ACE | Personas
Persona One: Lester
Lester is a third year International Area Studies major. His research interests are in Economic development in East Asia. He also writes for a campus political newsletter and is in a fraternity for which he participates in and organizes a multitude of group events. He and the other fraternity members use a wiki for communicating.
His information gathering tasks range from sifting through the BBC, New York Times, and CNN news sites online and performing other Google searches to come up with material for the Political newsletter to doing academic research. His academic research consists of writing papers and completing class assignments. He also does research for grant proposals, or when assisting professors on research projects. He uses Google Scholar and Google to do some searches because from there he can access material at UC Berkeley by following the "UC elinks" to material which is subscribed to by UC Berkeley.
Lester uses a variety of methods to organize his information when doing individual and modifies some of these slightly when he is doing group work. When he is doing online searches using Google or Google Scholar, he adds things to his bookmarks when he thinks their useful for his general area of study, but if he is working on a specific project, he opens a Microsoft Word file and creates a list of resources containing links to the relevant results of his Google/Google Scholar searches. If he is in the library conducting searches using library resources, he emails the information to himself and adds it to his list later. Occasionally he will plan to spend his research time in the library and will look up resources, write a list of call numbers, gather the materials, read them there, and write his paper there at the library.
When working with a group, he emails links to resources, or the resources if they are in PDF, text, or HTML format, to the person/people with whom he is collaborating. He feels his system of organizing information could improve, but this system works well enough for him for now.
Persona Two: Allison
Allison is a fourth-year undergraduate student, majoring in the Political Economy of Industrial Societies. She is in the honors program, and is planning to stay an additional semester to work on an honors thesis focusing on political and economic issues surrounding immigration from North Africa to France. In addition to taking courses and doing thesis work, Allison is a research apprentice to a professor in another department. The research isn't closely related to her own interests, but she enjoys the work, and the opportunity to meet people outside of her own program.
Allison uses the library a great deal for schoolwork and for her research apprenticeship. She makes appointments with reference librarians to help her locate good resources, and she finds that about half of the materials she uses are books she checks out or uses at the library. The other half are located through Internet searches, including on-line journal articles located through Google Scholar as well as general information from Wikipedia, Encarta, or other sources found on Google.
She bicycles about 2 miles to campus from her apartment each day, so although she has both laptop and desktop computers, she rarely brings her laptop to campus (it's just too heavy). She takes notes on paper during class, and tends to use library or other public computers when she needs to use a computer on campus.
Persona Three: Amit
Amit is a first year PhD student in the Asian Studies program and is a teaching assistant for a course in Political Economy of East Asia in the International and Area Studies (IAS) program. Amit received his undergraduate degree in Political Science with an emphasis in Political Economy in East Asia, so is well equipped to TA the IAS course. Although Amit has TA experience gained in his undergraduate career, this is the first course Amit will TA at UC Berkeley. He plans to use online resources to organize course reading lists, and would like to make them available to students. He would also like to have an area where students can comment on resources. Amit uses many online tools himself and is convinced that they can be useful for promoting student/TA, student/student, and student/Professor interaction. He knows UC Berkeley uses things like BSpace and Blackboard, but he is not sure how popular they are with the undergraduate students in general, and more specifically, the IAS students.
His first task as a TA is to come up with a reading list based on previous years' readings. The professor has emailed him Word documents that contain citations to course readings for previous years. Amit sets off to find a tool that will allow him to compile course resources such as reading lists and other objects, save them, and make useful comments on them.
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