Here’s a sampling of the final projects:

• Space News Aggregator, Ben Schoenfeldt
• Financial Buy/Sell Recommender, Jennifer Wolf
• Boo-Moo: Books and Movies Recommendation, Azalea Ayuningtyas
• Aggregator, Jia Jin Kee
• SouthQuad menu to SMS (presentation), HeeJung Byun
• Your Perfect Style, Erica Willar
• Hang Ninja (or on Facebook), Matt Hornback & Clint Sweet
• Flickr Weather, Emily Rosengren
• GoodDayGenerator, Andrew Olmsted
• Intelligent Design (Color Palette picker), Allie Ghaman
• Male Tennis Statistics, Danielle Lamy
• Weather Generator, Khizar Jahangir
• The Big Ten Tracker, Jeff Green
• Twitter:Rise&Fall in stock market, Somin Yoo
• Online PGN Interpreter, Andrew Konishi
• visualSearch, Lee Overbeck
• Weather using Geolocation, Mitchell Overbeck
• What’s new A2? (Ann Arbor review highlights), Evan Schuetz

Also, a huge thanks to Chuck Severance, who got this course started and gave us early chapters of his book Using Google App Engine, which gave us the confidence to use App Engine in the course and which we were able to rely on for class readings.

Specific numbers of people, dates, and times are never shown. These features would increase the cognitive load on pedestrians, while we intend this service – once people become accustomed to it – to blend into the background and become a moving, changing part of the cityscape. Our goal is not to guide people to a specific path, but to highlight flows at a pedestrian’s given location. In doing so, we restore the idea of “the beaten path” to urban landscapes – something that has largely been lost with permanent, paved pedestrian ways. It is up to you to decide whether to stick with the crowds or see what lies in less frequented areas.

Explore the WalkOn presentation (Flash). The other projects in the class are worth a look too.

Inspired loosely by Steven Johnson’s work Everything Bad is Good for You, we began thinking about intermixing the ideas of place and people markup with play. This led to imagining a game in which you tag other people. If tag from two strangers match, aside from some stopwords, within a certain range of time and place, each player might get points.

The idea of being tagged by strangers ultimately feeds into peoples’ curiosity of what others think about them. This became our focus for the project, which we are calling Mirror. We built in anticipation (you can only check how you’ve been tagged once per day) and ambiguity (tags, for you, are only localized to the resolution of a cell tower). You can only be tagged by people who are not in your social network.

These tags also build identities for places. Imagine a space that displays the way people currently in it have been tagged — reflecting its current occupants. Browse a map that shows the way people have been tagged in a neighborhood. We also imagine games, such as scavenger hunts in which the goal is to go out and get tagged in certain ways.

We tell show some of the possibilities in the above storyboard. There is another write up on the project’s page, as well as (an admittedly hand-wavy) tech/design explanation (pdf).

We actually believe that such a product could be bad for both you and community in general, but that doesn’t stop it from being fun to think about.

• My team’s submission for the CHI student design competition was accepted. Like a lot of good news, this begets more work, but it’s fun and I’m really looking forward to the conference.
• I’ve been accepted to the PhD program at SI. I’m pretty excited; among the programs at various schools, I haven’t seen a better fit for my interests. My interest are broad, and it is going to take some work and reaching beyond SI to make sure I get what I want out of the PhD. Talking that through may be a future post.
• I went back to Boston for a short weekend to interview candidates for Olin. Going back was strange. I couldn’t help but feel like I should be picking classes and settling into a dorm. It was a good time, though, and great to see people.

Boeing work continues to be a good complement to my SI activities. I’m having a lot of fun with my current portfolio of projects. I’ll admit, though, that after two trips in the last month, I’m feeling a bit spread thin.

If you just happened to randomly walk into the conference and listen to a reasonable sampling of the discussion, you would have no idea that any of these schools have masters or undergraduate students apart from wonderful conference volunteers. One of the few times that these students were mentioned was as a way to accomplish more tedious or technical aspects of research (eg: hire students to program something) that are not of interest to PhD students or faculty. I made this remark in mixed company and got at least one “Amen,” so I’m emboldened to continue the conversation here for a bit.

The conference’s theme this year was “research frontiers in information,” a topic that I will grant is more in the realm of PhD candidates and professors than others. A review of last year’s proceedings, themed “bridging disciplines to confront grand challenges,” does show more discussion of teaching in the papers.

I’ll admit that part of where I’m coning from is my opinion that every masters student and undergrad should have a research experience during their academic career. In my work experiences (which are limited and may, to some degree, be atypical), I’ve encountered some headaches that have resulted from what I’d characterize as a lack of exposure to research methods.

Two examples

In one workplace, I watched a study grind to a halt because employees were not aware of human subjects review processes. The review board’s reaction — once they became involved — had the tone of “you should have known better,” while the employees involved hadn’t known about this at all. As a consequence, some of the employees ended up developing an impression of the review board as a meddling, unnecessary hinderance.

One of the smart things Olin faculty did was to require a mock-IRB process for nearly every project involving users. Practically, this achieved a couple of things: (1) the iRB members caught a few problems with student protocols that could have caused ethical problems and (2) they often suggested ways to revise protocols to get better results. More useful in the long term though, going through this process led us to engage in some very important conversations about ethics and research. At least within some SI masters courses, I have at times been uncomfortable with how casually the informed consent process is taken. A more robust discussion and empahsis on consent and review processes could better prepare students for both professional and academic futures.

In a second example, a project team decided that they would try using ethnographic methods in their work. This is, by and large, a commendable decision. In explaining their plan at a project review, though, the team described it as more or less just watching people and indicated a preference not to refer to sources on how, exactly, one might do ethnography. I opened my mouth to speak, but another colleague versed in ethnographic methods got there first; he was rather upset about the idea that observing people in a haphazard fashion could seem to anyone like ethnography. These feelings had been building for some time, and unfortunately the message came across as closer to “this is my territory, stay out,” than encouragement to engage more with the methods. Many people left the room offended or startled.

This was not the ideal outcome, and I spent some trying to patch things up between everyone (everyone was much more understanding of each other once past the initial frustrations) and even more time thinking about how this could have been gone better. The situtation absolutely would have been helped if my colleague was more open to the idea that ethnographic methods are something that people from many disciplines can learn and use — something I strongly believe. Ultimately, the project team needed to appreciate that there is more to ethnographic methods than the readily visible routine of observing people. Preparing people to engage with methods in this way is a lifelong learning skill that can be developed in school better than many workplaces.

What to do?

Determining if and how to engage students, particularly professional-track students, in research is a challenge across higher education that certainly exists within the i-schools.

One problem that I feel needs to be addressed is the prescriptive nature of the way many courses are taught. In project based learning, discussing the why of a routine associated with a particular method is incredibly important, as is allowing students to innovate and adapt a method to fit their particular project. Some courses at SI very narrowly prescribe a particular way of doing things. Pedagogically, taking a particular implementation of a method and foisting it on students is a dangerous thing.

I respect those who argue that narrow prescription is an effective introduction to a method that can serve as a stepping off point for future innovation and variation, but I disagree. Defining the what of a method without giving students a chance to take ownership of why is, in my experience, more likely to lead to replication of the routine in the future. When eventually given the freedom to use new and different methods — be it in a future course or the workplace — students trained this way tend to respond within the narrow scope in which the method was presented to them. I can think of very few situations when “you must do it this way because that’s how it’s done in industry” is an acceptable, complete answer to student questions, yet this is a recent and real example that stiffles student curiosity and initiative. I believe that this sort of teaching to replicate the methods’ outputs rather than to understand, adapt, and improve on various methdological tools is at least partially responsible for the problem in the second example.

This teaching of why rather than what is a generalizable goal across project based learning and research as a whole, and indeed the distinction is not always clear. This fuzziness is something to be embraced for the opportunities project based learning offers for students to learn about methods and also to do original work that sometimes — with the right amount of encouragement and support to develop the ideas just a bit further — can result in something publishable. Many courses do embrace these opportunities.

More traditional forms of research in higher education offer amazing potential for mentorship of newer students in a way that rarely happens in the classroom. I’m incredibly happy about my experiences with research so far at SI. Some of my peers have had trouble finding the right research experiences, and I have to wonder if we are doing enough. Earlier I stated my belief that a research experience should be required for every student; even if this is unpopular with some students, it may be an eat your vegetables situation. Such experiences are not only important for the methods and knowledge learned but also for giving developing a basis by which students can decide what career opportunities and/or further education they which to pursue.

I raise these concerns not because I think that SI or other i-schools require radical change. Many already structure their curricular and other opportunities in a way that encourages to learn about research and research methods. Within particular courses or curricula, faculty and instructors are making great strides at integrating teaching and research. I hope that within our schools, we define research and researchers broadly enough that we remember to talk about and share the best practices being developed across undergraduate, professional, and PhD programs. Perhaps next year’s i-conference is an opportunity to do just that.

All of the entering MSIs had to buy Rapid Contextual Design and The Team Handbook. I’m thinking this influenced Amazon’s recommendations.

I’m on three teams for courses, with three to five people on each. We’ve gotten pretty good about having regularly scheduled meetings and, when additional meetings are necessary, trying to schedule the next meeting at the end of the previous meeting. That process works okay, but still not as well as when facilitated by Exchange. This also leaves a number meetings which need to be scheduled outside of meetings, as the need arises. For those, we revert to seemingly endless chains of threads of messages.

On one team, we’ve started using a shared Google Calendar, but that’s really only good for keeping track of team meetings we have scheduled. When used as a scheduling tool in groups, the weaknesses — primarily having to seek out other users’ calendars and hoping for appropriate permissions, rather than having the free/busy information shown in context as you try to setup an appointment — quickly make it unmanageable.

I’m whining, I know, but I am going to have to figure something out. After years of taking Exchange’s services for granted, scheduling group meetings by emails back and forth won’t do.

Also: would it be going too far to say that a nontrivial amount of the success we had at Olin, both with involving students alongside staff and faculty in the administration of the school and with student teamwork, was faciliated by having Exchange in our suite of IT services?