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.