Amanda Tockert

Amanda Tockert

Drexel University

Information 608

May 28, 2008

Interactive design a review.

When I first signed up for this class I did not know what I had gotten into. I thought that this would be a survey course over how researchers used informational technology to further their programs. I did not know that it would entail working with the technology I thought we would be studying. This course had the potential to be an enjoyable and educational project.

I am not a computer programmer and show little aptitude for that line of work. As I worked my way through the class I learned a great deal about how changes are made to computer programs, how to motivate people to work together in a group and about the changes that are being made in the research community.

Researchers to my mind were always grouped together in a library setting working with books. I had never managed to picture a group of people online chatting as researchers until now. I did not know that the technology we used for class was even available, I am sad to say. I would have given a great deal to have known about the VMT while I was in my Stats classes, both at Drexel and especially in my undergrad years. I plan to use the knowledge that I have gleaned here and to pass it along whenever possible as a public librarian.

I have learned in the last several weeks how an idea becomes reality. Through the text book I followed an idea from thought to prototype to testing and implementation. These were things that I knew were done, but had no idea how. I learned that many companies hire a group of people and pay them to spend their days taking items apart and trying to think of easier and more productive ways to put them back together. I read about the parts boxes that were maintained to give fabricators easy access to materials to use in designing and redesigning products and wished I could play with them as well.

I spent time reading about objects I used daily and seeing them in a completely different light. Knowing how much effort goes into changing the design of a remote control makes you feel a little more generous when your breaks for what you feel is a stupid reason.

I believe that I can now use the Heuristic approach that we studied to evaluate projects within any library that I work in. I can now use this as a method for evaluating proposals and in this manner I can look for and perhaps catch potential problems before they become too large to easily contain. In this course we went over methods for prototyping. I was able to understand that these ideas also apply to papers that are written in a library setting. This helped me to retain the information that I was reading. Although much of this class dealt with technology that I do not intend to work with; the basic ideas and principles can be modified to apply to the environment that I will be working in.

I have also studied different ways to enable people to work in a group by reading the textbook. This was a side effect, but it was a pleasant one. I do not know if it was intentional of the professor, but it was a valuable resource. By knowing how different groups of people might react to different stimulus I will be able to more effectively present ideas to those that I supervise and to those who supervise me. It is always important to be able to judge how an audience will react to information. In the Research world poor presentation skills can kill your grant proposal as surely as bad information.

I felt that the presentation style utilized in this course failed to provide me with the necessary information I needed to perform required assignments in a competent fashion. I found wonderful information in my textbook, after the week I needed it. I think a master reading list posted where it could be referred to by students might have alleviated this problem. Much of the information of the Wiki page seemed to move around with no rhyme or reason. I don’t know if this was my inexperience with the format or if students were attempting to organize the page.

I expected to find summaries of class presentations available for online students to read and did not. I expected to use feedback from the professor to help push the students onward in the design process, and did not receive it in time to be of use. I thought that there would be readily identifiable projects that student’s could work together to finish and turn in and didn’t. I understand that this is college and that a certain portion of time is spent trying to make you work and feel as if this was real life not a classroom setting. But for some students too much freedom is a bad thing. Fabrication of ideas without structure will work in a business setting because the employee who does not contribute can be fired. Fear of losing a job and not being able to pay rent and eat will make people work on the project. There is no way to fire an unproductive or troublemaking student, so other members of the group are forced to carry more weight and allow the troublemakers to hold control over their grades. I am willing to take a poor grade if I have earned it, but not when it is earned for me by people who will not communicate with me.

Working with a mixed level class was not what I had hoped it would be. There was a great potential for the Graduate students to move into mentor roles in research while the undergraduate students learned about instruction through offering their insights into technological development. For my group this did not happen. The Graduate students instead felt isolated from the class due to technology problems and difficulty in contacting the professor as well as the other half of the class. Because the undergraduates were on campus and had access to both the professor and each other they were more likely to put off working on an assignment until late in the evening before it was due. This habit caused short tempers among the Graduates who in turn were required to track these students down through chat messages and e-mail in an attempt to solidify meeting times. As the quarter went on tempers were wearing thin as Graduate students with jobs were forced to be up into the wee hours of the night working on projects and then go to a normal job. This is not the entire fault of the undergrads, but should be noted. Students living on a campus are more likely to structure their schedules to allow them to sleep late and to party or study in the evening. While Graduate students who are taking courses on line are often juggling work and family and plan to fit study in as best they can which makes meetings and group projects trying under the best of circumstances.

There was throughout the course a feeling that the undergraduates were enjoying favored child status. Because they were physically able to ask the professor questions they were better able to keep abreast of what the professor was intending a project to become. This was not in our group shared in a relevant way.

In fact one week there was a power play between the undergrads while the project was being salvaged, not worked on. It was being salvaged because the Graduate students had spent a week trying to contact the Undergrads and being put off until 9:00p.m. of the day the project was due. Therefore it was nearly too late to actually work on it let alone plan and design and execute the project.

There had been an understanding that one student’s paper was to be used as the basis for the project since it got such good responses in class. We were told that he knew how he would want it presented and he would have it ready during the week. He came to the meeting after ignoring the group all week with no plans and unprepared to follow up on the plan that was his idea. He fussed around for a few minutes and picked a fight on the chat with the other Undergraduate and then went out to dinner with his girlfriend, this was at 10:30, he came back in an hour. At this point part of the assignment had been worked out, when he left the other Undergraduate student tried to take over and change the entire course of the project. This would have had us scrapping all the previous work and starting from scratch at 11:00p.m., when it was due at 12 that evening. When the Graduate students attempted to help create a design to turn in the undergraduate student essentially told us we did not know what we were talking about and upon the return of the other student they apparently went to each others rooms and quit responding to the Graduate students for long periods of time. At about 1:00am the Graduate students gave up and left them to their squabbling. This was the last time the group actually met as a whole and managed to get even a little bit of work done.

Also, there was a feeling from the undergrads that they did not need to finish an assignment until they presented it in class on Tuesday. It was stated in the syllabus that I found that projects through the Wiki were due on Monday at Midnight so there was the added fear that none of the assignment were turned in on time as the undergrads were the one responsible for uploading the designs.

I was very disappointed in the way the class ran. I was paying more for less professorial time. I spent a great deal of time seemingly chasing my tail, unable to find the information needed to complete projects and assignments. Had I been in a classroom setting I do not feel this would have happened. I was also displeased at the amount of time it took to get feedback on projects and that there was no centralized area for locating grades and critiques of work finished. I use those items to gauge where I am in a class and to alter the next assignment to make sure I am handing in what is required. By not getting weekly grades for weekly assignments I felt as if I was operating without direction and with no way to correct mistakes and misunderstandings. I had no effective way to know if I was gleaning the correct information from my text and applying it correctly to the class process and when fellow students were consulted many of them agreed, it did not lead to an enjoyable class experience. Instead it left me feeling that I had missed a great deal of information that I would have liked to have received. I am still intrigued by Human computer interaction, but I do not feel prepared to take another course in the subject if I wished to again further my education and I find that to be a disappointing ending to a frustrating course. I am pursuing work in a reference situation because I like to find out the answers to questions and I feel that all I really got from this course was more questions.

Having never worked with a Wiki I was put into the position of a playing catch up with a group that did not play well with others. When I tried to contact the professor with questions there was no feedback given until several e-mails were sent and there was no time left to utilize the information. I feel that the Wiki format is ill suited to this class as a stand alone learning environment. I believe that there should have been a hybridizing between the white board environment and the Blackboard that is more prevalent among online courses. In this manner important information could have been displayed in an easy to access site that was familiar to students and would have given them a foundation to build their learning from this course on.

The Blackboard could have been used to show the syllabus and reading assignments as well as what was expected from written assignments, while the Wiki could duplicate the information and in this way both ensure that the students were finding the information that they needed but made sure they were finding it in a timely manner.

I understand that students from this course were going to become study material for next semester’s students but I feel that the desire to keep all information accessible and modifiable from the Wiki page put this quarters students at an unfair disadvantage.

I think my group could have gotten a great deal more accomplished if we had been on a regular campus rather that a split class, it was very difficult to keep everyone motivated and available while working on projects. As it was ten weeks did not seem like enough time to appease the member’s ego’s and to get people settled into a proper working contingent. It was discovered to be difficult to gather people together over distances and time zones. This did give us ideas to work with when contemplating international researchers. We took the problems we were having and tried to apply our remedies to the problems in our projects. We did not always succeed but they were a good starting point.

The group I worked with met with various degrees of success in following the guidelines of group work laid out in the textbook. Many different attempts were made with different leadership styles, but we never found one that worked for all members of the group at one time. This would be relevant in a normal work environment when trying to develop new products. Although in that case there would be a different timeline and a great deal more incentive to get with the program.

I am afraid that if we had another ten weeks in the course there would be severe problems. In the ten weeks we have had we almost managed a good working relationship only to have it fall to pieces. By the end of week 8 no one was replying to my e-mails or posts in the chat area. I do not think this matter would improve with more time. No one from this group contacted me during week 8 and I only got a response from 1 Graduate student in week 9 stating that he was working a 13 hour day and couldn’t make the meeting I was proposing. I believe that had we another ten weeks in this course I would have been forced to phone the professor in order to ensure that I had his attention and request his aid in contacting at least the students that were on campus. It would have been to late to change groups, but perhaps he could have reinforced the message that the course work needed to be finished in a timely fashion and that not just their grades were in the balance but those of the entire group.

I think the Whiteboard technology that we used this quarter is an excellent device. I believe that it will greatly aid the CSCL research community. I think that there needs to be more work done on functions that allow researchers from different time zones to communicate with each other. Perhaps a clock that users could select their chat partners’ location and be told what time it really was while they were chatting. This would enable them to know why the other party would be asking for specific times or trying to rush off. I would also hope that they would design a better way to keep in contact with each other; perhaps a messaging system that would leave alerts for members of a research group when someone was trying to reach them. Maybe a voice chat could be added for students or an instant messenger like object that they could sign into that would help them monitor when other members of a group were online

I think that overall that this course did not live up to its potential. There was so much information to learn. Many ideas were never touched upon and very little direction was given to aid the student in choosing which ideas to focus on. I have heard of other experimental classes that have gone worse than this. I just wish I had been told up front that that was what I was signing up for. I do not think I would have joined the class because I have learned that this style of presentation does not play to my learning style. By the time I realized how the course would be run it was too late to change. I do not so much regret the time spent in the course as the time wasted. I know that had even minor changes been made I would have spent an enjoyable quarter learning new things. I was so excited to be in the course when I first joined, it was the one I talked to everyone at work about. Telling them what we would be studying and how I felt that I might be making a real difference in the future of online study and technology. I only wish I could have kept that point of view and enthusiasm. Instead I am left at the end of this class frustrated and feeling as if I have missed much more than I can put into writing.

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