International Student Classroom Interaction

I have completed my interviews. I would love to do more but I am getting to the point where I need to prototype and test. My interviewees gave me a number of things to think about with this project.

I am getting a lot of excitement from professors and a PhD student regarding my in class communication tool. I am working on a human subjects committee application today that I will hopefully file tomorrow so I can start that process.

Right now I have 3 concepts one to help with classroom interaction directly and another to help improve the sense of community in the department.

In class messaging - This would allow students to communicate through an IM type client. Right now I am looking at using twitter or possibly yahoo as the client. The reasoning behind this is that many students fear having to speak in English and prefer writing. Plus they have the opportunity to construct their thoughts. I am looking at having it be both anonymous and named. The two variations on this are a chat room style set up where everyone can see what the others are saying. The other variation is where the student sends a message directly to the instructor.

iFriends - This started out as mentor/mentee but someone pointed out that this seemed to put a hierarchy in place and make it seem more academic. I am still playing with names but iFriends is what it is right now. iFriends is a program where incoming international students are paired with second year American students. I am also looking at pairing incoming American students with second year international students. I picked iFriends since it is cross culture friendships and informatics school friendships. I am open to new names.

Culture sharing - International students would be encouraged to share their culture with other students. This would occur through cultural pages that the students generate to teach people about their culture. These pages would be shared over the summer along with the forum that we already have set up. I am also hoping to encourage more culture sharing in one of the first semester classes.

These are my core concepts. I have also been gathering things that the students mentioned were good practices from the instructors and helped them to feel more comfortable in class. I hope to take this information and put it together in to a presentation of good and back practices when dealing with international students.

I had an international student come to my office hours today. He was having trouble taking notes in class and wanted me to fill in the blanks. Unfortunately the AI's don't take notes in class we understand the topics but we don't have the detailed notes. I had encouraged him to find a note taking buddy but it sounded like he would need help with every class.

He did have notes but they were only what the instructor had on the power point slides which is purely an outline. I talked to the instructor and he called the office of international affairs. They suggested a 500 level English class for the student. His spoken English class was wonderful I didn't detect an accent at all.

I am not sure where the breakdown is here between the lecture and the note taking but I think I am going to reach out to him via e-mail to see if I can understand what is going on. I am not going to use him as a subject but this is an area that hadn't jumped out in my research so far. Plus I want to help him out so he can do well in the class.

Tonight I had an interesting discussion with a group of first year HCI students regarding the CHI 2008 design competition. We are all working on it as part of different classes but face similar problems.

The part of the discussion I found the most interesting was how people design and where their inspiration comes from. For some it comes from research others from the actual subject themselves or a population close to the subject at hand. It is really interesting to watch these students start to find who they are in the design realm. Everyone has their own ways of finding inspiration and these first year students are just starting to develop their design processes and voice.

Something I have really started to internalize over the past few days is my design inspiration and voice. I have realized that I am really a human-centered designer. The reason I came back to school was to learn more about usability which is a very human-centered field. I have learned so much more than just usability in the domain of HCI in the past year and a half. I have realized people are my inspiration. This is how I helped my team come up with our CHI solution. I saw a problem some interesting points and found a possible solution.

Much of my research for capstone has been papers that talk to people or statistics about people. My capstone is about a group of people and I am waiting on Human Subjects Committee approval to survey this group of people. It is kind of funny when you finally internalize something that was there all along.

Another topic was the PRInCiPleS framework and its merits as a design system. One of the students debated that this was not a useful way to design and that his team had thrown it out. Other people from other teams talked about how they are using it and how it is helpful. The PRInCiPleS are not intended to be a end all be all solution for everything they are just a framework that helps you make sure you have everything covered to create a solid design argument. Also as someone else said if you get stuck it is a good place to come back to and say ok where am I and can this help guide me toward a solution. Thinking about my capstone project I started to try and fit things in to the PRICPS as we lovingly call it and realized that I am doing it without really thinking about it.

As has been said many times before design is a very non linear process. I believe everyone has to take the ideas that are out there regarding design and find their own way to design.

Find your own process and run with it.

Probably the most interesting piece of research I have found for my capstone so far is a dissertation from 1959 about International student adjustment. Interestingly I am working on pretty much the same topic.

Did you know that Indiana was one of the top schools for International students in the United States in the 50s and 60s? Back then IU had around 400 students which was really large for that time.

Many of the things I have read over and over again in more recent research is also noted in this dissertation. The question is are these problems that we are doomed to have to deal with or is it that everyone just talks about the problems but doesn't try to solve or at least reduce them. Some of the issues discussed in this dissertation have been addressed by the international student center but many of the common ones haven't.

Do I expect to solve these problems with my capstone no but I hope to make some improvements at least within the Department of Informatics.

This little glance back in time is really very interesting and even with how old it is I think I has some interesting information.

Right now I am waiting on my HSC to come back and then I need to set up my online survey. I am also planning on meeting with someone from the International student center so I can understand the orientation process more. Maybe I can observe orientation in the spring.