JOURNAL

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June 5 - June 11

Well this week has definitely been a lot more interesting! For one thing, I'm finally able to navigate the IST building properly ;-). It can be a little confusing sometimes. At the begining of the week I met with Prof Rosson to discuss where I was and what I'd be doing for the week. She gave me a little starter project to 'get my feet wet' developing in BRIDGE. But before I got into that I did a little more reading on CSCW, and also poking around in BRIDGE at the end user level - creating and collaborating on objects, trying to get a feel for it all. Tuesday was really fun because I got to go out and do field work with Lu, one of the grad students who works in our pod. We spent the morning at LCC (Leadership Centre County) observing Georgia, who I think is the manager. Lu is interested in the ways people manage multiple projects, cues for task switching, etc. I mostly went along for the experience, but I was hoping to maybe learn a little about what details are important to people working in collaborative projects to get an idea of what sort of things people would want to be notified about.

Tuesday afternoon I spoke with Craig, who refined my starter project a bit and pointed me in the right direction to files I'd need to look at. Thank goodness, because there are soooo many files in BRIDGE that I wouldn't even know where to start! Anyhow, so that's what I worked on the rest of the week. BRIDGE has all these objects, like calendars, web pages, discusssions, and tons more, and I had to basically make a menu structure that read from a templates folder and a user could use to create objects in different categories. It sounded simple enough to me, so I got pretty frustrated when I couldn't figure things out and had to go bug Craig a few times. A flaw I have is being reluctant to ask people for help, especially when it comes to work. I guess it makes me feel incompetent. But Craig (I've decided to start calling him the bridgemaster) is really nice and reassured me that I was asking all the right questions and that nobody understands BRIDGE right away. It's pretty confusing to remember how all the classes connect to each other. But I stayed a little late a couple times and got the hang of it and at the end of Thursday told Craig I was done. He was soooo impressed! He said he expected it to take another day! That made me feel really good =D. Friday I just fixed up my code a little, did some documenting and added this other feature Craig had mentioned I could do. We talked some about how to approach my RSS project. It's going to be a lot of thinking and pretty interesting I think. I have to finish reading some papers first tho, and talk to Prof Carroll about them. I really dislike reading. I'd much rather code. Luckily Human-Computer Interaction stuff is cool to read about, especially since I have a certificate in Social Psychology and did some Industrial/Organizational Psych too.

So my week was also interjected with weekly CSCL (Computer Supported Collaboration and Learning) and ILSD (Informal Learning in Software Development) meetings. People around here sure meet a lot! Also, after being the first to arrive at the pod 2 days in a row, I went and got Libby and I keys to the pod and the lab. I like having keys - makes me feel important =). I've also been thinking about changing my hours. Prof Rosson said they are flexible, so I think I'll start coming in later and leaving later. I'm more alert later in the day. All the meetings are in the afternoon anyway.