JOURNAL

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June 12 - June 18

This week Professor Rosson was at a conference in Milan, so I kind of checked in with Professor Carroll every now and then. The week started out kind of slowly... I finally finished reading all my CSCW papers, Activity Theory paper, and findings on RSS. Did I mention I'm not a big fan of reading? I mean, I see how it's important, but the whole time I could only think 'When will this be over so I can move on??'. Luckily by Wednesday I was back into BRIDGE code. Understanding the current rudimentary code for creating an RSS feed was a lot more complicated than the code I had to understand for my BRIDGE starter project. It got a little frustrating at times, and it mostly came down to BRIDGE being a huge project, and me still being too new to it to understand how all the parts work together. I also learned that there was a lot I didn't know about RSS feeds in general, so I had to figure out a little about how those work first. By Friday I think I got a good enough grasp on not only how RSS would work with BRIDGE objects, but on how BRIDGE handled version control in general. I did run into some problems at the very end of the week which seemed to arise from some bugs in the version history creation of objects, but I'll have to ask Craig about that next week. When I left the office Friday evening I had some code semi-working that reported some, what I consider, useful information on differences made from the last version of a website to the current version, so I didn't feel too bad.

This week, in-between my reading and coding, I got to help by participating in a study Jayne is doing with ALICE, a graphical programming language for kids, and in a study Lu is doing involving chat tools in BRIDGE. They were both pretty fun. The CSCL meeting this week wasn't too long. I got to actually say that I completed something since the last meeting =). The main thing we talked about was this ECSCW conference that Professor Carroll is going to attend. He has to write a short paper on work with activity-oriented tools, so we each wrote a summary of our projects and sent it to him for compilation. Since Professor Rosson wasn't here, we didn't have ILSD meeting this week, but I suppose that'll start back next week. I think going in at 10 and staying til at least 6, instead of 9 and 5, worked pretty well for me this week. But I might start going in earlier again next week and working late. I want to put more hours in because I'm going to need to take some time off soon =)