SIMS CORPUS
IS213 – ASSIGMENT #2
Due Date: Tuesday, February 17
I. INTERVIEW #5
INFORMATION USE
1) What aspects of the SIMS Academic website do you use - if any?
a) Not familiar with the site
i) What is policy?
b) What courses are being offered during the semester
c) What are the requirements for the final project
2) Are there other academic resources you use?
a) Course websites
i) Rarely use them
ii) Only use to retrieve something that must be consumed
iii) Professors tell you eight times when something changes on the website – don’t have
b) It is a hassle to get to the course websites everyday
i) Want RSS to tell me
(1) You have an RSS reader
(2) And, it’s up to me to check the reader
ii) Wiki can put out an RSS when a page changes
(1) Keep up with changes in the course
iii) Pull technology is not useful
3) When do you use this academic information?
a) Twice a month
b) Cardea
i) Only use to get at names and faces
ii) Print quota
INFORMATION ACCESS
4) Are there other academic resources you would like to have access to?
a) Depends on what is important
b) Assignments, Readings are important
c) Sometimes procedural things are important – room change
d) It should be up to the person to decide what is important
i) The teacher decides what goes out in the RSS feed – and what doesn’t
ii) Wiki model doesn’t carry about the change – just publishes any change
5) How do you access the SIMS academic information that you use? (bookmark, cardea, homepage)
a) Doing in my head
b) What doesn’t go in my head – goes on a notebook I carry around
c) Sometimes keep bookmarks – when URL is really long and the convention isn’t something I can remember
i) Book the course bookmarks have an easy convention to remember
INFORMATION CLASSIFICATION
6) How would you classify the course information found on the SIMS Academic site?
a) Don’t know what we need policies for
i) Phil will tell us
b) When I came here I used it a lot
c) Even before I got here, I used
i) General descriptions don’t give us much information
ii) Know the catalog isn’t relevant – it’s the teacher that is important
d) Look at the course site at the beginning – first week or before of class
i) Then you look at it twice more during the class
7) How would you classify the course information that you use?
a) Three break downs
i) Technically oriented materials
ii) Policy oriented material
iii) Social science related material
b) Use tracks when I was thinking about coming here
i) Means of orientation
ii) Think about my track – not as being the same as any one of those but relative for me
(1) I’m into this and I want to take classes from this guy
iii) Look at what is offered
(1) Time to register – first week of class
(2) Take the best classes from there
(3) Think of classes in regards to succession
(a) But from a semester by semester basis
(i) Changes too often to do it over a longer period of time
c) Not overwhelmed by announcements
i) If they could be categorized – it might be useful to have as an RSS feed
(1) But people will self identify with categories they think they are interested in
(a) Think in terms of what “policy” means to me whereas the person who posted it will think of “policy” in terms of what it means to them
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION
8) Do you communicate with others about courses? If so, who?
a) A lot of meetings
b) Established a Wiki
i) Post stuff to the wiki
ii) Let’s work on this document together and then post it
iii) Use CVS to share files
(1) Current Versioning System
9) What methods do you use to communicate course information?
a) Email
b) Semester long thing – went to CVS
SIMS – SPECIFIC QUESTIONS
10) Do you use MyYahoo! or other site which allows you to classify the home page?
a) Don’ use
b) If it was useful I would
i) MyUW
(1) There model was Yahoo
(2) Useful means relevant
(3) Makes sense
(a) Can see the weather
11) What factors would impact your use of "my.sims" customization tool?
a) Times I wished there was stuff I needed
i) Forms
(1) Funnel me to the forms I need
ii) Push you information based on the classes you have taken
iii) Pushing useful news is good
(1) Both from the university and external (NY Times)
(a) Don’t want just SIMS information
12) How did you choose SIMS
a) Don’t remember how I found SIMS
b) Looking at the Academic stuff and needed to figure out if it was a good program
i) Courses was how I oriented myself