Course Organisation
- The questions and comments for Week 6 are about the Museum activities, and the questions and comments for Week 7 should be about activities that relate to your own life and studies.
- The quizzes are also about the activities – tell me which three you chose, and which one you liked best.
- One student has suggested that it would be nice to have a lecture to pull the various experiences together. I sincerely hope that the strike will end by next week, and that we can do that in the Week 8 lecture, but in the mean time, I will write blog posts about each of the six sets of activities you’ve been doing over the past two weeks and open these for discussion.
- If you come to the Forum on Saturday and Sunday (see announcement), we can also discuss your activities and the experiences face to face
Plan for the Activities
I changed the tasks for this week, because I feared a return of the bad weather. Again, the tasks fall into three categories, and each is related to something that matters to human factors and user experience.
As before, the activities are on TopHat.
Information architecture is a term that’s often used to describe how information is arranged on web sites and apps. I like to apply the term as well to any sort of products or artefacts that convey information or that serve as information repositories, such as books, educational resources, edutainment …
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is covered in your textbook under “social” aspects; we will talk about it in Week 9. The activities are designed to get you thinking about how you collaborate, and what it takes to build and maintain a successful collaboration platform. If you want to get a feel for the scope of the field, which by now encompasses social media, look at this old, but golden list of frequently cited papers.
Finally, the environment activities look at the ways in which the built and the natural environment affect the ways in which we live, work, and study. As you’ve experienced, the environment has a big impact not just on your ability to understand and enjoy face to face sessions, but also on mine to deliver them without interruptions (or PhD students serving as “bouncers”).