Teaching is not an easy job, but it comes with huge satisfactions (and, of course, frustrations).
Every year, a new cohort of graduates that I get to know well leave the university. Actually two cohorts: the undergrads, who spend four years with us taking Digital Media Design and finishing with a BSc, and the master students in Interactive Media Design, who spend only 12 months with us, who graduate with an MA or an MSc, depending on their final project contribution.
Working with master students can be challenging – they have a thirst for learning new things and perfecting skills in the 12 months they spend with us! But it is also a wonderful opportunity for learning: they are learning from each other, as everyone comes in with a different background and skills, and I get to learn from them! One of the components of my module “Principles of Interactive Media Design” is a group seminar prepared and run by groups of students. They get full responsibility for those two hours, that include presentations, debates and class activities on a topic of their group’s choice.
Most of the times, I take part in the suggested class activities as well. As an observer at first (I get to grade these activities after all!), but sometimes I get fully immersed and almost forget I’m not there to play.
Here are two samples from this semester. The first one is from a seminar on lifelogging, where after building a collective class timeline by sharing events from our lives, the organisers suggested that we actively get involved in creating a memory for the future by creating an outfit using newspapers with visible headlines.
The second one is today’s attempt to draw a tree with my lips. We were looking at the role of the body in interacting with computers and at various modalities of interaction. What if we weren’t able to use our hands at all?!
One of the joys of academic life is that we get (a lot of) requests to review papers sent to journals and conferences.
Internally, my university recognises this type of activity as “research service”, and it is accounted for when we fill out our “academic workload model/sheet” every year. What I found out in the last two years by filling out this document was that I spend way too much time reviewing other people’s work compared to writing up and publishing my own work.
As an academic, you send your own work to conferences and journals that organise the peer-review process. So, of course, you have to oblige when asked to do the same thing for others.
Reviewing papers in your field of expertise can be a rewarding activity: you get to see new theories being developed, to read about interesting field work and the design of new services and products before anyone else. But it is a time consuming and difficult exercise. It’s a bit like gardening: after pulling out the weeds, you start working with the papers that have a chance to make it in. For some conferences, a 2 phase review process led to a lot of candidate papers blooming after a first round of reviews. And it is really rewarding to see how your advice helped improve a paper!
Having worked in various research areas over the years (from IT Evaluation, Knowledge Management and Software Engineering to Learning Technologies, Social Media and ICT for Communities), I get a lot of requests to review papers for all kind of venues. After having spent days and nights in agony reviewing papers that I couldn’t resonate with, I learnt to be more selective and actually decline to do reviews.
But the last period was particularly busy from this point of view. I accumulated 13 reviews (for CHASE, ICWSM and ECSCW) to do over a 3 weeks period. Which, on top of all my other commitments, is a lot. Especially because I also attended a 4-days very intense project meeting in Sheffield during this period – it was the kickoff of the meSch project.
I went to sleep finishing a paper review and I got up early in the morning starting another one. It is interesting and challenging, but also exhausting. And I’m here writing this blog post because I reached a block – I have to finish the last reviews by tomorrow, and then go back to working on my own submissions, due one in two days and one in seven days.
Among my favourite blogs talking about academic life, I count FemaleScienceProfessor. She has an excellent older post on doing manuscript reviews that goes into more detail on the whys and the hows here.
Limerick has an annual Lifelong Learning Festival. I remember the first time I came across this information, it was in relation to a gardening demonstration and it was back in 2011. I read the whole program and I realised how many interesting events I had missed because I was unaware of the festival’s existence.
I have the strange reputation of reading any notice, poster or flyer that falls under my eyes. To me, everything is interesting. I’d like to try everything and go everywhere. A friend called me a “culture vulture” one evening when I was leaving early from an exhibition opening to attend a dance performance in a close by location.
So last year I decided that miLKlabs, the Limerick hackerspace, had to get involved in this Lifelong Learning Festival, and somehow I managed to convince the others. We had three events over a week, and everybody -organisers and attendees – seemed to enjoy them. For the first time, we attracted people who weren’t on any mailing lists or subscribed to Facebook pages – people who read about us in the Festival brochure or heard about the events on the radio.
I’m also running an Urban Gardening event, showcasing our UL Community Roof Garden on Saturday. And together with Sharon Slater from Limerick’s Life, we’re running a Tweasure Hunt in the city on Sunday, 24 March 2013.
Our former outstanding IMedia student, Paul Campbell is running a Geocaching event on campus on Saturday as well.
Looking at the Festival brochure, I’m really upset that there are so many great events I will have to miss, because they’re running in parallel with the ones I’m involved in. The Festival is a celebration of the really impressive amount of skills people of Limerick have and are willing to share. I know “there’s a recession on the radio” (Irish joke, don’t be upset if you don’t get it!), but this shows clearly how rich we are, and the kind of things we can do together!
Now please excuse me, I have to put on my various other hats and blog about these events on their own websites;)
I have been planning to return to blogging since the beginning of this year, if not earlier. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of my friend Elmine Wijnia, who committed to a 66 days blogging “diet” back in 2009. She told us it was tough, but I still wanted to try!
But I put it off day after day. I am too busy to afford doing anything for myself.
It is one of the busiest periods until now this year: I have tons of reviews pending, paper deadlines, project work, exam papers to grade and so on – all on top of my teaching. But it’s now or never! I’ll have something to look forward to every day:) Or not.
I love blogging. I think about myself as a blogger. I got most of my current and many of the past students to at least try blogging. Many surpassed their master, and made me very proud. Their blogs, combining portfolio pieces with learning diaries, brought them outstanding jobs all over the world. Just like this blog mattered maybe more than the job interview when I got my first job in Limerick almost 8 years ago.
And I actually never stopped blogging: I just neglected my own blog.
I initiated a project we titled Connected Limerick, looking at the interplay between the physical city and its digital replica. And not only looking, but also engaging in it.
Then last summer I participated in an exciting project that was part of the Interactivos? workshop during the Hack the City exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin. And guess what? I volunteered to be the project’s voice.
Do I still enjoy blogging? Yes! But I wish every day would have more hours in it…
And to be honest, academia is making me think of blogging as a sort of guilty pleasure. Blogging, when I should spend every precious moment of my life producing the highly desired ISI publications?!
After three years of activity, meetup.com displays 103 members, 22 meetups and 10 reviews for IxDA Limerick.
We had an impressive number of invited speakers, networking events and workshops. Two of our members organised the firstDesign Jam in Ireland this spring. Together with milklabs, the Limerick hackerspace, we organised the first series of Ignite talks in Limerick.
At the moment, we are in the process of collating all the information we have on meetup.com on an independent website. Alan Ryan, who is doing an internship at the Interaction Design Centre at the moment, joined me as event co-organiser for this first event.
I would like to renew my invitation for the members who would like to get involved in the organisation of this local chapter of the IxDA to step forward. We’re looking for new ideas, new activities, new people to run theLimerick chapter of IxDA. We’re looking for more practitioners to join our ranks and lead the conversation.
The meetup on Wednesday opened this year’s series and was scheduled as part of the Design Week.
As the speaker we had in mind couldn’t make it for Design Week, we decided to take the opportunity to present our own work in progress:
Urban Social Technologies are information and communication technologies applied in an urban setting and with a social purpose (Pedersen and Vallgarda, 2004). Emerging at the intersection of Social Media with Ubiquitous Computing and enabled by the wide scale adoption of smartphones, Urban Social Technologies are increasingly pervading our lives. The effects are multifold and invite to reflection. A presentation by a team of researchers and students from the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick will provide the material meant to trigger a conversation on the participants’ practices and opinions related to location-based practices, with a special focus on the Limerick urban space.
We couldn’t have wished for a better group of attendees on the night! We had a very interesting mix of people from various backgrounds, although current and former IMedia students formed the majority. The big map of Limerick we borrowed from Limerick Smarter Travel was excellent for triggering memories related to places and supporting the conversation.
Although it was lashing rain outside, I decided to go to this event organised by Limerick Local Heroes. Walking is good for the soul and is good for the body, and even more so when you walk for a good cause.
The rain stopped about 10 min before the walk started, and it started again when we finished – so I guess we were really lucky! It’s been years since I walked on the Island, it was good to see how much things have changed for the better there! Over €1300 were raised this morning for the Cancer Foundation through the donations people made when registering for the walk.
Well done to Kevin Haugh, the organiser of the event, and to all the other people involved: stewards, walk leaders and especially to the walkers.
Everybody knows by now about the attraction Social Media exerts on me. I am “Social Media-curious”, and I love trying new things!
I started blogging back in 2002, hard coding a project website where I was sharing frequent updates. I started Coniecto back in 2004 and I was involved in starting and maintaining at least another dozen of blogs. I got a Twitter account in the winter of 2007, but I didn’t “get it” until I started following Leisa Reichelt, whom I met two months later at reboot 9.0. I must confess that foursquare intrigued me from the beginning and I got an account when my friends started talking about it. But without a smartphone it was kind of impossible to “get it”!
In 2010, I bought my first Android phone and started “playing”. It’s been 2 years now, and I am still struggling “to get” it. I’ve read everything that fell in my Google Reader, I’ve listened to conference presentations (the Local & Mobile Conference in Raleigh had a whole session dedicated to location-based social networks), I’ve checked in 476 times, but I am not hooked yet. Just curious!
I can’t deny having my moments of delight. I remember going to Dingle back in 2010 for a bicycle tour. I had my sandwich under an annoying drizzle out in the Marina, and checked in. I discovered that Bernie Goldbach was the mayor of the place. Next day, while waiting for the bus back to Limerick, I had the inspiration to check in again. Guess what? I ousted Bernie:) Checking in to Philly Airport on the way to a conference and getting a swarm badge was fun as well…
Ok, you’re checking in and you discover that a friend is (or was there). Or you get a free coffee after 5 checkins. You tell your friends you’re at a show everybody wanted to go to, but didn’t make it. But is there anything more to it?
When my friends are sharing their foursquare statuses on Facebook or Twitter – most of the time it makes me dream about how these places look like. Sometimes there’s a photo: foursquare is a very nice vehicle if you want to post a photo on other social networks with one click! Reading status updates from my friends is great most of the times: I know where they are, I know they are well and going about their lives. I know when there’s something exciting happening in their lives and they want to tell the world! There’s that ambient intimacy Leisa Reichelt was talking about.
Every now and again, I hear about new places in Limerick – like in the case of Canteen. A few others are extremely popular among foursquare users: LaCucina, where the food is to die for, the Absolute Hotel – my favourite place for business meetings in town, the Milk Market that got a new life and sees things happening 3 days a week now…
Adoption of Social Media applications, foursquare included, is influenced by a whole series of factors. Practices are shaped by culture, by the availability and reliability of underlying technologies, by the example of peers, and so on.
I really hope to find the time to do a foursquare study this year!
The Interactivos?12 workshop brought together about 30 engineers, artists, architects, developers interaction designers, activists and hackers from around Europe to work on six topics that had been selected from a huge amount of submissions. The six projects focused on a wide range of topics, from making energy consumption visible and raising awareness about recycling, guerilla gardening and collaborative cooking and eating in public spaces to encouraging inhabitants to unveil the city’s hidden potential or report cycling accidents/incidents.
I decided to join the Mobile Cityscapes team when Corelia Baibarac, whom I had met at the Local and Mobile conference in Raleigh earlier this year, told me that her proposal had been accepted. Cora is an architect doing a PhD in Trinity taking an interesting angle on encouraging mobility. We were joined by Kathryn Maguire, Christine Gates, Alessio Chierico and Eulalia Guiu. I commuted for most of the workshop, although I spent a couple of nights in Dublin. The representatives of MediaLab Prado insisted on continually documenting our work, and I took responsibility for the daily accounts, helped by Eulalia. To give you an idea about the daily activities, here is the account for each day of the workshop:
On the 25th of August, the space we were occupying in the exhibition was altered to display the results of the workshop, and we had a big launch party. We were amazed to see how many people came in and spoke to us about what we had done!
During the workshop, we used random walks in the area selected as testbed to involve potential users. We developed scenarios, a rough video prototype (thanks to my collaborator Alan Ryan who made it possible in the short amount of time we had!) and a prototype for the web-based platform (thanks to Tim Redfern, our team’s mentor, and to Max Kazemzadeh, who worked with us as technical assistant).
It was really tough work, but I had the privilege to work with some great people and to get to meet the mentors, people working on the other projects and the staff of the Science Gallery. Teresa Dillon, the curator of Hack the City, did a great job pushing us the whole time to find better ways of describing what we were doing. Jane Chadwick minded us during the 3 weeks, making us to feel at home at the Science Gallery. And it was not an easy job, with the hundreds of people coming in every day!
Being “an exhibit” in the gallery and doing work at the same time is quite a difficult task, but it had its advantages: I met friends I hadn’t met in a long long time passing by and saying hi!
I also had the chance to re-discover an area of Dublin I thought I knew well – with its hidden corners, contrasts, mysteries and great people who stopped to talk to us.
In short, it was a fantastic experience and I enjoyed it , although my body cried for rest after a busy year!
As Corelia is continuing her work on the Mobile Cityscapes project as part of her thesis work, and I am working on developing Connected Limerick further, we decided to continue our collaboration. The InfiniteCity native mobile app will be the next step, replacing the one that we have used for generating data during the workshop (EveryTrail).
This is the 5th year of 3Dcamp – when did time fly?
When we started back in 2008, there were a number of similar events running in various cities. There was a podcamp in Kilkenny, a barcamp in Cork, and in 2008 we had a webcamp in Cork before the BlogTalk conference.
When we started discussing the idea of a barcamp at UL, James put forward the idea of branding it as 3Dcamp. It was a time when 3D representations were seen as the coolest thing after sliced bread, Second Life and other virtual worlds were just surfacing. Google Earth and Sketchup were trendy, and everybody was interested in wii hacks. I didn’t know much about 3D technologies at the time, but I was definitely ready to learn!
This year, we discussed about how appropriate the 3D name is for what we are planning to include. Not very appropriate, but myself and James decided to keep it for this year, as it is a sort of brand by now.
So, for this year we encourage speakers to focus on:
Mobile applications
The Internet of Things
Augmented Reality
Maker/hacker-spaces
Open Data, Open Culture
Gestural Interfaces (Kinect)
3D visualizations (Blender, Sketchup),
Virtual worlds & gaming (Second Life, the Metaverse)
Mapping mashups, GPS, geotagging, geocaching
Location-based Services (LBSs)
Urban games, location-based mobile games
Robotics
Haptics and augmented toys (eg. Wiimote hacks),
Interactive art installations
Please keep an eye on the 3Dcamp website, our Twitter and Facebook page for news and updates. Speaker names and topics will be added closer to the date.
The hashtag for 3Dcamp 2012 across all social media will be#3Dcamp12
My poor blog looks really abandoned! I guess I should talk about what’s keeping me so busy these days.
The Connected Limerick initiative started back in 2010 with an event organised as part of the tweak festival. Another event followed last year, and Connected Limerick developed into a real project, focusing on the interplay between the way both locals and visitors are navigating the city and the digital overlay that informs and influences these journeys. And of course, there’s an associated Facebook page.
I’m one of the founding members of miLKlabs, the Limerick hackerspace. I post there and on the miLKlabs Facebook page every now and again.
In November last year, I joined the Limerick Local Heroes initiative group and helped organising the townhall meeting and the Ideas Summit. I set up their first website, later transferred to an own domain. Taking care of the Facebook page and Twitter account together with other people was a very interesting experience. Collaborative work felt a bit like magic: posts simply appeared one after the other without any need for formal coordination. I am still marginally involved in the Community Pillar, which is preparing its Action Summit at the moment.
I also joined Transition Limerick last year, a group encouraging reflection on sustainable development.
Together with Miriam Lohan, we started an action group called “We love Plassey Riverbank”, in order to reach out to people interested in the conservation of the canal and river Shannon banks. We had two successful clean-ups and we are in the process of planning further actions.
I am still running the IxDA local chapter – that’s a group I would really need help with! We had a couple of excellent meet-ups this year, and there’s a Design Jamin the make– the first of its kind in Ireland!
I am also involved in the Limerick OpenCoffee Club, and from time to time I manage to go to the Limerick Open Source Meetup. I don’t manage to write about that, except for the odd picture or tweet every now and again.
And there’s 3Dcamp as well. But that’s a story for another post!
Here are two samples from this semester. The first one is from a seminar on lifelogging, where after building a collective class timeline by sharing events from our lives, the organisers suggested that we actively get involved in creating a memory for the future by creating an outfit using newspapers with visible headlines.
