[community] Tracking and recording, or choosing not to track and record

Fri Jul 29 13:37:17 UTC 2016

Thanks Alan for putting out this question.

The exploration of this topic in the IDRC is motivated primarily by applications in learning, to address learning differences. 

I’d like to recount some examples in my past. 

The thing I hated most about school was boredom. I was not an easy student to have in class. I loved math because the right answer was not negotiable or subjective, but I hated the rote, repetitive assignments. I hated memorization tasks or assignments where we simply needed to parrot back what the teacher told us, especially if I disagreed. I made assignments bearable and motivating by setting my own goals. I had to finesse the personal goals so that they would meet and exceed the teacher’s expectations without being interpreted as not doing the assignment. I thrived with teachers who were less structured and who gave me freer reign. This strategy of setting and tracking progress toward new and motivating learning goals kept me sane. 

I recently found some old notebooks. I recorded questions I wanted to pursue, ideas that seemed intriguing, things I disagreed with that I wanted to investigate and then my progress toward discovery and mastery. This started when I had a teacher, Mr. Doyle, who tried an experimental pedagogical approach back in the 60’s of pure student directed learning. We were allowed to choose what we would learn and how we would learn it and he would be there to support us. Of course he was soon fired, but that year was a huge turning point for me. It gave me a path out of boredom and acknowledgement that my ideas mattered. My school history had been very rocky until then. One teacher called my parents into school and suggested that I was likely developmentally delayed and would never master English (for my mother this confirmed what the doctor had told her at my difficulty birth, that I had likely suffered brain damage and would have difficulty learning). Only a month later when every student was tested (gymnasium style) in a standardized test, it was determined that my problem wasn’t developmental delay but "above average intelligence" and I was just being “uncooperative.” 

I still write down questions, ideas, things I’m curious about and then chronicle my findings. If you see my office you’ll find numerous notebooks with this tracking. 

The other example is not about me but about another family member. You could say that dyslexia runs in my family. My  mother likely had undiagnosed dyslexia and several of my other family members have learning differences. To get over the frustrations and maddening school process of “remediating” learning “weaknesses”, we discovered some of the things my relatives with learning differences were exceptionally good at. Of course these were usually not part of the school supported remediation plan, and the teachers didn’t track or give credit for these skills or strengths. We developed our own "report card”, exercise and tracking system to balance the discouraging and slogging progress in other areas. After a while we also used the tracking to figure out what would best prevent a frustration melt down or a complete loss of self-esteem and confidence during difficult periods. 

Possibly because I come from a large family, I feel an ickiness and uncomfortable self-consciousness with excessive mirror gazing or attention to self. I’m not very interested in the many apps that track personal data, but I like mapping a plan, charting a path forward, trying out different paths and recording what works and doesn’t work.

Jutta

> On Jul 29, 2016, at 12:01 AM, Maria Carmen C. Cruz <cruzinmc at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Alan.  I've never been much for tracking my stuff, mainly because I
> remember most of the important stuff anyway, and I'm just not
> interested in tracking most stuff if I don't think there would be any
> benefit for me.  I tried doing a food journal for a few months, but I
> didn't learn anything from it and it didn't motivate me, so I stopped.
> As for privacy, I don't have a huge problem with anyone tracking my
> data if they don't abuse the info.  But having said that, if you allow
> someone to track your data you have to know there's always a
> possibility of the info being misused, and act accordingly.  Thanks,
> and take care.
> -- 
> María Carmen C. Cruz
> Blog: http://cruzviewz.blogspot.com.
> Facebook: www.facebook.com/CruzingMC.
> Twitter: @CruzingMC.
> My favorite charities: donate online at
> https://www.canadahelps.org/en/pages/great-charities-worth-giving-to/.
> My custom manual wheelchair fund: www.gofundme.com/manual-chair-fund.
> 
> On 7/28/16, Tirloni, Giovanni <gtirloni at ocadu.ca> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Alan,
>> 
>> 1. What kinds of things do you journal or track about your life?
>> 
>> Physical activity with a Fitbit wristband.
>> Websites/apps I use on my computer with RescueTime
>> Trying to use a to-do app on my phone/computer
>> 
>> They prompt me to exercise more, waste less time on useless things and
>> organize my day. I find that being able to look back and see how I am doing
>> with hard numbers provides motivation (versus only having a subjective
>> feeling).
>> 
>> I really like the idea of tracking more of my self, but for my own benefit.
>> Not a fan of sharing every single detail of that. I think this email is the
>> most I've shared publicly in years :)
>> 
>> 2. What kinds of tools (digital or analog) do you use to do so?
>> 
>> See above. Mostly digital. I thought about hanging some calendars on the
>> wall to track days I have done certain activities to have better visual
>> sense of them but never got around that. I think that will work better as a
>> permanent and easy to see record of what I'm trying (rather than an app I
>> open/close on my phone). It's bulky though.
>> 
>> 3. What kinds of journaling or tracking have you tried and abandoned, and
>> why?
>> 
>> Anything that requires active data collection on my part. Things like
>> writing a journal of daily activities, things I ate (to rule out allergy
>> triggers), water consumption, daily weight, time spent on projects. Nothing
>> that required continuous conscious effort to capture lasted much longer
>> (unless there were external forces pushing me to do it for a while). It's
>> laziness combined with implicit benefit analysis.
>> 
>> Things that work automatically like Fitbit, RescueTime, etc have had better
>> luck with me.
>> 
>> 4. Are there things you have considered or wanted to track, but haven't?
>> What kept/keeps you from doing so?
>> 
>> Manual data entry usually.
>> 
>> Water consumption: is there a glass that tracks that automatically? That'd
>> help me.
>> 
>> Weight: there are some scales that can sync wirelessly but mine is a
>> traditional one.
>> 
>> The drawback you can infer from all these laziness is that easy of use will
>> rank higher than privacy concerns sometimes. For better or worse...
>> 
>> 5. What kinds of things do you have strong feelings about not tracking, and
>> why?
>> 
>> I am not super concerned about governments and corporations doing something
>> nasty with my personal data at the individual level. I worry more how that
>> affects society as a whole, where that will drive things to, etc. A
>> dedicated attacker will always succeed against a victim with much less
>> resources. If a state government decides Giovanni is import enough to merit
>> close attention, they have the means to collect a lot of data without my
>> help.
>> 
>> Society on the other hand is a bigger issue for me. Massive data collection
>> is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper today. I'm not against lawful /
>> targeted surveillance under circumstances defined by the law. The issue
>> recent privacy scandals have shown are more related to the system being
>> massively abused, in my opinion.
>> 
>> Things that make me not use a service/app: if it's not obvious I'm in
>> control of making my data private. When there isn't a big switch that says
>> "make everything past/future private now" that gives me pause.
>> 
>> If there is a way to export my data, that helps too in not being demotivated
>> to track because I will lose the data later. Not related to privacy concerns
>> though.
>> 
>> Overall, I think in the middle of the spectrum between "got nothing to hide"
>> and "privacy advocate".
>> 
>> Giovanni
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 1:03 PM -0300, "Harnum, Alan"
>> <aharnum at ocadu.ca<mailto:aharnum at ocadu.ca>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello inclusive design community,
>> 
>> Part of the Inclusive Design Research Centre's work on Preference
>> Exploration and Self-Assessment
>> (https://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/%28Floe%29+Preference+Exploration+and+Self-Assessment)
>> is revolving around metrics, journaling and other "self-tracking"
>> activities. We're obviously interested in a wide variety of dimensions
>> around this and thought we'd throw some questions out to the community…
>> 
>> So if you're comfortable sharing or otherwise have some thoughts along these
>> lines, we're curious about questions like:
>> 
>>  1.  What kinds of things do you journal or track about your life?
>>  2.  What kinds of tools (digital or analog) do you use to do so?
>>  3.  What kinds of journaling or tracking have you tried and abandoned, and
>> why?
>>  4.  Are there things you have considered or wanted to track, but haven't?
>> What kept/keeps you from doing so?
>>  5.  What kinds of things do you have strong feelings about not tracking,
>> and why?
>> 
>> I'll share one from my end to start off: I track my dreams, and have on and
>> off for about fifteen years now. I record:
>> 
>>  1.  A basic description of what happened in the dream.
>>  2.  Basic type of dream: good, neutral, nightmare
>>  3.  Keywords for elements or themes that appear (especially if they're
>> recurring ones) like:
>>     *   House I grew up in
>>     *   Failure in school
>>     *   Superheroes
>> 
>> I do this partly because I find it an interesting window into my unconscious
>> mind but also because I have a number of friends who are also interested in
>> their dreams, and we like to talk about them.
>> 
>> ALAN HARNUM
>> SENIOR INCLUSIVE DEVELOPER
>> INCLUSIVE DESIGN RESEARCH CENTRE, OCAD UNIVERSITY
>> 
>> E aharnum at ocadu.ca<mailto://aharnum@ocadu.ca>
>> 
>> OCAD UNIVERSITY
>> 100 McCaul Street, Toronto, Canada, M5T 1W1
>> www.ocadu.ca<http://ocadu.ca/>
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