JOURNAL

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June 19 - June 25

At the beginning of the week Professor Carroll finished putting together that paper for the ECSCW conference, "Supporting Common Ground in Geo-Collaboration". All of our names went on it as co-authors, so that was kind of cool. Yes, I know I only contributed a mini-paragraph to it, but it was my first time having my name on an HCI paper. By the end of the summer I'll have a paper that I've really done a lot of work on though =D. So I worked on BRIDGE webpage objects all week. On Tuesday I met with Prof. Rosson, Prof. Carroll, Craig and Lu to discuss where I was and what the plan was, etc. It ended up being a really long meeting and a lot of issues came up. With webpages in particular, with version history in BRIDGE, general RSS stuff and some conceptual things. It got pretty confusing. I started a page in BRIDGE to document the issues and potential solutions, why certain decisions were made over others, etc. This should help with my paper later on. I found that Prof. Rosson, though she was very helpful with her suggestions and things to think about, was a little out of touch with the low level technicalities of the project, which Craig and I discuss on a more regular basis. Anyway, basically there is a lot more to this than I initially envisioned.

Wednesday's CSCL meeting was interesting. Damien showed us this database interface he'd been working on that will eventually get integrated into BRIDGE, and we all gave our input on it. Not that I haven't designed a user interface before, but it was kind of fun to see first hand how a group of experienced developers went about it and the kind of things that should be important and why. I like HCI so much because of the psychology of the human aspect of it. I realized some things about why certain things are designed in a certain way, based on our nature of how we perceive things and interact with them. Also, I got made fun of a little at the meeting for being a non-mac user =). At Friday's ILSD meeting I talked yet again about RSS stuff. By that time I had pretty much finished with webpages. The feed now compares the current version of a webpage with the most recent one before that with a "significant" change, and tells you a little about the lines, links and embedded objects added/removed/changed. So I had it do this a couple of ways, and I started testing it with some existing webpages in BRIDGE to see how useful they were. After lots of complications I was finally able to download some RSS readers, so I don't have to read the XML file anymore. I worked a bunch of extra hours the earlier part of the week because a couple of my friends drove up from Atlanta on Thursday evening, and we're going to Pittsburgh on Monday!