This page holds work for the Fall 2008 IS 366a course. You can view other people's portfolios by clicking on the IS366a tag on the bottom of this page, or by editing this page and looking in the sidebar.

That having been said, my takeaway from this class is a much clearer understanding of the qualitative research process.   

Like many of my classmates, my early training and education involved primarily quantitative methods of research, including collecting data from experiments -- that didn't really include humans at all.  Most experimentation that I conducted in IS&T was what some of my professors have characterized as "computer science".  Be that as it may, until I entered SISAT, I really had no other concept of useful data that could be collected in the IS&T industry setting.  Most of the data collection that involved people, I considered "marketing".  

Now, it's different.  I know more about human component of IS&T and its relevance to academia and the industry.  The final piece of the man/machine puzzle is observing and reporting on the way that people and information and machines do their jobs.  And how do they affect each other in how those jobs are done.  (If you want to substitute "activity" for "job", it might be just as appropriate.)  In this semester, I have discovered that it is definitely possible to acquire and disseminate useful information by following the methodologies, formats, and protocols of qualitative studies.  

I actually have data in the form of interviews that I, and a classmate, have collected.  The problem was trying to figure out how to properly analyze and disseminate the information that we found useful.  I think that I now have the tools to take a crack getting the first version out the door during the break.  

If there is one thing that I would have liked to do, and would have perhaps found even more useful down the road, it would have been the collection and analysis of qualitative data using automated tools.  I'm sure that I will find a way to deal with that omission down the road one way or another.  

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Use this area to describe your research.

I don't know why I thought Simon was from Britain.  I was halfway through Chapter 3 when I checked out the back cover and saw the man's credentials.  Pretty interesting.  He's a professor of Computer Science and Psychology with a Nobel Prize in Economics.  That's what I call a Renaissance Man.  

I have been most impressed with Chapter 3 so far.  The comparison of human activity with those of an ant trying to get back into the anthill gave me pause for reflection.  I'm not sure if I would completely agree with Simon on that one point, but it is an interesting point of view.  

Tomorrow (Monday), I'm going to be teaching a little lesson on encryption in my CalPoly Extension class – at the request of the students.  I think I'm going to use his DONALD+GERALD=ROBERT cryptarithmetic example to confound the class – both of them!  That was a really interesting little exercise in testing one's problem solving creativity.  

I find it also interesting in Chapter 4, where Simon is approaching Short Term Memory and Long Term Memory  challenges like he is designing a new chip!  There are obvious parallels in the architectures and I believe, perhaps wrongly, that we tend to design machines that act like we do, if they don't always look like we do.  So perhaps eventually we (humans) will design and build CPUs that behave more and more like the real human mind.  

I just hope we give them a nice personality;-)