1. what did you find

1.1. interesting about the article?

The general consensus on the question was that people enjoyed reading and getting familiar with the concept of HFA. The majority of the responses tied this concept to some other projects that we have seen in the course of this class, and the common idea from the answers I read was that it was interesting how user modeling using HCI could contribute to improving systems used by people.

1.2. not interesting about the article?

There weren't many unhappy people with the article and its ideas. Most people enjoyed it.

2. what do you consider the main message of the article?

The main message of the article lies in the fact that user modeling with HCI could help systems get better and that if we adopt HFA systems we would have more chance to create and inprove systems that are used.

3. to which other previous articles / discussion topics of the course is this article related?

People mentioned the EDC and the Clever projects. I guess that the nature of our class is touch on subjects and concepts like that, therefore it was normal to see that the main projects that we interacted with were appearing in people's answers.

4. choose MS-Word (or another HFA) as an example:

4.1. how much (in percent) of the functionality of the HFA do you know?

While every student of this course seems to have good knowledge about the functionnality of word, it looks like based on the answers, no one claimed that they know more than 50% of the functionnality of the HFA. I agree with everyone. I think that it seems that we are very familiar with MS-Word, the options and applications available inside are much more than we know about.

4.2. how do you learn new functionality?

The main answers were the online documentation, and asking for help. I can add that if you run into new functinnality, you could learn from that too. The only drawback to that, is that if one knows about the functionnality of word and run into something, you could always get out of it and end up not worrying about it. So in other words, you have to have no way out of the new feature in order to fully learn about it. This was my experience with emacs, with VI....

4.3. for MS-Word users: is there a command in MS-Word which “transposes two characters” (e.g., “leanr” becomes “learn” by positioning the cursor between n and r and executing the command)?

No one knew that such command existed.

5. what have YOU learnt “on demand” in YOUR life? Briefly describe the most prominent example.

For the most part, students answered that throughout their degree in computer science they had to learn on demand because the material covered in class was just not enough for them to go out and apply it. Computer science senior project was another example of learning on demand, because the professor did not contribute and the student were responsible to find the necessary resources to get their project done. Also, there are people who said that traveling, meeting new people and having to perform a certain task ( bar keeping) is a lerning on demand experience.

6. what do people have to know to be able to learn on demand?

People answered that getting familiar with a certain system could help in learning on demand. There are other people that said that knowing where we can access help for a certtain system could help in learning on demand. Of course motivation and will to learn have to be there for anyone to learn about anything.

7. why should one “learn on demand” instead of relying on “use on demand”?

The answered were quite similar for this question and claimed that if we learn about something rather than using it, we would have a strong idea and good knowledge about the functionnality of that system. On the other hand, if we just use a certain system, we do not really have to learn about it.

8. which computer systems have you encountered which

8.1. have a User Modeling Component?

The main answers for this questions were MS-Word, Dreamweaver, and Acrobat reader..

8.2. support learning on demand?

I found Google in most answers and I agree with that.