Week 12

This week was final report write-up work and some paper review. I got an old copy of “Usability Engineering” by Jakob Nielsen off the recommendation of the HCI course and while it’s pretty old, it has a lot of interesting HCI ideas. A lot of CU faculty are still off before the beginning of semester so I spent my extra time reading and starting to plan for summer 2024 internship interviews by getting started with leetcode.com and the classic “Cracking the Code Interview” book.

Week 11

I started a copy of an old book “Software for Use: A Practical Guide to the Models and Methods of Usage-Centered Design” by Larry Constantine which written in 1999, but is referenced in the HCI course I took extensively as a foundational HCI book. I also went back through my HCI course notes to review some materials and get my notes ready for my semester final report.

After some advisor discussions at CU, I’m pretty certain I’ll be applying for graduate school at CU in 2024 and the HCI course was a good experience overall in that direction. I read a few more papers from former-CU faculty who had HCI or ed tech focuses, and it appears that Google has been able to lure many faculty members away (I’m not surprised).

Next week will be my final week of academic paper review, and seeing if any of my correspondence with CU labs has good follow-up. After that it’s all final report work.

Life-Long Learning Resources at CU

I got around to looking at CU’s learning resources and I’m overall very impressed. My last time being an undergraduate was about 20 years ago, and all resources back there tended to be in-person with the web resources being very terse and not all that useful.

CU students have access to VMock where you can upload a resume, and get immediate feedback on what to change. I decided to give it a try with a resume I made myself a few weeks ago and got reviewed by a few humans and VMock provided fantastic feedback. I was able to use the VMock feedback to fix style issues with fonts, remove words that provided no value, fix repetitive words, add specific examples, and swap in better action verbs for experience bullet points. What was really nice is that VMock had examples for many of these items that looks like they were from a ML model that had ingested a large number of technical resumes already. It was a very reasonable approach to trying to fix a resume for getting through applicant tracking systems and to follow good known formats for engineering students. I wish I had used this to make my new resume in the first place.

There’s a Skills for Success Guidebook that took me about 30 minutes and it was a good sounding board for making sure I’m thinking about what I want to do in my career over the next few years and, more importantly, what the skill gap is preventing me from getting there. I’m happy that a resource like this is provided to get students into a good mindset before they meet with career services.

Last, I looked at Linkedin Learning. I very long time I ago I used Lynda (which became Linkedin Learning) to learn about a few new topics I didn’t know in the system administration space. LinkedIn Learning still has a lot of those roots with a few improvements. There’s a lot of nice short content in the platform now that I don’t recall being there before. I watched a short How to Learn Faster series of videos that covered how to get better at skill acquisition in as little as 20 hours, and I looked through some management course. I think all the materials are reasonable, but I believe that students have to take a learned skill and immediately demonstrate applying it get the most benefit. When I was working, I’d use learning content like this to address a deficiency I had with soft skills or quickly learn a technology I had to use. As a student, this can feel more abstract because unless you’re also employed a large number of hours a week, you’ll have to apply learned technical knowledge to a self-driven project, and soft skills you’ll have to use with relationships outside the workplace which might not translate correctly. I ended up using edX as my learning platform for the Summer, but that was a reflection that HCI topics are not covered very much outside UI design in Linkedin Learning.

I can find some items to offer criticism about, but being a student and having access to free career and life-long learning resources is such a big difference from having to identify and pay for them. It removes most of the friction you’d normally have around using a resource, and I highly recommend them.

Week 10

My HCI course is in the rear view mirror after taking the quiz. Overall I enjoyed it, but I do miss live discussion and hands-on activities that you would get with an in-person class. I’m looking at taking the remaining HCI courses via edX to complete a full certificate in the fall. I ordered a few used copies of books referenced in the course, and started to look at ACM SIGCHI materials which is the primary location for HCI folks in the industry. I really with our CSPB program offered the equivalent to the CSCI HCI course.

I took the remaining time this week to read several research papers published in the last 3 years from CU HCI and educational tech practitioners. One of the more interesting papers I read was The Dimensions of Reflection Coding Scheme: A New Tool for Measuring the Impact of Designing for Reflection in Early Childhood . My child is about 2 1/2 years-old and the way this study reflects on reflection in small children is very interesting to me.

I also took time this week to try out some CU career resources and was impressed with VMock which I was able to feed my resume and get tips on how to tweak it to be better suited for getting through applicant tracking systems (ATS).

I tweaked a spreadsheet to track all the labs I’ve reached out and continue to get out-of-office messages or slow responses. I’ll exhaust my list of interesting labs and faculty members by the end of the semester, but anticipant getting some replies when most of the campus is back for Fall semester. I have another set of papers to published papers to read and have found that CSRankings has a nifty list of all the HCI top schools, faculty members, and publications that I can focus on. If I run out of interesting CU academic papers to read, I plan on checking out some other HCI heavy universities like CMU, University of Washington, University of Michigan, and Georgia Tech.

Week 9

I’m done with Section 5 of my HCI course which is the last section before the final quiz. I’ll be reviewing materials and taking that quiz this weekend. Overall, I’d say it was a good idea to take the HCI course because there isn’t currently a HCI course offering for the CSPB program (but there is for normal on-campus students). I’m sure many would find learning about HCI to be easy, and I agree with that, but the more difficult piece is that learning the high-level concepts are only the first necessary step as you will need to actually interact with humans doing studies, interviews, etc. to push HCI concepts forward. That’s very different than data mining existing large datasets and you can really understand that HCI work is very expensive in both time and money because of this.

For looking at lab work at CU, I followed up on some emails and many faculty members are away for the summer or at conferences. This wasn’t unexpected, but I guess I thought that would lead to delays of a few days instead of weeks. We’ll see if hear back before end of semester. I’m planning on reading anywhere from 5-10 research papers the last 3 weeks of the semester, and waiting to hear back from any of the 3 major maker spaces at CU campus if they’re available for tours/introductions to using their spaces. I might have to wait until Fall semester instead, but want to make sure.

Week 8

Between last week and this week, I’ve progressed through finishing Section 3 and Section 4 for the HCI course. This leaves Section 5 and a last test before I’m done with the class. A lot of the HCI content I’m sure is well-known in the HCI field, but it has been very interesting for me coming at it without a HCI background. I haven’t had any exposure to this type of content in the course work I’ve taken in CSPB, so I’m extremely happy I decided to pursue it this Summer. Course readings includea seminal paper, Direct manipulation interfaces all the way from 1985, and my reading of it has been very enjoyable. It established concepts like semantic distance and articulatory distance nearly four decades ago. The content has been easy to digest, but to get more out of the course I’ve had to do additional readings and optional assigments.

Mid-Semester Project Thoughts

I’m still happy with picking a mix of the HCI course, resume updates, and reaching out to CU labs to what’s available in Boulder. The HCI course time estimates from edX I find to be a bit inflated, so I’ve made sure to do all the additional readings in addition to the required materials to make sure I’m getting over two hours of content a week.

While the HCI course has been a breeze, finding opportunities to volunteer in Boulder in the educational tech or HCI space hasn’t been a huge success yet, but I’m happy that preparing for that required me to do some needed work like updating my resume and starting to explore CU’s physical campus. I believe I’m on track to be done with the HCI course in a week, and will have the remaining weeks of the semester to read more papers by labs and PIs at CU I’m interested in, and I can sent out more email introductions and explore more physical resources on campus.

Week 7

With July 4th, I pushed my normal study time for the HCI course to Friday instead of Thursday. That being said, since last update, I did some last edits on my resume and sent it out to another PI of a lab at CU. I don’t have any blockers, and will be finished with Section 3 of the HCI course by end of the week and on schedule for finishing it before the end of the semester. I’m starting to think more about HCI work and have been a bit intrigued by the possibilities of AR/VR topics while looking at the upcoming Apple headset (Vision Pro) SDK. I’m considering using HCI principles along with papers on effective spaced repetition and more general learning techniques to mock up a Vision Pro SDK app for 2024 to play around with learning using flash cards in a AR/VR space. The HCI class has brought up some topics that make we want to rethink what’s possible with that topic without directly trying to mimic the physical setup of flash cards. I’m not sure yet without looking at the market more generally, but I’m starting to consider whether there are more effective ways to present content for spaced-repetition learning.

Week 6

I’ve worked through Section 2 of my HCI class and performed the readings. The class continues to be interesting and I’m glad I’m learning about the Gulf of Execution and Gulf of Evaluation and how they relate to feedback cycles. I have requests for my resume and I spent time this week to create a clean LaTeX resume that I can use for volunteering. I found it to be a bit of a learning curve to get my resume worked out in LaTeX. My HCI class schedule is working out and I’ve not exceeded planned hours per work working on it.

Week 5

I have continued on into the HCI course to Section 2 which establishes many broad ideas around how HCI work uses views of users (processor, predictor, and partipant) along with feedback cycles has made learning HCI continue to be very interesting to me. I have reached out to a CU lab director to see if there are any volunteer opportunities available. My project proposal has been updated to have a more accurate reflection of the HCI class schedule and there’s some additional time at the end of the summer to do additional readings from both the class and published work around HCI and educational tech from CU-associated alumni, students, and faculty. I’ll be finishing up Section 2 this week and starting on Section 3 before my Week 6 update. I’m not finding my schedule to be too overwhelming and it’s mostly filled with watching class video, reading, and taking notes. So far HCI work has continued to interest me.

Week 4

I’m changing up the format of these updates to be a little more interesting. This week I did some of the recommended readings from the HCI course I’m taking and I was really interested that it recommended The Design of Everyday Things. It’s a book that was actually on the recommended reading list of one of my previous jobs. I read through the recommended chapter and it reminded me about how much HCI inherits from Human Centered Design principles around non-computer objects because of how the line blurs when you stuff more computers and electronics into objects around us. The HCI section I worked on has general suggestions about subjects to look at digging deeper and education technology as well as augmented reality both appeal to me and I’m making progress. A slight tweak I had to make was to push the course deadlines back a week so that it covers 12 weeks instead of 6. The original 6 weeks would of required too much time (around 6 hours a week). The course had a really interesting tidbit about the Stacks feature on macOS where items on the desktop are grouped into stacks because of how common it is for us humans to throw things into piles rather than neat little folders. It’s a feature I use all the time and I stopped caring about desktop organization as soon as macOS included it. The fact that it came from research from the Advanced Technology Group at Apple all the way back in 1993 and came from some HCI research is really intriguing to me.

Week 3

What did you do last week?

Played around more with my github pages site.
Watched the rest of Section 1 from the HCI class and started on recommended readings
Began to collect data about HCI and education tech research labs at CU to prepare to email lab PIs
Watched the CSPB recorded video about how various CSPB students found job opportunities
Visited the Alpine research cluster via a CU tour in Boulder

What do you plan to do this week?

Finish section 1 of the HCI class and start section 2
Reach out to at least one PI of a research lab at CU about volunteer/tour opportunities

Are there any impediments in your way?

None

Reflection on the process you used last week, how can you make the process work better?

I can queue up some of the HCI class reading to do earlier in the week since it’s so interesting. I found it interesting to walk around on-campus at CU because there’s a lot of flyers up, etc. I’m going to try to keep an eye out for more on-campus events.

Week 2