HI all,

Last week was another warm and lovely week here in Bloomington! In today’s post I will be addressing building a professional online presence, CHI, peer reviews, meeting updates, final product(s), challenges/failures/iterations, and an updated timeline.

Professional Online Presence:

This week one of our new focuses was building our online professional presence. We had a Wednesday workshop this week in which we talked about networking both in person and online, as well as discussing creating an online professional presence. A few ways to build this presence includes creating a professional website, establishing a professional twitter, a linkedIn profile, and many other ways.

One other REU perk we received this week was getting professional pictures done. Here is a fun pic I took alongside my REU partner…***Check Out a Cool Photo Here***

One of our deliverables for this is to draft an online professional website and here is a link to my draft. This is still very much a draft and will be continuously updated!

CHI:

We are planning on trying to get our paper published at CHI which is a major international conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems for the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. Here is a link to the 2017 CHI conference, which will be held this year in Denver, CO. If you check out the website it will give you some cool information about the conference along with what is necessary to apply to different routes for papers, posters, etc.

Peer Reviews: 

This week we also received our first iteration for our peer reviews of our paper. We received some good feedback and had to create a reviewer response table to keep track of their responses. Here is a link to this response table. 

Meeting Updates: 

So far our meetings keep going well and we have incorporated Patrick in them as well so he can get up to speed. We have had a slight set back with our recruitment, so that has been the discussion of a few of  our meetings and we started recruiting with a new method and have received some good responses! We continue to grow as a team and making progress.

Final Product(s): 

We are continuously making progress towards our final paper and research, but we have had a few set backs in terms of our projected timeline of launching our FaceBook group which will have some effects on our what our overall paper may comprise of. Our ultimate hope is to create a prototype useful to those living with HIV, but that is a longterm goal and not in our sites as of now. *We do not currently have a visual of our final product yet*

Challenges/Failures/Iterations: 

-One of our major challenges this past week dealt with recruitment. Our initial recruitment group has not been properly following up with us so we had to begin recruiting from online sources and have received some good response thus far! We are planning on following up with our first recruitment group in person and are hoping for the best, but we are unsure if the recruitment will follow through.

-We have had MANY iterations on our paper as well, our feedback from our mentors and peer reviews have been very helpful and much appreciated.

-Another thing that we have regularly iterated on is our FaceBook activities. We have constantly changed, rearranged, and reconfigured these activities.

-We have had multiple other challenges, but have successfully been iterating and working through them.

Timeline Update: 

Key: Things that were slightly changed in the timeline are in italics.

Week 1: Get to know the basics of the ProHealth REU and meet other REU students and mentors!

Week 2: Have related work and methods outline done. Read and explore more about our specific project including transcribing, summaries, and starting to look at the data. Getting IRB confirmation and other accounts sorted.

Week 3: Draft for related work and methods and an outline for the introduction are due. Delve more into data analysis and finding major themes, along with looking into possible algorithms. Review Facebook activities and solidify what we will do in these activities. Start designing how we will present TreatYoSelf Drexel App (video and guidelines booklet). Will find out how recruitment from PositiveLink is going on 6/8/27. More reading.

Week 4: Outline for abstract, draft for introduction, and peer reviews for both related work & methods are due. Start designing an algorithm for our forum data. Meeting with Positive Link to discuss Facebook activities and if changes need to be made to them. Have almost finalized video and guidelines for TreatYoSelf app to be discussed and reviewed with other before meeting on Friday. Meeting with TreatYoSelf group on Friday 6/16/17 to discuss how we will be addressing their app to the Facebook group.  Possibly launch the Facebook group and distribute questionnaire and ice breakers.

Week 5: Draft for abstract & related work, peer review for introduction, methods finalized, and an outline for findings and discussion. Depending on PositiveLink’s recruitment, we will or will not launch the FB group this week. If it is launched we need to run our FB activities by PositiveLink and we’ll begin our questionnaire, introductions, and ice breakers.  Use TreatYoSelf’s groups critics to improve our video and guidelines. Solidify our algorithm for the forum data and start distributing it (maybe –> Depended on the data).  Draft our online professional presence. Finish up transcriptions and readings that were assigned. 

Week 6: Peer review for abstract, drafts for introduction, findings, & discussion, and a finalized related work (iteration, iteration, and more iteration). Receive peer review data and give more reviews. Hopefully recruitment will continue to go well and we will be able to launch the FB group this week! If launched make sure we gather the data accordingly and monitor the FB page. Continue with forum stuff (not quite sure of the direction). Continue iterating with online professional presence and other deliverables (videos, etc.). Receive feedback from Drexel group about TreatYoSelf guidebook and video and make necessary changes. Work on making FB activities applicable to both PositiveLink recruits and FB recruits. 

Week 7: Draft for abstract, finalized introduction, and peer review for findings & discussion. Continue iterating with online professional presence and other deliverables (videos, etc.). Facebook group should be launched, we will continue to monitor it and collect data while simultaneously launching more activities. More…

Week 8: Peer review for abstract and drafts for findings & discussion. More…

Week 9: Finalized for abstract, findings, and discussion. More…

Week 10: Everything is camera ready!!!!

Let the fun continue…

Last Saturday a few of us attended Taste of Bloomington, which was not quite what I expected but I did get some yummy Indian food and truffles. Select this link for a Bloomington Indian food suggestion. That restaurant had some good food along with a nice quaint atmosphere.

I do not have any plans for this weekend but I am open to suggestions!

Until Next Time…

Julia 🙂