Mark Childs

This week is the first of the learning activities as part of the Theatron project. I’ll be introducing it to the students from inworld. I wonder what sort of impression they’ll get of me based on my avatar. I’m also meeting with Business Development, mainly to let them know the sort of work I’m doing so they can see any potential for bidding and consultancy.

Writing coming up: I’ve done (more or less) the presentation for ReLIVE08 - I still need to do the one for the PREVIEW conference. ReLIVE is over a month away, but I had an idea of how to approach it so thought it was worth getting down while it was still in my head. I also have to write my paper for the DIVERSE proceedings. I wasn’t going to, but there were less papers submitted than there were for 2005/6 so thought I’d work up the student working paper I did last year. There’s also the chapter for the book for CIPEL, I’m still not too sure what to do for that, and they want a draft by the 4th Nov. Hopefully they’ll be happy with an outline. I have three research days before then, plus weekends, so I may come up with something. Then, of course, there’s the methodology chapter for the PhD, which is the next one I had planned to write. And the conference proceedings to edit. That seems like enough to be going on with.

I skipped September as far as blogging was concerned, far, far too hectic. I think in future I won’t even try to find the time, although this only takes about half-an-hour, there were way too many things on my mind to stop and think.

The first week in October was a bit quieter. I’ve now been able to get a response about my enquiries about audience response systems, there’s a plan as far as promoting interactive classrooms across the faculty, and I’ve been trying to get more involved in the curriculum design and the Echo 360 projects. When I came to putting the list together it looked OK. I just need one or more of them to start to come to fruition.

The number of meetings seems to be expanding though. It seems to averaging two a day when you combine the EC and the CSHE ones. Maybe there are more than usual to get things moving at the start of the year, but I hope they start to tail off or there won’t be much time remaining to do the actual work. Most days I’m here till about 7:00 and it’s still mounting up.

The first week in October involved a workshop in successful bidding, which was really useful since it gave us a chance to go through some bids and identify what worked and what didn’t. That was followed immediately by a meeting about looking at creating some bids, which was useful. Note to self: I should follow up some of those ideas to see if a bid could be put forward.

Then a couple of learning committees - there’s something I need to feed back to one of them about ethics of online research. There are issues with online identity and stuff on the internet in addition to websites that I should write something about. Then InHolland University in Haarlem, the Netherlands, invited me over for a meeting about editing the conference proceedings for the DIVERSE conference. We met the publisher which was really useful, finding out that they would do all the formatting was a great relief. A friend and colleague from the University of Southern Maine was also there, and on the second day of the visit we got to talk about a paper we’re writing on the changing nature of identity due to technology.

Today I got to see some of the really interesting learning and teaching that automotive engineering are doing - giving students a series of projects to do rather than lots of lectures. What I really liked was the way the projects introduced an element of competition between the groups, the kudos of winning was more of an incentive than the final marks, it seems.