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.