This week I did A LOT of reading! I began the week by reading about a dozen CHI papers on various topics, just to learn and understand how they are supposed to be written and formatted. I did this so that I can *hopefully* write a paper and submit it to several conferences to get published. Sarita said that there is a lot of work needed to get a paper published so anytime you start is too late. From these readings I learned that there is a general format for CHI papers that consists of an abstract, an introduction, a statement of methods, an explanation of results, and a conclusion.
On Tuesday, near the end of my readings Amy came in after a meeting with Sarita and told me to "burn all the CHI papers." Instead, I placed them to the side and proceeded to listen to everything else she had to say. My next task was to learn all about interviewing and be prepared to start interviewing kids in our class next week. Amy gave me a book to read called Interviewing as Qualitative Research by Irving Seidman. The book goes over the basic strategies and goals of interviewing. Currently, I am about three quarters of the way done reading the book and I'll probably finish it over the weekend.
On Wednesday I did a practice interview with Taneshia and then she did a practice interview on me. Sarita said that we both did very well for our first interviews. I was conversational, but said "ummmm" a lot and had large breaks between questions. After the interviews we both went back to our desks to listen to recordings of the interviews that we conducted. Listening to the interview was not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. I also worked on the HCI course wiki to polish it off and make it ready for the class to start next week. I wrote an introduction, a disclaimer, an "about us" page, and a resources page. I have put a link to our course wiki on my Project page.
On Thursday I did another practice interview with Scott, which went much better over all. I had better transitions between questions and said "ummmm" a lot less. The major problem with Scott's interview is that I forgot to turn on the voice recorder, but I realized this about half way through the interview and recorded the second half.
On Thursday I also learned about how to observe and take field notes. I learned this by reading the first two chapters of a book Sarita gave me called Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. On Friday I put this recently acquired knowledge to use and observed people at a local coffee establishment for about a half hour. I wore reflective sunglasses in the hopes that people would be less likely to notice me watching them.
I learned very quickly that once people realize that you are taking notes about them, they leave. Though it takes most people about ten minutes to decide whether or not you are actually looking at, and taking notes about them. However, if the person's back is to you they won't notice that you are watching them. The downside of having the people face away from you is that it is often difficult to hear what they are saying. I think this information will be very important for next week whenever I start observing the students in our class.
Tomorrow (Saturday) I will be meeting the parents of the students we will be teaching and helping to pass out consent forms. Our biggest worry is how many consent forms will be returned, hopefully most of them will so that we can start interviewing the students next week! I learned a lot this week about lots of different things. I think the skills I learned will be helpful throughout the rest of my life in whatever I do. I feel very good about the work I did this week and I am very excited for the class to start next week.
Week 1
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Week 2
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Week 3
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Week 4
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Week 5
Week 6
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Week 7
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Week 8
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Week 9
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Week 10