Minutes, Meeting of Tuesday, 26 May 1998

Notes taken by Sarah Luebke. Modified slightly by Samuel A. Rebelsky.

The meeting convened at 12:00 in the MathLAN laboratory and quickly moved to Jimbo's for a more casual environment. On the trip over to Jimbo's, we discussed general issues (such as the plan to have notes for each meeting). Both these notes and the agendas for each meeting will be on the web.

The meeting reconvened at Jimbo's, where we again discussed the agendas and the project URL, http://www.math.grin.edu/~rebelsky/Research/Summer1998/ .

This week we will talk about the architecture of the system. For tomorrow, read the papers and think about which subproject(s) you would like to work on. Get a lab notebook to keep all your notes in. Also log your time in there. Raphen will provide guidance for the other team members on how best to log time.

The Main Project

• Analyze web usage. More specifically, how do students use the web.
• Look at the pages, sequence, time spent on a page, where the user came from/goes to next.
• Ethical implications of logging/analyzing?

Reminder: Sam needs to gather Cleo stuff.

Sarah's notes are blank here, but most of what we discussed is in today's agenda.

Who are we?

Kevin. A senior CS major from California. Taken (almost) all the CS/math courses at Grinnell (or at least as many as he's allowed to get credit for). His interests lie in the logging aspects of the project. He has a little experience with cookies and CGI scripts (in both Perl and shell).

Sarah. From Beloit, WI. In the fall I will be a second year, though I plan to graduate in 3 years with a CS major. I am probably the least knowledgable in our group, but I am very enthusiastic about the project.

Raphen. He is a senior transfer student (from Florida), and also a CS major. He's considering grad school, but he might work a few years first. Very interested in research and has experience in programming.

Hilary. She is a junior CS major from Connecticut. She thought the prject sounded interesting and she wants to try lots of things, not knowing exactly what she is interested in. She took Mr. Chenette's Arts, Multimedia, and the Internet course, and has experience with JavaScript and some other web technologies. She has never used Java.

SamR. He went to school in Chicago, but was a math major during his undergrad years. He took several film classes, though they haven't been directly pertinant to his multimedia work. Then he taught at Dartmouth for 4 years. In 1994 he started using the web as a teaching tool. Currently he does web consulting (on the side, his main role is teacher and member of the Grinnell community). He has also worked with cookies, javascript, and Perl (to name a few of his ablilities). According to him, he is the "world's least organized person".

We discussed the new technology Sam is getting (e.g. the Glimmer Mac and the smart board). Possibly we can incorporate these into our work.

There is a science dept picnic next Wednesday. You need to sign up and bring something.

The meeting ended at some unspecified time. We will meet again at 1:30 pm on Wednesday.