Engineering Pathway

Hello everyone,

I have been talking with a few people about possibly working on the Engineering Pathways project. I was just wondering if anyone else in the class had any interest in working on this project? The more people the merrier... Thanks.

-Stefanie
slr@me.berkeley.edu

Engineering Pathway
Engineering Pathway is a major NSF-funded project of the UC and other organizations aimed at creating access to high-quality teaching and learning resources in engineering for both K-12 and university level education. More details about current plans and the possibilities for a 214 project will be posted. This is an opportunity to be involved in a real project with real-world effects. It's particularly appropriate for students with a background in engineering, but others are welcome as well. The plan is to put together a group of IS214 students to work on user needs and evaluation. There are likely to be 2 to 3 possible projects related to this:

• A major thrust of the project right now is extending participation in engineering -- working with groups that are seeking to bring under-represented groups into engineering. This includes women and various specific minority groups, and people with disabilities. We may coordinate one or more of these projects with a group of students at another university, allowing for the possibility of experience in distance collaboration.
  
• Last year's 214 project considered EP's use by faculty and students in universities and colleges. This year we will focus on teachers in K-12 education. Especially appropriate for students with a background in engineeering and/or in K-12 education, specifically math, science, and engineering.

coupons!!

It’s interesting to consider how people save money. Do they clip coupons from magazines and newspapers? Do they seek out online promotions? How are the right coupons matched with the right people? Depending on the product, it might be the case that most users are willing to pay full retail to save the effort.

Presently, there exist websites (i.e. fatwallet.com, retailmenot.com, slickdeals.com, etc.) catered to solving this problem. However, they typically employ only a social ranking algorithm to bump up and down popular coupons and present them to the users, without each individual users’ preferences and interests in mind. I suspect it’d be more useful to instead create a personalized coupon listing for the user based on implicit and/or explicit user profiling techniques, and then using collaborative filtering for coupon recommendation.

Seva Foundation

Seva Foundation Global Staff Information Networking Project

Background: Seva Foundation works in Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Mexico and Central America on health and development projects designed to combat poverty and injustice.

Seva has program offices and local staff in Nepal, Cambodia, Tibet, Guatemala, Mexico and program partners in India, Tanzania, Egypt and other countries. A main focus at the Seva Foundation is to build local staff and partner capacity to address health and development problems. One method for building capacity is to democratize the information sharing across Seva's staff and partner network. For several years, Seva staff has expressed a desire to communicate more regularly and share information over the internet, including program information, reports, photographs, draft publications, budgets, newsletters, grant proposals, etc. They would like to learn from each other’s programs and projects, lessons learned and new approaches to solving problems. In addition staff would like to provide feedback to each other on a regular basis, and work on joint projects, where a similar action research question is being explored in very different programs in two regional offices.
Students would be asked to research the following questions:
A) What are the specific technology and communications needs in each office and across the network? Which needs are common?

B) What are other international organizations doing to share information globally? What has and has not worked for them to date?

C) What are the available technologies that could allow Seva staff to network over the internet given local internet and infrastructure conditions? How can they share documents, photographs and write/talk to each other regularly?

D) What resources would be necessary to implement this project? What will it cost? Where might we apply for funding?

Project Description: Needs Assessment and recommendations for Seva’s international peer-to-peer community learning network.

Timeline: September-December 2007

Final Product: A well-developed proposal for an internet-based e-learning system along with a well-researched list of possible funders

Methods:

1. Interviews with Seva Foundation Staff in Berkeley regarding general needs and ideas
2. Creation of a needs assessment survey to be filled out by all Seva staff
3. Interviews with Seva Foundation consultants who have worked on technology in Seva’s global offices in the past.
4. Interaction with 8-10 global staff who will be present at global networking meetings at Seva (Oct 27^th – November 5th). Working with Seva Berkeley staff, students will present preliminary findings to Global staff based on survey. They may also conduct follow up interviews with Global staff as time permits.

*Contact Information

---

* Seva Foundation – www.seva.org - (510) 845-7382

Project Contacts – Julie Rinard (jrinard@seva.org) and Carrie Libeu (clibeu@seva.org)

Fun Project

As I mentioned in class today, I am currently not on a project team, but am looking to work on a project that is fun, lighthearted, yet serious... maybe something relating to a product or website such as the iphone, online dating, etc...

If anyone is interested in working on a project of this type or would like to brainstorm ideas, please contact me at: slr@me.berkeley.edu

Thanks!

Project Idea - UCWise (update)

What's changing?
In meeting with one of the professors, Nate Titterton, currently using the system, I discovered that a new "UCWise 2" system is being designed right now. This system will hopefully replace the existing UCWise system within a year.

What does this mean?
This means the focus of the project will shift from simply suggesting improvements for the old system to a focus on building the new system to be better from the very start. This will probably involve review of the existing system to see what aspects are positive and should be maintained, but it also allows us to deviate widely from the existing design flaws as we help guide the design of the new system from the inception.

I am excited. This makes an interesting and tangible problem even more immediate and impactful.

If you are interested in working with the project, you can contact me at eomer@eecs

Emergency Situation Reports

Elisa Oreglia and I are developing a project within the ISD Clinic class to research the use and effectiveness of situation reports, or "sitreps," in humanitarian emergency response.

Context
A sitrep is a type of document, usually authored in Word, commonly used by humanitarian NGOs (non-governmental organizations). It aims to give a concise and accurate account of the situation on the ground in a developing emergency situation. Recent research (and personal experience) indicates that these documents can be difficult to work with, poorly suited for information sharing within or across organizations, and even ineffective at their primary goal of delivering vital, timely information to decision-makers.

Project Description
The SitRep Project aims to document and analyze the current procedures and processes associated with the creation, distribution, and use of emergency sitreps, ideally within 3-5 NGOs involved in emergency response. The initial goal is to identify problems and opportunities in the current process, the format of the information being collected, and the systems used to collect and analyze that data.

You can see some more information about the project, along with some of the background research, at our wiki: http://sitrepwiki.nickrabinowitz.com

We're envisioning this research as a year-long project, so the portion covered within the first semester is likely to include developing a research plan and conducting initial user research.

If you're interested, let me know, either by comment or by email: nrabinow@ischool.berkeley.edu

Phoebe A Hearst Museum of Anthropology

A group of iSchool students did a final project last spring called Delphi aimed at developing a web-based browser for access to the Hearst Museum's collection and improving the collection's visibility. A member of last year's project team who took 214 suggested that continuing this work would make a good 214 project. The museum staff is enthusiastic about continuing this project; they have been working on web-based access as a high priority. We will consult further with them about what they need and what's possible.

This was a really great project, and I'd love to help further it. If your interest is piqued, please leave a comment here or email me: alana@ischool.berkeley....