Tour Information
We didn't have a lot of suggestions for changing our tour, except for Teri's question about time and timing. Alex and I decided to address this issue in our discussion. Time and timing certainly could fit in with Dunne's phases of information needs of battered women - depending on the situation. The information seeking behavior of battered women is more situational than anything else. I brought this up in the presentation, but I will reiterate my point here. For example, one woman may want to plan her escape and recovery from abuse in the beginning and may want to be in a state of information overload. On the other hand, a different woman may not be ready to learn about finding her own apartment and may just want to get out of the abusive relationship for now. Depending on the person and the situation, women may/may not be ready for information at various times/phases in the information seeking process.
My Final Thoughts on Class
This semester I've been introduced to some unique user perspectives that I've never thought of before. Taking an entire semester to study the information needs of the less popular information poor was quite valuable. In most of the other classes, we focus on the information needs of the majority; and the majority is quite overstudied. Unfortunately, those with unique needs are in the minority and information professionals may inadverdently ignore their needs. This class has taught me to think about the needs of every user. If we never sit down and try to meet the needs of those who don't use our systems, they never will and our users will stay the same; because of this, our systems and our technologies will not grow. This is something that most be avoided; innovation is critical and to be innovative in the information seeking field we must design systems around each individual user. We should step out of our comfort zones!
Showing posts with label tour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tour. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Monday, December 04, 2006
Week 14 Tour Update
For our tour this week, we sat back and waited for our classmates to comment on our presentation. Thus far, our comments have been very positive. Alex and I have included everything we wanted to include in our tour, hopefully without causing our own information overload!
This was actually the hardest part of our tour; because we were overloaded with information it was really easy to overload others. Even though we wanted to convey this sentiment, we did not want to spread on the incredible amount of disorganized information to others! Having said that, for the most part it was easy to organize our presentation because we modeled after a scientific research paper with an introduction, a literature review, methodology, analysis, discussion, conclusion, and even future work. The hard part to organize was our 'journey' because it was a confusing one! We decided the best way to discuss the places we went and the things we found by discussing each one individually in the order we visited them. By illustrating this with photos, I think our presnetation is easy to follow and enjoyable - who doesn't like looking at pictures? :)
This was actually the hardest part of our tour; because we were overloaded with information it was really easy to overload others. Even though we wanted to convey this sentiment, we did not want to spread on the incredible amount of disorganized information to others! Having said that, for the most part it was easy to organize our presentation because we modeled after a scientific research paper with an introduction, a literature review, methodology, analysis, discussion, conclusion, and even future work. The hard part to organize was our 'journey' because it was a confusing one! We decided the best way to discuss the places we went and the things we found by discussing each one individually in the order we visited them. By illustrating this with photos, I think our presnetation is easy to follow and enjoyable - who doesn't like looking at pictures? :)
Monday, November 27, 2006
Week 13 Tour Update
This past week Alex and I put together our presentation and posted it online to the discussion board. We went through some interesting trials as we put everything together ...
One interesting story is our quest for the Family Violence Prevention Center's website. We were working on our project in the SILS lab and were trying to remember the FVPC's site; the problem was we didn't have our pamphlets with us so we were trying to recall it from memory - we both knew the site existed, or at least it was advertised, so we tried our first guess: fvpc.org. This brought us to a church's website so we Googled 'family violence prevention center of chapel hill, nc'. This brought up lots of opportunities to volunteer with the center, but no information on the center or its services.
Since we couldn't find ANYTHING we decided to call them (thanks to Google maps we had the number). The staff member who answered the phone informed me that the site was fvpc.org; when I told her we had tried that and it didn't work she replied with "let me try it, maybe my Internet here is different". Obviously, she also got the church site; she then told me that they had just switched technology coordinators and that perhaps the site was down and would be back soon but the address was definitely fvpc.org; well, this obviously wasn't true. Later, Alex and I found their site in our notes 'fvpcoc.org'. It was still interesting that we very much could NOT find their site, even when we asked the organization. Interestingly enough, fvpcoc.org is a very good site with lots of helpful information - if you can find it.
One thing we really wanted to get across and focus on was our actual, physical tour. We wanted to stress the 'information overload' aspect as well as the fact that we didn't really know where to start or where to go for what information (besides the Rape Crisis Center, which is obvious). We tried to stress this in our presentation through pictures ... I hope you enjoy it!
One interesting story is our quest for the Family Violence Prevention Center's website. We were working on our project in the SILS lab and were trying to remember the FVPC's site; the problem was we didn't have our pamphlets with us so we were trying to recall it from memory - we both knew the site existed, or at least it was advertised, so we tried our first guess: fvpc.org. This brought us to a church's website so we Googled 'family violence prevention center of chapel hill, nc'. This brought up lots of opportunities to volunteer with the center, but no information on the center or its services.
Since we couldn't find ANYTHING we decided to call them (thanks to Google maps we had the number). The staff member who answered the phone informed me that the site was fvpc.org; when I told her we had tried that and it didn't work she replied with "let me try it, maybe my Internet here is different". Obviously, she also got the church site; she then told me that they had just switched technology coordinators and that perhaps the site was down and would be back soon but the address was definitely fvpc.org; well, this obviously wasn't true. Later, Alex and I found their site in our notes 'fvpcoc.org'. It was still interesting that we very much could NOT find their site, even when we asked the organization. Interestingly enough, fvpcoc.org is a very good site with lots of helpful information - if you can find it.
One thing we really wanted to get across and focus on was our actual, physical tour. We wanted to stress the 'information overload' aspect as well as the fact that we didn't really know where to start or where to go for what information (besides the Rape Crisis Center, which is obvious). We tried to stress this in our presentation through pictures ... I hope you enjoy it!
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