Meeting with one of my assesors

Wow! I was a bit... I don't know the correct word... afraid? I arranged a meeting with Andrew Vande Moore to sign my PhD Plan. Would he criticize too much my PhD Plan? Ok... I know... the PhD Plan went through several iterations with Erik and Katrien, but still I was aware that the PhD was a bit open to face my next two years of PhD.

I am working in learning... and learning is affected by multiple factors. We can control some of them but maybe others we are not aware of them (or we can not control them because are externals). But sometimes I am a bit afraid... I have a really good scenario to get a good PhD. We are experimenting with real students, so I could do really nice experiments, however, I end up after every evaluations with a feeling that I could have got more valuable evaluation (It also relates to my non-sexual usual sadomasochist tendencies, I don't know why but I'm always thinking that I did something wrong). 

Anyway, let's go to the conversation. In the last post I wrote about concepts such as awareness, meaningfulness and usefulness. So after the conversation, I added two concepts to my TODO list: Trust and Robustness. Btw, sometimes, I have the feeling that my thesis will be like the collin dictionary, a collection of concepts with their context-dependent definitions. Or maybe it's end up as an onthology... a self-definition of concepts that nobody uses except the owners (Oooops! Sorry! I don't want to offend pro-onthologists ;))

Andrew pointed out these concepts as something that I should consider in the evaluations. Why? Because it is a really important part in the learning process. An iterative feedback cycle between students and teachers. If students don't trust the teacher, would teaching make sense? We are trying to increase the awareness of our students through some kind of feedback (STEP UP!-the dashboard for those that don't remember the name ;)). I really like this picture, trust is reliability plus delight, and in this case, reliability relies (I know it's redundant) on robustness. How will students increase their awareness if they don't trust the system? And just thinking, the thesis students scenario is ideal for evaluating this. We have students, we have supervisors, and we have the activity of both in the social networks. In addition, neither students nor supervisor have the same motivation to work on the topics. Still master students don't have seen the visualizations so we have the perception of the students on how they are performing before the dashboard. We can show them the dashboard and we can ask them about their perception after the reflection. Afterwards, we can ask supervisors about their perception on how the student is going, and,  finally, we can mix motivation on the topic and social-network activity. Here are included posts, tweets and read/skimmed papers but even more important the comments received on their blogs from their peers and supervisors. Therefore these parameters can show us whether they are performance indicators. Because it was other part of the conversation and it also relates to trust:

What do we visualize?

It also relates to visual storytelling concepts. What is the message? What is the goal of the visualization? I think that I already mentioned before in other posts this concept. Andrew has explained to me how they use visualizations to display spent energy. He has told me that makes no sense to show spent energy whether they don't explain information about the context, for instance, how the sensors are and some additional contextual information.

We talked about more things but I was trying to summarize, although as you can see... I'm not good on it!. Also he offered me an additional testbed, he recommended to read one paper.

So conclusions of the meeting: It was a really productive meeting!