate some stuff so we know what to talk about.

we need some new ways of getting some more crutial data as well as finishing all the interp sessions and consolidating all of it.... basically we got to meet up this weekend. how about saturday at 12 noon csb 115?

Sundays meeting etc.

team, today we held interpretation sessions for U2 and U3, i belive we are almost finished with U2 and made good headway on U3.
we were very productive yet we have a lot of work to do this week and beyond.

tomorrow those who can make it are meeting at CSB 115 at 2 pm tomorrow for an interview with matt and Andrew while they study for 107. after the interview we are going to try to model out some of the stuff...

we decided that we should hold meetings and move ahead with interpretations if we can have at least four people together, so lets start holding as many meetings as our schedules allow.


we also moved tuesday's meeting forward to 10 am.

everyone try to get your interviews done soon. lets shoot for meetings on tuesday and thursday and maybe one on friday to finish and interpret (or at least touch on) all the contextual interviews, so we can begin to consolidate models this weekend.

C.I. U1 notes (Dominic)

-Notes for U1 (Dominic)
Utilizes book (mentions heaviness), powerpoint slides, notes, and labtop (heavy)à needs access to all at the same time while studying
· Lecture notes necessary
o Could get by with just notes but use of book is supplementary in connections (however not 100% necessary)
· Looks at lecture slides b/c midterm is coming up
o Sometimes prints pp. then writes notes on powerpoint (In Coulsons Class)
o Did this in Coulsons class because she makes a lot of verbal annotations to her slides
o No access to extra information on top of slides
· In 107C, not excessive amount of info in addition to powerpoint
o So, he doesn’t print notes or really take notes in class (just helpful abbreviations he may need to know)
o Finds it more helpful to just listen and “absorb”
o Starts to gather midterm info when midterm nears
· TA & Quizzes
o His TA doesn’t give study guides so he gets them from other students
§ Prefers long study guide to short fill-in-the-blank study guide
o Different quizzes for different sections
§ Gathers concepts on quizzes from other students
§ TAs make study guides and quizzes; they create important info.
· Cultural; has to work over weekend so studies in advance because cant really over weekend
o Studies at home because he doesn’t get into social aspect of school
o Feels more comfortable and efficient in his own environment
· Class structure
o Different teaching styles
§ 107b: no ppt. à have to go to class & write notes whole time
§ 107C: ppt. --> doesn’t really write notes
· Listening allows him to think about concepts rather than think about writing notes
· How would you change 107b lecture style if you could?
o Different methods of studying for different classes is inconsistent
o Consistent study practices would make it easier
o Example: outline for lecture with everything discussed that day
§ Teacher goes through it in class on overheads
§ Display of information should always be retrievable
· Doesn’t compare notes
o If unclear marks it (highlighting) and comes back to go ask about it
· Time Factor
o Long group study session not as efficient for him as studying alone
§ No distractions
§ Maybe some way to put questions he has at home on a blog or something so he can get help from classmates?
· UP/Nb; -likes UP--> professor annotations & additional info
· Allows him to study at home
· Allows him to just listen in class
· Finds it useful but no uses it so it doesn’t serve function
· Maybe have designated people to take notes?
· Iterations show connections b/w concepts
· Process is important but lags too much so not useable