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.