Education, technology, and dance blog
On the 28th of November I gave an invited presentation at the Open University about the methods we used during the ICT Study last term as part of the Learning Landscape Project, including the Day Experience (or Experience Sampling) method. Quite a few people have been asking for a paper, but so far the video from this session is the best I can do. If you’re interested, go to the Webcast@OU page to view the presentation.
It’s official now, so I guess I can announce it here. I’m really happy to have been awarded a small ascilite research grant for a proposed project on ‘ICTs in the daily lives of Australian university students’, which follows up on the work Mike Arnold and I started here at Cambridge. It’s a fun project, involving giving students cameras and diaries, and asking them to record their daily lives by answering a few questions 10 times in a day. Best of all it gives me something to plan for when I get back to Melbourne. It’s 9 weeks today until we leave…
Okay. I just took a quick look at my photo library to see how far I’ve let my blog slide lately, and came up with the following list of events since my last entry! Yikes. So, I finally got around to uploading photos albums each one — go to the Photos page to see them. If it seems like there has been a lot going on lately, there has. These are just the things we have photos for. There were lots of other important things going on! The biggest and most time consuming was Lotte’s Visa Application, which weighed 1.7 kg and basically took Lotte 3 months of full time work (keep your fingers crossed). We also launched a new weekly live jazz club called The Speakeasy at the on August 27, which has been a great success. I presented at the ALT-C and BERA Conferences in September and at a research symposium called Poke 1.0 this month (no photos, but I’m sure you know what a conference looks like). The cricket season ended well, with Cavendish winning the league with 9 wins and 1 loss. We’ve had lots of new challenges to keep us busy too. Work for me has been quite intense since the start of October, because I have been conducting the second phase of the day experience stuff we started last term. Meanwhile Lotte has got herself two part time jobs: selling soap at Lush, and summarising news articles for important people at the Government News Network. All this, and trying to plan for our wedding next year!
Workshop & Tea Dance
Air Force Ball performance
Trip to Germany, Italy & France
At the moment, Tuesday evenings can end up being quite cramped, between playing cricket for Cav and performance trainings with CLH, but last week was something else. It turned out my team had three games scheduled on the same evening (needless to say we could only complete one). This caused quite a bit of confusion and bemusement, particularly for the teams we didn’t end up playing. The good news is we won the game we did play, and went to 7 wins from 8 games in the League. After the game, Lotte and I headed to The Snug to hear Torben Rees Trio perform again (I recommend getting a hold of Torben’s first CD, by the way). As usual we had a bit of a dance in the tiny space between the band and the tables — if you have Facebook here’s a link to a video posted by James.
Grrrrr…
The cringeworthy coverage of Paris Hilton’s every silly move has got to stop somewhere, but news services complain that they’re just giving the public what they want. Of course everyone knows these same services are the ones that set the agenda, carefully cultivating our tastes and then cashing in on them later. Which is why I loved this video segment so much. Yesterday MSNBC’s Morning Joe news anchor Mika Brzezinski decided she was not going to lead the news with Paris flouncing out of prison, and ends up tearing the story up on camera. Someone give that woman a medal. Watch here: MSNBC anchor tears up Paris script
