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.