Hhmmm - weekly blog becomes monthly blog - still - at least I got the entry in before the end of the month.
The meetings with BDSO went well. Hopefully we’ll be working on some bids to do with some European funding. I wasn’t involved in any JISC bids this time round, because they’d all been assigned before I got here. I can see the logic, you might as well sort out who’s doing what as soon as possible, but it’s frustrating, since I started after the decisions were made, and so don’t get a chance to submit anything. There’s also a danger with making the decision months in advance, in that the technology moves on so fast that something that may have looked good in July looks old-hat in November. I think we need a better system.
Can I just add here how appalling air conditioning is? I’m sitting here in my office - in a draught - irritating drone in the background - neck aching from being frozen. This must be a health and safety issue but all my complaints are poo-pooed. At 18:20 it switches off, and the return to decent environmental conditions is wonderful. Why put the damn thing on in the first place?
Back to the blog …
The retreat went well too. I can’t really see the point of a retreat just being to lock yourself away and write - you can do that at home - but the chance to be with a group of very smart people for two days, who are working on the same stuff, and can share and advise you at key stages, is invaluable. And the location was incredible. I had a two level room that was close to being the best hotel room I’ve had. I’m looking forward to the next one in February.
Managed to edit the conference proceedings. Just waiting for my co-editor to do her bit and it’s done. Mostly editing is just trying to create a narrative around what’s been submitted so that it doesn’t look like a group of disparate papers. But there’s always one or two papers that require a lot of copy editing. Hopefully the proceedings will be out early next year.
The PhD is coming together. I’ve actually got some teaching to do, which means some user groups to evaluate. I’ve been in contact with a few people at EC and it looks like there may be some more I can do at Coventry. Of course, identifying some user groups meant I finally had to put some evaluation instruments together, so I’ve been spending a lot of time doing that. I could have done it months ago and been prepared …. ha.
Last week was the most excellent ReLIVE08. A Danish friend introduced me to the word hooge (that’s it spelt phonetically, she didn’t spell it for me) which means a sort of homely, familial group feeling. I don;t think there’s an equivalent in English, but you know what I mean. The only conferences I normally feel that at are the DIVERSE conferences, but this one had it too. Helped a lot by knowing a lot of the people there. Five or six times though I’d not recognise someone until I saw their avatar name (which were on our conference badges). Most times I was really surprised by how they looked.
Finally tracked down the audience voting equipment - the supplier and the receiver hadn’t let me know they’d been sent. Now I just need somewhere to store them …
Got the chance to meet two more heads of department in EC, which has prompted lots of ideas for new things to work on. I think I’m going to be very busy in 2009.
The project to provide feedback to students using audio has got off the ground. I’ve been synthesising my project proposal with one submitted by a group of lecturers teaching sound engineering. The idea is to use the platform through which they already deliver the sound files for students to work on and do stuff to as the platform for delivering spoken instructions, students’ observations and evaluation. Neat. There’s a wiki about it at http://digitalfeedback.wikispaces.com/
Yay the aircon has just gone off. Peace.
Other things (wow it’s been a busy few weeks). Went to the PLANET workshop - one of the areas I’m working on is a pattern language for learning. This is a Coventry project that I worked on before I got to Coventry. There’s a flickr stream here - http://flickr.com/photos/yish/sets/72157608488366264/
I like the photos because I think I look quite intelligent in them. That was a good day too, not least because I met two writers who’ve been very influential on my research - Sally Fincher’s work on networks saved my MA and Isabel Falconer’s work on a taxonomy of learning activities is an integral part of my PhD and is something I recommend to everyone http://athena.cs.man.ac.uk/apache2-default/r/LADIE/www.elframework.org/refmodels/ladie/guides/
I was also “at” the JISC Online conference towards the start of the month. This was at the same time as the writing retreat, but I managed to combine the two by doing as much on the conference before and after, and skipping one of the days entirely. This just meant attending Gemixin’s and David White’s Elluminate session by sitting at the PC in the duty manager’s office of the hotel.
My inworld home is Chilbo, and Fleep Tuque, the mayor of that place (not her official title, but it should be) recently blogged about me. I hadn’t realised, but an interview I did with the Times was actually used in one of their articles. Fleep’s blog about me is here: http://www.chilbo.org/blog/2008/11/chilbo-resident-gann-mcgann-in-uks-timesonline/ and the Times article is here: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4523668.ece#
I reckon that’s another 30 or 40s towards my 15 minutes of fame.