6/13 - 6/15 (Week 3)

I was away Monday and Tuesday, so I've only been here two days thus far this week.

Yesterday (Wednesday) I completed the online ethics training module. It was positively fascinating and I learned many useful tips about how not to damage my human test subjects during research studies.

Most of the day, though, was spent making sketches of how I plan for the website to look in regard to followings. This mostly involved sketching the users page and the worlds pages to figure out how I’m going to make the worlds and activities of followed users [that are of an appropriate level for the following user to use as a “next step” sort of example] appear everywhere on the site. Reilly, Genevieve and I, the three REUs working mostly Community side, met in the conference room and went over one another’s sketches and plans. We wanted to make sure that our final designs would be easily integrate-able and just to hear each others’ ideas about the site. Badges and followings are closely tied together in working to solve the problem of tracking users’ goal setting. Tagging and searching will also be intertwined with the worlds and user pages. The group discussion session was very productive and I left with a strong idea of what the other two planned to do, which helped me as I went about figuring out what I plan to do.

That brings us to today (Thursday), which I spent working on my proposal. I redrew some of the sketches from yesterday to incorporate ideas talked about at the group meeting and made the sketches neater, in preparation for including them in the proposal. The rest of my time was spent writing my proposal, in which I outline what I plan to accomplish during the remainder of the summer (10 weeks) and how I plan to do go about accomplishing it.

Assuming that I indeed get my proposal finished and posted tonight, I will spend tomorrow researching “patterns found in users’ worlds on the Alice2 forums”, and then building worlds that attempt to recreate patterns and code structure found in the forum worlds.