JOURNAL

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July 10 - July 16

On Monday I read all day, mostly because I wasn't quite in the mood to get back into coding. We (Julie, Jayne, Libby, Damien and I) did have a meeting with Prof. Rosson so she could catch up on our projects, since she'd been gone and we hadn't had ILSD in a while. Tuesday I met with Craig so he could help me to understand Calendar stuff. After looking at the code for a long time, he still couldn't figure out why it wasn't doing what I wasnted it to, so he said he'd get back to me. In the mean while, I went back to working on folder objects. They promise to be very interesting. Then later in the afternoon I spoke with Craig again and he discouraged me from approaching them the way I was. He also discouraged me from approaching them in the way that I see as pretty much the only other alternative. So he kind of put me between a rock and a hard place, so it was very frustrating. He says to wait until we "think about it" some more. Then we met with Prof. Rosson and Prof. Carroll and discussed the research aspect of the project some more. So the plan is to get in two informal user studies and at least the backbone for a 10 page paper for CHI (the major HCI conference) before I go! Crazy. So I worked on setting up stuff for my first study for the rest of the day. Wednesday morning, I couldn't do anything further with the study until Craig set up certain permissions for me, so I started on my paper instead. I wrote most of the introduction. At the CSCL meeting we talked about the upcoming I-conference. Penn State's IST department will be hosting it, and all of the other "I-schools" are invited. I'd tell you what an "I-school" is, but they don't seem so sure themselves =). They invited me to come back for it since I'd be an alum.

The rest of Wednesday and all of Thursday were pretty much spent working on my study. I was hoping to finish by then, but no such luck. Thursday's work was also interrupted breifly because we had to take a publicity shot for the IST department. These photographers came in and had a bunch of us sit around a table in the lab and pretend to interact with each other and the map on the SmartBoard. It was kind of funny, because after a while we actually did start interacting with each other and the map. Friday I didn't go in because I was on the way to spending a long weekend in Atlanta with my friends! After an exhausting 40 hour week in 4 days, it felt pretty darn good.