Introduction

Exploration

Description of the grid

I created a grid to help someone when they ware buying a car. As constructs I listed whet I believe are important factors to look at when buying a car. I tried to remain impartial, so that my personal biases would not change the mind of a potential user. I was depressed to see that the car I purchased was not rated highly on the elements I thought were important.

Comment on initial impressions

I did not find the Web Grid to be as easy to use as I expected. I must admit I had to try several different ideas for the grid until I found one that I was able to use different constructs on. I believe it is a good tool to help the user organize all of their ideas. I can only wonder that if I used this tool when I was shopping for a car, if I would have bought the same car.

Problems Encountered

I worked on this project form home. I saved all my files on my home system (Win 95) and tried to upload them to the University. For some reason the Web Grid pages come up as test instead of HTML. This is most annoying, as I will have to redo all of my Web Grid pages at the University.

I found out the answer to the problem. On a Windows 95 system, and probably some others, Netscape would load the 'acgi' file just fine. On the UNIX system,the file would have to be called an HTML file. I do not understand why this happened, but I am glad I figured it out before I had to retype all 3 grids. (I only had to retype 1)

Link to grid

Elicitation of constructs on CPSC547 topics

How I developed my own constructs

I found it much harder to create this grid. This is because I could not find a correlation between a lot of the topics. I liked using the triad function, it made it easier for me to find a difference between the topics. I believe this is because I would only be looking at 3 topics at a time instead of 10.

Description of the grid

The grid contained the topics of all of the presentations completed in class. They were used to represent the aspects of advanced information systems. The constructs I chose were ones that I believed were important in finding the differences between the topics.

Compare the grids

The comparison between my properties and Brian Gaines' properties is shown here:
A lot of the properties that I chose for the topics were very similar to the ones Brian Gaines chose. Most of the topics were similar too, except for knowledge based systems and broadband networks.

Link to grid

Elicitation of constructs on your presentation topic

Description of the grid

For this grid, I chose Wide-Area Broadband Networks. The context of the grid was The Ability to see the Potential of Wide-Area Broadband Networks. The elements of the grid are applications of Broadband networks. They are: Multimedia Activities; Video on Demand; High Speed File Transfer; Distance Learning; Animation; Video Conferencing; Desktop Publishing; Virtual Reality; Home Shopping.

Analysis of the grid - Focus, PrinCom

The gif below shows the FOCUS of the grid. From this, I can tell that video conferencing and high speed file transfer are similar, also Multi Media Activities and desktop publishing are similar. For the constructs, the only ones that are similar are "Expensive -- Cheap" and "Requires High Speed Data Transfer -- Speed of data transfer is not important".

The gif below shows the PrinCom of the grid. I was interested in seeing how Video Conferencing was joined with the constructs Expensive, Will be available in the future, and Few people will use this. While no other elements are very close to a group of constructs.

Link to grid

Conclusion

Even with a few set backs, I found Web Grid a lot easier to use than I first thought. I can see that is can be a useful tool, and it helps a lot showing the relationship between different elements. There were a lot of elements that it found a relationship between, even when I thought there was not one.

Project Completed by: Kent Jarvie - E-mail: jarvie@cpsc.ucalgary.ca

Last updated: Marh 25, 1996