The Project Experience

1. The Project Experience: What We Did

The topic of activity theory is broad enough to serve an entire semester. Our task was to learn what it meant and how it worked and present it in only four sessions. The hardest part of that was to find the best angle of approach. We met and discussed it... how are the four topics (listed in the title matter above) connected? How should they be presented? We struggled to learn everything in time to clear our strategy and make our presentations. This was complicated by the high standard set by the four groups that preceded us in the presentation schedule.

When our week-on-the-spot arrived, we had far too much information and far too many ideas for four sessions. Fortunately, Neill had tools from his work with Virginia Tech's Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) project to rapidly develop the slides based on content that we provided in documents no more complex than email text. Working together, we were able to compress the material and give quality presentations (even when Neill's work with the ETD project took him away for one session).

The PICTIVE exercise went even better than we could have hoped, and the discussion session on day four tied everything together cleanly and admirably. Unfortunately, the exercise only covered one of our four topic areas (had we had another six to twelve months, we could have enjoyed an authentic ethnographic excursion!). Even so, we feel that our four days in the spotlight were educational, enlightening, and even entertaining for our classmates and professors.

After it was all over, we contended with varying travel plans to organize these Web pages. Again, the ETD software was helpful: we submitted marked source files and used the ETD tools to build integrated hypertext Web pages which include equations and graphics. Our presentation slides formatted directly into Web pages, too, saving us the work of a complex conversion.

2. Exercise Results

The PICTIVE class exercise went exceedingly well. We had two groups role-playing as a disparate design team and arrive at completely different approaches to the design. Immediately we saw the shortcomings in the PICTIVE strategy (that GUI design comes after a complex set of user-requirements have been specified), but then we saw the benefits: a low-tech interface is quickly and transparently adjustable in a group situation. We can also extrapolate: the PICTIVE approach can be used to model furniture arrangements in a small apartment and the time-slot chart for preparing Thanksgiving dinner in a one-oven kitchen!

3. Lessons Learned and Suggestions for Improvement

Our project was so widely-focused that we could not do all the proper research and cover all the necessary areas in the time alloted. If we could turn the clock back and do it all over, we would narrow the focus and delve more deeply into certain topics--- concentrating more on Participatory Design because it lends itself to active learning.

Although the PICTIVE exercise was enlightening, we think that a homework assignment prior to the work would have been helpful. We would also include a very specific set of user functional requirements before allowing the team to role-play the development of the user interface.

4. Summary

We thank the instructors for leaving the helm: for creating the conflict that inspires learning, and for risking their reputations to be the self-effacing ``more knowledgeable others'' that we studied in Vygotskian Activity Theory.

Our team began being as diverse as seems possible, but we all contributed our time and efforts as our talents led us, and the result was a near-seamless offering of information covering the wide area of activity-based human-computer interaction sciences.

Again, thank you for this educational opportunity.

-- Neill, Martha, Linda

December 3, 1996