Introduction

For the interview process this week, I sought out another graduate student at GSU to try to understand one potential persona for my user experience research on the DALN later in the semester. For this purpose, I interviewed Fikko, a 3rd year Ph.D. student in rhetoric and composition who’s research is somewhat relevant to literacy studies but is more in-line with pedagogical applications of AI writing. While the DALN doesn’t yet seem to have anything related specifically to AI and its intersections with literacy, it does offer narratives related to digital literacy and writing with technology. The user testing I did earlier in the semester emphasized that while these users may have some use for what the DALN offers, it may be a difficult resource to engage with by those outside of the discipline. So, this interview set out to accomplish two major goals, to come to an understanding of the graduate student researcher persona, and to glean some perspectives on what those types of users want/need out of their research tools. 

Interview

D: So, I’m gonna ask you a couple questions. It’s only like six/seven questions that you need to answer, so it’s not gonna take too terribly long. So, starting with demographic details, can you tell me about what you do at GSU, your research process, that sort of thing.  

F: Yeah, so I guess my name is Fikko Soenanta. I’m a, third, coming towards fourth year Ph.D. student slash candidate. I am in the Rhet/Comp concentration in the English department and I am done with my course work, so what I mostly do is teach lower division English classes. 

D: What would you say your research interests are? 

F: So my research interests are AI pedagogy, kind of just the users or lack thereof AI in a composition classroom. I think along the lines of both how we can integrate it inot class and converse how we might be able to regulate that as needed. 

D: So as you’re going through your research and acquiring, like, different sources, primary and secondary, what would you say are some of your most common research methods and what sort of databases do you use, or if you use archives what sort of archives do you use? 

F: The nature of my research makes it very difficult to really use a lot of traditional sources that means a lot of academic paper repositories, like Jstor or Ebscohost, have never really worked very well by virtue of my topic being so new that a lot of people haven’t been properly publishing yet, and that means a lot of my research, at least source-wise, ends up coming from a lot of primary sources, a lot of non-academic, non-peer reviewed sources. It’s much more like firsthand accounts with my students, a lot of social media, a lot of just popular articles that are more on the pulse. Some number of that is a good handful of white papers and papers that have already been published on AI.  

D: You mentioned firsthand accounts. When you think about the firsthand accounts that you’re engaging with, I’m guess that you’re mostly engaging in things like surveys, interviews, questionnaires, observations? 

F: A lot of that, yeah.  

D: So, one of the things that the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives does is collect narratives, so not traditionally scholarly sources, they’re not peer reviewed, but we go through that and verify that they meet the requirements for being uploaded to the archive. So, one of the main purposes of the archive is to collect those firsthand accounts. What are some of the goals that you have when you engage with something like a narrative, something like an interview? What are you looking to gain from those sources, if you can give me a brief rundown?  

F: Yeah, so I think the part here that I can speak of that most relevant is that I’m currently doing like a test run of using AI in my classroom and that there’s a heavy reflection component to basically build into every single submission because one of my records design is that reflective writing is an opportunity to push back or kind of like regulate AI a little bit so we can delineate what is acceptable or not. So, reflection is a kind of like primary artifact from students. I can’t use the ones that I’m doing currently (for research) because I haven’t quite gotten IRB approval and such, but in a future version of this class, I’m hoping to actually be able to use that as a primary source. I think there’s a bit of concessions between what I’m looking for as a pedagog and what I’m looking for as a researcher and I think that basically involves things such as trying to really see how their writing might have been transformed with the use of these new tools. Especially to what parts of writing they struggle with, how AI might have affected that, or whether it helped them a lot or not at all. Along those lines. Does that answer the question? 

D: You answered the questions and a bit of the next one, actually. I was going to ask you about some of the challenges that you encounter with your research process as well. You mentioned needing IRB approval in some cases, in other cases you’re using somewhat untraditional sources, so you’ve hit on that in a couple of your answers to other questions and it seems like those are some of your basic challenges.  

F: Yeah, yeah. Something I can add to that is that, research-wise, there is a human aspect of it that is a bit of a double-edged sword. I think it really helps create much more novel, much more interesting, much more revealing takeaways and conclusions from the research, but on the other hand, it does mean that I, in some way, place the burden of research not entirely on myself, but also onto students. That has some degree of control from me. I guess in some a sense that a lot of times like that involves relying on there being enough students to cooperate, students who are willing to participate in the research, getting the right class schedules that I’m able to conduct the research in the first place. There are a lot more moving parts that might prevent or extend the research.  

D: So, if there was something that was available to you, that would give you the opportunity to engage with similar reflections in some way, like the thought processes that students have as they move through their writing process, would that be something that would be valuable to you? 

F: I think it might be one of those areas where my research can be refined further on my end. My reaction is that I would think that it’s helpful, but maybe not completely pertinent by virtue of I’m really looking for reflections of students who are working with AI specifically. But on the other hand, there is merit to seeing how students without the tools kind of think about like, the writing, of course. That’s a bit that has its own kind of pit falls and fallacies to kind of compare them one to one, which is why I’ve been shying away from really having like a comparative approach to my research. A little bit of that might go a long way to seeing how students might work with or deal with certain aspects like drafting, researching, when they’re using AI compared to when they’re not.  

D: That is helpful! And I appreciate the distinction that you’re making there as well, that the focal point of the reflection or narrative is extremely crucial to your research. I think we’re probably a bit of a ways off of people actually looking at AI as part of their literacy… They’ve written about digital literacy but it’s in a limited capacity that they’ve discussed how AI is actually implemented in literacy practices; that and whether or not we’re ever going to view the use of AI as active literacy. Moving on…. 

D: If you did have something available to you that was similar to Jstor or EBSCO, what are some of the positive and negative aspects of those services that immediately come to mind? 

F: I’ve always been a fan of those platforms. I think, like, they’ve always been helpful. I like the robust search features, between just, you know, filtering the dates, filtering logical operators, that sort of thing. On the other hand, I think there is kind of like an academic language to it that I think like, makes it like, not the most intuitive to use for people who are not yet part of this community. In a sense, I think a common frustration I experience is that I want to do research about a topic that I’m not very well versed in, but that is adjacent to what I’m trying to work with. Which is why I’m trying to learn more about it, but as someone who is not a scholar of that field, I am not really familiar with the proper terminologies or keywords, relevant figures in the field, that makes it a lot more difficult to really find what I’m looking for. I know what I’m looking for is out there, because I’ll be shocked if no one has written about this before, but I can’t seem to find it by virtue of I’m not really sure what keywords they are gonna be using. For an example of this, my research is kind of using a lot of examples of classroom-based research on writing processes, which I understand there aren’t that many present. There should be those out there, but I’m struggling to even find things along those lines by virtue of not really knowing what the right terms are. 

D: So if something like Jstor or similar databases had a section of their website specifically dedicated to this, here are the names that need to know and some seminal works that have been produced.  

F: It will be valuable, but maybe more of a compliment that’s independent of the database proper. I don’t really have an answer to that. I don’t think it’s one that I can quickly point to and go, this is how we solve this problem because I think it is complex, right?  

D: Yeah, I just ask because it’s an interesting crossover with an earlier user testing assignment for this class. I had one of my roommates, a neuroscience M.A. who’s currently researching dyslexia look at the DALN and they struggled with bridging the gap between that foundation and the terminology of literacy studies. But that’s pretty much it for the questions I had prepared, do you have any questions or anything you’d like to add? 

F: No not really, I think we’ve had this sort of conversation in the past a little bit before, so I’m reasonably familiar with the DALN. No questions at the moment, yeah.  

D: Well, thanks so much for your time! See you around. 

F: Good luck with stuff.  

 

Reflecting on the Interview

This interview gave me a lot more valuable information than I had originally planned on. It completely outdid my expectations in respect to the goals I had for it, giving me additional information to cultivate a more accurate persona of graduate student researchers, some of the challenges that they face in approaching new disciplines, a common source of primary sources for pedagogical research for graduate student researchers, how the DALN could enhance users’ understanding of literacy studies terminology and core theories, and most importantly some basic wants/needs of those in this persona in relation to their preferred databases. I’ve done some interviewing in the past as part of other research projects, but most of the time those experiences were focused on gaining an understanding from the interviewee’s specialized knowledge or experiences. The difference that I noticed here is that while the interview provided all those great outcomes, it was still remarkably opinion based – the responses to questions were open ended and provided room for interpretation and analysis after the fact, let alone the variety of additional considerations those outcomes have for ongoing development and research. Suffice to say that a singular interview is not nearly enough to gain a full understanding of what I need to do effective user testing, or even to effectively design a user experience case study. It’s much more likely that I’ll need to interview someone from each persona, record overlaps, and try to implement testing methods that reinforce overlapping goals and motivations for using the site. 

In terms of what I learned about interviewing itself, the biggest takeaway was that building rapport with your interviewee and it can be vital to a successful interview that natural conversation is allowed to happen. Many of the key takeaways from the interview came not from the direct answers offered by Fikko, but from the conversation that evolved around them. While the conversations were brief (I didn’t necessarily want to spend hours transcribing, I’ve had to do that for a past end of semester project and it was grueling), they were the primary method of gaining clarification, bridging gaps, providing explanation and rationales for certain questions, and more. Without building a positive rapport early on (it helps that I’m already friends with Fikko) I’m sure that effective conversation would be nigh impossible, similar to what you can see in talk show interviews where the host ruins their rapport at the start and it’s just 20 minutes of awkward conversation. Regardless, this was an exceptionally valuable experience and provided amazing takeaways for not only interview skills, but also the ensuing project I’ll be working on for the remainder of the semester.