Today we learned some soldering, Lilypad Arduino, and ShareLaTeX basics and went over some foundational information about IRBs and ethics. I was able to get the Blink program to run on a Lilypad Arduino. My professional bio can be found here and my K-12 bio can be found here.

We also did a few exercises related to ethnographic observations. At a sports bar on a Tuesday evening, people ran in and out, typically dropping in to pick up orders or place an order for carryout. No one else got their food to eat there. As one young couple placed an order, the woman in the couple set her phone on the counter, and checked it once, quickly, perhaps just to check the time. As they waited for their order to be prepared, they leaned on a couple of stools and chatted, looking at each other or one of the TVs on the wall. Neither of them pulled their phones out again before picking up their food and leaving. One middle-aged woman came in to pick up an order and was hunched over, hair covering her profile, doing something on her phone while she was waiting in line but quickly put it away when she reached the front of the line. No one else seemed to use their phone, although one young man held his phone and wallet tightly the entire time he was in line and picking up his order.

MacLeod, H., Jelen, B., Prabhakar, A., & Oehlberg, L. (2016). Asynchronous remote communities (arc) for researching distributed populations. Retrieved from http://www.haleymacleod.com/Papers/2016-pervasivehealth-arcmethod.pdf

MacLeod et al. focused on developing ARC, a method for conducting group-based research online with distributed populations, as opposed to previously developed methods for conducting individual interviews with members of these populations, which could build off of established HCI methods of group research like focus groups, surveys, diaries, personas and scenarios. The researchers created a private Facebook group to test out this method in a study of people with rare diseases. 13 participants were recruited from other Facebook support groups for people with rare diseases. The participants were informed of the potential security risks of participation in the study and given $50 upon completion of the study. The study took place over the course of 22 weeks, during which time 11 activities were posted. The researchers ran into a few technical difficulties and extra overhead in using Facebook as the platform for their work and privacy concerns because of their target population, but were ultimately able to glean relevant and important information. Participants engaged more with activities that called for completion over a period of time, rather than in a single sitting and that called for recalling information rather than generating new ideas. Participants seemed to experience confusion related to specific activities, and were made uncomfortable by some, but generally enjoyed them. The platform was also able to provide participants with social support and opportunities to connect with one another. The paper ends by briefly exploring other potential avenues for expanding upon this research, by comparing in-person studies with ARC-based studies, by more closely studying the effectiveness of specific activities, and by attempts to apply the framework to other populations.

Maestre, J. F., MacLeod, H., Connelly, C. L., Dunbar, J. C., Beck, J., Siek, K. A., & Shih, P. C. (2018). Defining Through Expansion : Conducting Asynchronous Remote Communities ( ARC ) Research with Stigmatized Groups. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174131

Maestre et al. used the ARC framework mentioned above to facilitate studies of difficult to reach populations in a study of people living with HIV (PLH) in part to test the validity of the framework. MacLeod et al. had originally tested the framework in a study of people with rare medical  conditions, who would be difficult to gather in a single location for an in-person focus group. A second study found that the framework could also be beneficial when trying to study pregnant mothers who might have a number of commitments that would prevent them from participating in an in-person study. This study focused on PLH because as a stigmatized group, PLH can be difficult to recruit and self-reporting bias can be difficult to manage in face-to-face settings. The researchers created a private Facebook group with a name that did not give away the purpose of the group and reached out to administrators of HIV support groups on Facebook for help recruiting participants. They recruited 19 participants, two of whom dropped out. The participants were informed of the potential security risks of participation in the study and given $50 upon completion of the study. Over the course of 8 weeks, the researchers posted a weekly activity and encouraged participants to complete each activity. All of the activities were independent of the others, although there was potential for overlap in responses to some of the activities. While the basic ideas and structure of most of the activities was mentioned in this paper, the details of them were largely excluded. The data gathered over this series of weeks was triangulated to see what findings could be gleaned from it. One particularly interesting tidbit gleaned from this process was that while stigma was not rated as a relatively major problem in the majority of the activities, there was significant discussion of stigma as an issue in the comments sections, calling for further analysis. Overall, the researchers found that an ARC framework facilitated recruitment of PLH, allowed for more nuanced data gathering, and created a support space that could do some immediate good to the participants, although they did acknowledge the potential benefits of designing other, more illuminating activities.