IlliGAL Blogging

Yes! We survived to the first day of focus groups using DISCUS. The summary: everything went smooth. No software problems. No logistics problems with the students. The day started getting together again with our Chance Discovery Consortium colleagues. After an intense final discussion we came out with the final step by step procedure. Here it is a penny summary in a step by step list: (1) welcome, objectives, and instructions, (2) computer-mediated discussion using DISCUS, (3) break, (4) computer-mediated discussion using DISCUS, (5) break, (6) evaluation of feasible scenarios, and (7) fill a feedback questionnaire.





The photo shown above was taken while participants were instructed on how to proceed during the experiment. Researchers and participants gathered together to minimize uncontrolled elements during the experiment. For instance, participants were told not to communicate to each other using any other channel than the computer-mediated DISCUS. Tomorrow we are going to have two rounds of experiments involving 20 participants in total (instead of the 5 involved today).

The milestone of the day: Abhimanyu Gupta and Mohit Jolly---below---polishing DISCUS to get it bright and shiny, and most important, purring like a kitty.