cybertree

In the last few days I had a fewencounters with my local bank that makes me finally write this posting. The famous straw..

1) I want to put money into my banking account

I recently organized a coffee morning for a charity. I counted the money right afterward and send it off to the charity via paypal. Since the bank is more often closed than open I only took the money, including a lot of change, to the bank this week. All sorted, a box with 2€ coins, a box with 1€ coins etc. Alas, my bank initially refused to take it. Yes, you read it: they didn’t want it. They only want change in exactly the portion they find most convenient. Seriously? You cannot take 23€ in 1€ coins, because you have little plastic bags with 25€ written on it? You are a bank, but you don’t want me to deposit my money, because you don’t like coins?

2) I want to send money into my German bank account

BTW - not one of the big bad banks, but a regional bank.  Usually I use the terminal, then it is no problem. But the terminal didn’t work. So I needed to fill in a form. Since the on-campus bank is not my original branch, they cannot process it themselves. They also need at least 1 working day; on a Friday however they will tell you that they know it won’t be in my original branch by Monday. Really?? No, my original branch is not on a different continent, neither in a different country or a different city. It is just another branch of the same bank in the same city.

3) I want to apply for a credit card

I came to Ireland almost seven years ago, opened my account in my first month here. About 3 years ago I considered getting a credit card from my Irish bank, rather than extending the one from my German bank. It is always a bit of a hassle, keeping track of my credit card spendings, sending sufficient funds into my German account. To have an Irish credit card, it seemed to me, would make it easier to balance expenses and income. I am in my fourties, as long as I am in Ireland I have always received a regular monthly payment into the bank account and at that time I had been with the bank for 4 years. Nevertheless, they asked me to get my parents to vouch for me. You gotta be kidding!

These are just the highlights of encounters with the banking system here. I am sure there are others who have had similar or additional odd experiences.

I am not an expert on banking, but I am a customer or a user as you would say in my area of work. And from a user’s perspective there is a lot of room for improvement.

It seems there are a lot of questions around this topic, especially among Engineering students.
But there are also a variety of resources available to quickly learn how to write such a document.

What goes into a literature review and why do I have to write one?
A literature review provides an overview of the literature, in other words, the work that has been done already in the area you are studying. It might also give you some ideas and helps to define your own study area. In most cases you won’t get a pass for repeating work that has been published already; so doing a thorough literature review helps you avoid that trap. A literature review should inform your research question, but if you do it well it will actually give you your research question.

An outline of what a literature review is, what to do for preliminary research, how to analyze the literature and finally some information on structure and writing has been put together into a short paper on Writing a Literature Review by my colleague Dr Aoife MacCormac from BDI. The Learning Centre of the University of New South Wales also provides a summary and short examples and you can find out How To Come Up With A Perfect Literature Review In Some Simple Steps.

A lot of advice on phraseology is given in The Academic Phrasebank from the University of Manchester. And if scientific writing is new to you, the Scientific Writing Booklet might help.

Then you need to find out which referencing system to use. If there are no guidelines, pick one and stick to it. The most common ones are APA and Harvard, but there are others around. UCD provides a guide for the Harvard Referencing Style, the University of Waikato provides an APA Referencing Guide. The University of Exeter provides a general introduction to Hardvard referencing. The main point is to follow one system and not to mix them in one paper.

If you want to see if someone has done a literature review already, ask Google Scholar There are loads of literature reviews, for example on Photovoltaics and it also provides information on literature review itself.

If you are new to writing a literature review you can do this exercise and discuss the answers with your supervisor.

I went through a lot of stuff lying on my desktop and I found this list of questions. It was put together by Andrew Broad. He has more advice on his website to prepare you for your viva, but this list is what people have asked me for again and again. So I decided to put it up here:

1.    What is the area in which you wish to be examined? Particularly difficult and important if your thesis fits into several areas, or has several aspects, or seems to fit into an area of its own.

2.    In one sentence, what is your thesis? Resist the temptation to run from the room!

3.    What have you done that merits a PhD?

4.    Summarise your key findings.

5.    What are you most proud of, and why? This may be asked (again) towards the end of the viva.

6.    What’s original about your work? Where is the novelty? Don’t leave it to the examiners to make up their own minds - they may get it wrong!

7.    What are the contributions (to knowledge) of your thesis?

8.    Which topics overlap with your area?

9.    For topic X:

9.1. How does your work relate to X?

9.2. What do you know about the history of X?

9.3. What is the current state of the art in X? (Capabilities and limitations of existing systems)

9.4. What techniques are commonly used?

9.5. Where do current technologies fail such that you (could) make a contribution?

9.6. How does/could your work enhance the state of the art in X?

9.7. Who are the main `players’ in X? (Hint: you should cluster together papers written by the same people)

10. Who are your closest competitors?

11. What do you do better than them? What do you do worse?

12. Which are the three most important papers in X?

13. What are the recent major developments in X?

14. How do you expect X to progress over the next five years? How long-term is your contribution, given the anticipated future developments in X?

15. What did you do for your MPhil, and how does your PhD extend it? Did you make any changes to the system you implemented for your MPhil?

16. What are the strongest/weakest parts of your work?

17. Where did you go wrong?

18. Why have you done it this way? You need to justify your approach - don’t assume the examiners share your views.

19. What are the alternatives to your approach?

20. What do you gain by your approach?

21. What would you gain by approach X?

22. Why didn’t you do it this way (the way everyone else does it)? This requires having done extensive reading. Be honest if you never thought of the alternative they’re suggesting, or if you just didn’t get around to it. If you try to bluff your way out, they’ll trap you in your own words.

23. Looking back, what might you have done differently? This requires a thoughtful answer, whilst defending what you did at the time.

24. How do scientists/philosophers carry out experiments?

25. How have you evaluated your work?

26. Intrinsic evaluation: how have you demonstrated that it works, and how well it performs?

27. Extrinsic evaluation: how have you demonstrated its usefulness for a specific application context?

28. What do your results mean?

29. How would your system cope with bigger examples? Does it scale up? This is especially important if you have only run your system on `toy’ examples, and they think it has `learned its test-data’.

30. How do you know that your algorithm/rules are correct?

31. How could you improve your work?

32. What are the motivations for your research? Why is the problem you have tackled worth tackling?

33. What is the relevance of your contributions? To other researchers? To industry?

34. What is the implication of your work in your area? What does it change?

35. How do/would you cope with known problems in your field? (e.g. combinatorial explosion)

36. Have you solved the field’s problem that you claim to have solved? For example, if something is too slow, and you can make it go faster - how much increase in speed is needed for the applications you claim to support?

37. Is your field going in the right direction? For example, if everyone’s been concentrating on speed, but the real issue is space (if the issue is time, you can just wait it out (unless it’s combinatorially explosive), but if the issue is space, the system could fall over). This is kind of justifying why you have gone into the field you’re working in.

38. Who are your envisioned users? What use would your work be in situation X?

39. How do your contributions generalise?

40. To what extent would they generalise to systems other than the one you’ve worked on?

41. Under what circumstances would your approach be useable? (Again, does it scale up?)

42. Where will you publish your work? Think about which journals and conferences your research would best suit. Just as popular musicians promote their latest albums by releasing singles and going on tour, you should promote your thesis by publishing papers in journals and presenting them at conferences. This takes your work to a much wider audience; this is how academics establish themselves.

43. Which aspects of your thesis could be published?

44. What have you learned from the process of doing your PhD? Remember that the aim of the PhD process is to train you to be a fully professional researcher - passing your PhD means that you know the state of the art in your area and the directions in which it could be extended, and that you have proved you are capable of making such extensions.

45. Where did your research-project come from? How did your research-questions emerge? You can’t just say “my supervisor told me to do it” - if this is the case, you need to talk it over with your supervisor before the viva. Think out a succinct answer (2 to 5 minutes).

46. Has your view of your research topic changed during the course of the research?

47. You discuss future work in your conclusion chapter. How long would it take to implement X, and what are the likely problems you envisage? Do not underestimate the time and the difficulties - you might be talking about your own resubmission-order!

Ethnographic research in information systems research is not new, but what is it?

It is a very in-depth research method and a way of describing the real world. The researcher usually spends several months “in the field”, in this research area the field usually is a company. Typically the researchers immerse themselves in the life of the people they study. It has been used to investigate social and organizational contexts of information systems.

In ethnography data is collected through interviews, documentary evidence, participant observation and informal social contact.

The Benefits of ethnographic research are the in-depth understanding of people, organization and context of work. The researcher sees what people are doing and hears what they are saying. This enables the researcher to question what is taken for granted. For example people might have the perception that they follow a certain process, while observation might unveil they are following a completely different process or none at all. Your observation might cause you to question what standard and best practice is and it unravels the actual practice.

The Disadvantages of ethnographic research are that the data collection and the analysis process is long. The research has a narrow focus, as it concentrates on one company.

For the researcher this means it is important to think about what are the parameters which make the company comparable to others and are these parameters relevant for the findings. However, if it is valid to generalize from case study research, it is similarly valid to apply this principle here.

I am preparing ethnographic research to explore requirements for a software engineering framework. So I read a bit about it and talked to some ethnographic experts I know.

After talking to people who have done ethnographic studies in information systems research, I came up with the following list of issues to consider:

1.       Get involved, get a job to do in the company that is of use to the people you are observing

2.       Follow one project from the beginning as far as your timeline allows

3.       Introduce an observation instrument from the beginning:

·         Keep a diary; write ½ hour at the end of each day

·         Analyze and then follow the structure after the 1^st week
Write about people, profiles, tasks, projects

·         Collect data so it suits your research; have a plan!

·         Interviews should be written up at the same day with at least a brief summary - if there is a recording.

·         Regularly review your ideas and develop ideas; write analytic memos

4.       Organize a workshop and report what you found or saw

·         A happened like that

·         B happened like that

·         Then ask:

a.       What is best for you? (ask people in the company)

·         Ask yourself:

a.       What are the parameters to consider?

·         Come up with a prototype process together with the people involved

·         Be prepared that people might not like what you report back

Some things to consider: things written in your diary might be without much reflection, just to document them and you will know that, but someone else reading it might be upset.

Reporting your findings

To report the findings, methods of participatory design have been used. In particular Eva Brandt has done a lot of research on that.

Ulrike Schultze wrote a useful tutorial on methodologies for ethnographic research. That’s where the next entry will continue J

References

Myers, M.D. (1999). Investigating Information Systems with Ethnographic Research. In: Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Volume 2.

Ely, M., Anzul, M., Friedman, T., Garner, D. & McCormack Steinmetz, A. (2003) Doing Qualitative Research: Circles within Circles. Taylor & Francis eLibrary. Available from http://www.scribd.com/doc/49851619/27/Analytic-Memos [Accessed 20 October 2011]

Schultze, U. (2000). A Confessional Account of an Ethnography about  Knowledgework. In: MIS Quarterly 24 (1) p. 3-41

Brandt, E. (2006).Designing exploratory design games: a framework for participation in Participatory Design? In: Proceedings of the ninth Participatory Design Conference

ACCESSIBLE is an EU project that ran out in September 2011. The main goal was the development of a methodology to allow designers to make initial accessibility assessments before involving users in evaluations. The effectiveness of guidelines like WCAG 2.0 is questioned. Instead a scalable simulation system that consists of methodology and tools has been proposed. The methodology aims at automated exploitation of existing guidelines. The simulation system will integrate combinations of disabilities. The website supports a sourceforge page where a number of its tool sare available for download. In particular it provides a web accessibility tool (opens in new window) and a mobile web accessibility tool (opens in new window). The project also presents a number of links to project-related ontologies (opens in new window); however, most of those do not work..

It is hard to believe it is 4 weeks already since I left Moshi. I basically went directly from the airport to the UXcamp in Berlin - that was a bit of a culture shock.To say the least.. I saw friends and family in Germany and moved into a new house and now that the thesis is out of the way (hopefully..) and the postdoc has started (sort of..), it is time to look for conferences and journals again! Here is my target list for the next little while. I’ll try to get a few papers into journals and hopefully attend a few international conferences.

Conferences I’d like to present at:

ACM Multimedia Systems 2012
February 22-24, 2012
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Paper Deadline: September 19, 2011

CHI 2012 : 30th Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 5 - May 10, 2012
Austin, TX
Paper Deadline: September 23, 2011

International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
June 2-9, 2012
Zurich, Switzerland
Paper Deadline: September 29, 2011

WWW - World Wide Web 2012
April 16 - 20, 2012
Lyon, France
Paper Deadline: November 1, 2011

9th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
16 - 17 April 2012
Lyon, France
Paper Deadline: February 4, 2012

ICALT 2012 : 12th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
July 4 - 6, 2012
Rome, Italy
Paper Deadline: December 30, 2011

Australasian User Interface Conference - AUIC 2012
30 January - 2 Febuary 2012
Melbourne, Australia
Paper Deadline: August 15, 2011

Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM)
December 7 - 9, 2011
Beijing, China
Paper Deadline: August 25, 2011

Interaction |12
February 1-4, 2012
Dublin, Ireland
Paper Deadline: July 31, 2011

Euro SPI

UMAP

ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia

MobileHCI

Journals I’d like to publish in (TBC):

It was a strange journey in the sense that it clearly is an experience unmatched by any other. Like China, Tanzania is a country of big contrasts - very rich and very poor, unbelievable natural beauty and hard to believe tristesse. The best about this trip are the people I met. I will miss the women from the Rudisha Women’s Group, but mostly I will miss Johnson and his wonderful group of friends: Bumper2Bumper, Margaret, Rashid, Deb, to name a few.
The conference in Dar hopefully is the start of a good cooperation with Margaret Mushi from OU TZ and Brenda Mallinson from SADIE.
The most prominent feature, what I will probably never forget, is how welcoming people are, as well as how often you are the Muzungu. I guess you know you really have settled in here, when you are not referred to as the Muzungu any longer.
Elimu ni mali - Education is wealth. Yesterday I had the women write another test and, as expected, Aisha and Sara had by far the best results. But all of them did well. I hope Caroline will be able to continue the teaching; I left her most of my books and some ideas on how to continue. I hope the book I ordered for her will be helpful. These women really want to learn and they, do if they are given the chance.
I’m also glad Johnson took me on a trip to a small mountain village two days ago. The local secondary school will have students from an American school visiting next week. The best students were selected to host the American kids and we went with the teacher to visit the homes and to see what might be needed. I know, this is a worn out expression, but it did almost break my heart how some of them live and I’m full of respect that they are still the top students. One boy shares his home with his 90 year old grandfather, which means after school he takes care of everything. They live in a mud house without water and electricity. Another student, who is also an orphan, lives with her aunt, who has several children of her own, was left by her husband and on top of everything else has had breast cancer for the last 3 years. It seems she is in the terminal stage. I really hope that some of the American kids will keep in touch and that a few scholarships for those in worst circumstances come out of this. Having said all that, we also visited families, living in a nice house (however, without electricity), with parents who will do anything to help their children to make it through school. It was wonderful to see how neighbours or relatives take on the challenge and become guardians, despite their own difficult living conditions.
I will have to write about Margaret and children of destiny in a later posting. An extraordinary woman, taking care of very special children, orphans between 4 and 18 years of age.
On a more trivial note: I won’t eat chicken for a while and although I like it, I have also had enough avocados for a while… Not being able to eat tomatoes, sugar and beef turned out to be a real challenge. But obviously this is moaning on a very high level - considering that a lot of the people I met and worked with have to survive on 1-3$ per day.

So this will be another long posting; sorry folks;)
Saturday, 21 May we went on a day trip to Marangu. Marangu is famous for it’s waterfalls and the Chagga culture you can experience during the walks. I had arranged the taxi and Deb, Maren, Sarafina and I left early on Saturday morning. I thought Salmin, the driver, could show us some of the sites. Well, it turned out he couldn’t and Msafiri saved the day: we called him, he called a guide he knew in Marangu and we were sorted;) We spent the day leisurely walking, listening to explanations about plants, buildings and history - from 9am until 5pm. It was quite the day! We saw stone potatoes, coffee trees, of course some avocado trees and the traditional grass hut of the Chagga - it used to house the whole family, a cow, food for the animal and humans and a place to cook. The Kilimanjaro Resort in Marangu was the stop after our lunch - a place I can definitely recommend.
Rose and Santa Maria - 23/24 May
Monday was a very normal day - teaching, going into town to find out about the bus to Dar on Wednesday - had to come back on Tuesday, because tickets are only sold one day in advance. I briefly talked to Caroline who had visited Sally on Sunday - I had assumed that Sally would go home for the weekend just like the strudents at St Jude. It seems she has settled in alright and has made a friend already who shared a few things she was missing - she just needed washing powder, flip flops and the snacks are a bit more expensive as we thought. So I got those things on Monday and gave it to Caroline, who will visit Sally either this week or at the weekend.
Tuesday I started teaching, the women started showing up, I explained something and while the women were copying it down I walked around the building. And who would I run into but Rose? She has a slightly tense relationship with Foot2Africa - to put it mildly. But that day she was all sweet - she asked about the class, she even sat in for a while and then she invited Olga and me for tea and a samosa. Well, I will not write more about this. It was a nice gesture, although a bit bizarre. I left the women with a big homework as I wouldn’t be back before Monday.
There was one thing to do: I had promised Aisha, one of the Rudisha women, we would walk to a nearby school together to investigate about the conditions and requirements to get into the school. Aisha has four children, two of which are currently not attending school, because she cannot afford to pay for secondary school, which is considersbly more expensive than primary school. The younger daughter just finished primary school last December, while her oldest daughter finished primary school in 2008 and has stayed home since, helping around the house. Santa Maria is a school run by catholic nuns and a 10 minute walk from Rudisha’s workshop. It is a school similar to Mount Kilimanjaro School, slightly less expensive, also with a high standard, but it requires students to pass an entrance exam. They will not accept students who have been out of school for longer than 1 year - which means Aisha’s older daughter cannot get in, while the younger daughter will now sit the entrance exam in October. Aisha has signed her up for tutoring to prepare for the tough exam. If she passes successfully she will need a sponsor/mentor. If you are interested - please get in touch with me. I am looking for someone interested in supporting a child through the six years of secondary school, which costs approximately 700€ per year, and who is also interested in taking some interest in the progress and provide some mentoring: give positive feedback, provide encouragement when things are getting more difficult and, depending on how things develop, help in a few years with finding information about university or vocational training.

At first we went to the Usa River campus. This is the location of the secondary school. It
was opened in 2008, when the first class reached secondary level. It would be an impressive school anywhere in the world - and even more so in Arusha. When I first saw it I thought for a minute I’m at a university campus. However, the St Jude tour was scheduled and visitors are usually welcomed at the Primary School. We traveled across town and 45 minutes later we reached our destination.
At first I thought, this is all a bit too polished - the visitor service, the assembly with students performing (for the visitors?). But now, more than a week later I still like to remember the visit. And I have a lot of good memories. The guests were invited up on a stage to briefly introduce themselves, so the students knew our names. During the tour with Adellah from the visitor service, a little girl about Sally’s age came up to me and said “Hello Sabine” - I was very surprised she remembered my name. Turns out we share the
same name;)

A few minutes later we passed a room with the dance club in action - practicing what I know as Ententanz, and before we knew it, Deb and I were dancing as well. The rooms are all organized practical - practical for the students and in friendly colors so it can be fun to be there. Each student has a space in the shelf for the bags and some space in a large shelf for text books and exercise books.
The grounds are divided into separate areas for lower and upper primary and the respective playgrounds reflect the different age groups. Similarly the colorful murals encompassing the school grounds are showing learning content from the syllabus. A great way to learn - apparently teachers use the large pictures, which are done in excellent detail, to explain for example the reproductive organs or the digestive tract of humans or some physical phenomenon.
What I still remember most though is the enthusiasm for kitchen staff and teachers alike, a lot of things that show attention to detail and the love of all the staff of St Jude’s for these children: children who fail a class can repeat and so far this hasn’t been much of a problem; if the teachers notice that the students are more upset than to be expected before going back home for the holiday, a group of 2-3 teachers will visit the family and talk to the neighbours again. Sometimes students know they won’t get more than 1 meal per day at most - that certainly would upset me as well. In such cases the school takes in lower primary students for boarding. Usually boarding is only from upper primary to give the students the chance to build a relationship with their family and, how Adellah put it, so they know where their home is.
The school has a computer room which has very restrictive internet settings for afternoon classes and no internet access in the morning, but the computer labs are equipped with state of the art hardware - in other words, the children really learn to use a computer as a helpful tool.
St Jude’s is teaching the syllabus for the international baccaleaureate - so in theory the graduates can study in most places worldwide. The first graduates are not expected for another two years, but then the next challenge is waiting: to find scholarships for these bright and highly motivated children. Their parents will still be among the poorest and won’t be able to support them. Anybody involved in scholarship management, feel free to get in touch with the school. You won’t regret it!

Thursday was a long night. Foot2Afrika only had all the documents for the next big group of volunteers complete for the visa forms last night. So Rashid and I ended up with a big pile. I can honestly say, I’m glad that I never seriously considered a pure administration career… It was a short night and a long day.
But on to much nicer things. After my session with the women, Salmin picked me up at the project, then we collected Deb and off we were to St Jude’s in Arusha. Of course we first went to the wrong place - they now have two campuses at opposite ends of Arusha (45 minute drive apart). We just made it in time to the Friday assembly at 1.30pm. The students meet on Friday in their respective age groups - lower or upper primary school, before they go home for the weekend. I didn’t really know what to expect, but it definitely wasn’t what we got. It was a very inspirational visit, to say the least. I will write in more detail about it when I have caught up on my sleep deficit, but I can tell you that this school is full of enthusiastic students, admin and support staff from kitchen to maintenance and of course teachers. They aim to involve everybody, including the visitors. That’s how Deb and I ended up on stage, handing out certificates and a small price to outstanding students. Their achievements ranged from excellent marks in Maths to exceptional kindness and caring for younger students.
Today it was time to recognize staff achievements. The enthusiastic applause and cheering of the students for kitchen staff and teachers alike was incredible. The whole campus shows attention to detail to create an enjoyable learning experience!

On the way back we saw Mount Kilimanjaro in full and leaving Arusha we had an excellent view on Mount Meru. It was a great day, but got to get to bed now. Just wanted to give a short feedback.