I started looking for an apartment in Siegen right after I found out my grant application was approved by DAAD. The people at the international office of the university there were really nice and helpful. I was looking for a student room, because most of the Irish universities are renting out their student accommodation during the summer. In Germany though, the spring semester is still in full swing in July, and the students are still there. I was offered a small one-bedroom apartment, and I turned it down because it didn’t come with an Internet connection. After looking and looking, and getting assistance from my German colleagues, I realised that I was asking for an impossible thing. Apparently there’s a law preventing people to pass Internet connections to their tenants – the tenants have to apply for these themselves. This showed me once more how blinded we are by assumptions we make, and how we project our own environment on sites we are supposed to visit. I emailed the lady in the international office asking if the little apartment in Siegen-Weidenau was still available – and it was! It proved to be a wonderful solution: the landlords were extremely nice. They picked me up at the train station, brought me to the apartment, showed me around and volunteered to take me out if I ever felt lonely!
I learnt about the bus routes and used Google on my phone for finding the nearest O2 shop. I got there 30 min before closing time and managed to get a mobile internet “surfstick” with a prepaid account for one month. Although in the possession of a shiny HTC Desire (that was supposed to come SIM free, but didn’t!), I kept my old Nokia phone for daily usage. The prepaid surfstick and a 30 days voucher for TMobile hot spots kept me reasonably happy for the whole month I spent in Germany. Still, couldn’t do Skype voice on any of these!
The next morning I took the bus to the university, together with tens of students living in a student residence nearby. My plans to walk to and from the university, or to buy a bike faded away when I saw the steep hills Siegen is located on and the temperature reached 37 degrees Celsius. The bus was the best solution! The aprtment was located on the top of one hill, and the university on the top of another, on the other side of the valley. Three buildings, all very modern, a huge mensa(canteen), a big library, several smaller ones – everything looked quite impressive. The cable internet connection in the office really rocked, while eduroam was poor and only accessible in a few locations.
A colleague took me to administrative headquarters of the university in the city centre, were I got my stipend. I did a quick tour of the shops and returned to the apartment I got to like more and more.
The week was extremely stressful: I had brought unfinished work with me, I was still getting problems to solve from Limerick, while I was struggling to arrange my visits for the following weeks, plan the work I had envisaged to do with my colleagues in Siegen, and the temperature was getting closer and closer to 40 degrees. AC in German trains was failing, with people being taken to hospital after barely surviving locked in trains at 52 degrees Celsius. I knew it was going to be hot, but I didn’t expected it to get that bad.
On Wednesday afternoon, I was invited to a seminar were Stephan Lukosch from TU Delft presented his work in the area of Knowledge Management and Storytelling. It was a great opportunity to met Stephan in person (he had a paper together with Till Schuemmer from Fernuniversitat Hagen in a workshop I organised back in 2007), and to meet some of the other members of the Information Systems and New Media group that was hosting me at the University of Siegen.
On Friday, I discovered the joys of working from home. Sitting on the balcony overlooking the valley, sipping coffee and working away on my laptop while the birds were chirping in the nearby trees was fantastic!
My daughter, who joined me on Wednesday, took a few walks in the neighbourhood and discovered we were 7 minutes away from the woods and the footpaths that connect the whole area. We started taking walks in the evenings, which were one of the delights of being in Siegen.
Today we went to see a young friend of mine who had recently started a job at a hospital in Olpe, not far from Siegen. Sebastian was one of my online students in the e-portfolio course I ran back in 2005. At the time, he was a brilliant undergraduate student in a medical school, looking for an opportunity to continue with postgraduate studies abroad. We had met briefly in Bucharest that year, and we kept in touch the whole time after that. The day was really hot, but a nice boat trip on Biggesee and a quick dip in the lake made the day much more bearable.
For the last 3 years, I’ve been working with Prof. Volker Wulf‘s group at the University of Siegen, Germany on various projects related to Global Software Development.
It all started at the ICGSE’07 conference in Munich, where I met Alexander Boden, one of Volker’s PhD students, and we realised we were sharing a common interest in the social, organisational and cultural aspects of remote collaboration.
This spring, I found out about a DAAD scheme supporting foreign scientists and academics to spend time working in German institutions. I sent in an application, and two weeks ago I found out that my funding was approved!
Lucky me! I’ll spend the following 4 weeks working with my colleagues in Siegen, refreshing my German and visiting nice places (if I can only find a cheap bike:)!
And here I am, packing my bags and hoping to get my HTC Desire today, so that I can download Leo and brush mein Deutsch;)
My intention was to give a presentation about FabLabs at 3Dcamp. But being in the middle of 1000 other things, I postponed putting my name forward until no slot was left unoccupied. Well, I guess you don’t need to hear me talking – you can read it by yourselves.
FabLab (or Fabrication Laboratory) is a concept originating at MIT as part of the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). If you’re looking for a short explanation, it is the realistic version of the Star Trek replicator.
The whole idea is about sharing designs globally, while making things locally.
There are 41 FabLabs around in the world at the moment, in US as well as in Norway, Germany, the Netherlands in Europe, in Afghanistan and in rural India. The concept seems to have captured the imagination of many, and inventors, artists, teachers and students can get access to top technology to experiment making things without too much need for training.
Will the day come when we’ll produce all we need in our own kitchen? The plates, the mugs, the tea towels, but also the washing machine and the family car? Will the day come when machines will be able to replicate themselves?
Last year on Ada Lovelace‘s day, I wrote a post about someone I admire. I prepared a lot for that post, but I got very sick on that very day, so I had to crawl out of bed with fever to actually edit the post and publish it.
Call me superstitious, but I postponed taking the pledge this year, thinking that it would be safer to do it if and when I can, than dreading that I can’t do it. I don’t get to spend a lot of time on my blog these days and my sense of guilt is kind of going through the roof by now.
So for today, I would like to thank to some fellow bloggers from whom I’ve learned a lot during the years and who have been inspiration for me for many years now. The list is probably incomplete, and I’ll remember some more names when I’ll go to bed tonight, but here we go:
Nancy White(@nancywhite): although I have never had the chance to meet Nancy face-to-face, her work on online facilitation had a profound impact on everything I studied, wrote and did in both my professional and my social life. I attended her Online Facilitation workshop back in 2006, and I went back as a mentor in 2007. Nancy has a special gift of making everybody feel comfortable and important when participating in an online event, she is amazingly creative and open to new perspectives. She lives in Seattle and when she’s not on the road, manages to work from home. She is also a well-known chocoholic:)
Stephanie Booth (@stephtara): I met Steph for the first time at Blogtalk 2 in Vienna, in 2004. She and Suw where like twins – always together! I always wanted to go to LIFT and to the Going Solo events she organised, but never made it. She came to Cork for Blogtalk 2008, and so we met again. Her blog is my special Sunday morning treat, many times when I read her posts I feel like someone is putting a mirror in front of me and makes me see things I usually avoid seeing! I learn a lot from her GTD endeavours and I am following on her steps trying out new tools on occasion. She lives in Lausanne, Switzerland, blogs in both English and French and I’m happy I can read in both. She started a coworking space last year and has a beautiful cat.
Suw Charman-Anderson(@suw). Suw is a prolific blogger- she blogs here, here and here. She’s based in London, is married to @kevglobal and has two lovely cats who tweet: @Grabbity and @SirMewton.
We only met once – in Vienna in 2004. Reading Suw is a delight – she’s interested in the same things, but she can put things in writing so much better than I could ever do! In November last year, she began to write to write on Computer Weekly’s Social Enterprise blog, covering various aspects of social technology in business. That was like my best Christmas present ever! Her hobby is making jewelry. She’s actually the one who initiated the whole Finding Ada movement.
Lilia Efimova (@mathemagenic) Lilia is a person I admire a lot. We were both interested in Knowledge Management, but at a time when Social Software was in its infancy (and somehow despised), she had the guts to embark on PhD research that put blogging practices at the centre of developing a knowledge-based ecosystem. She actually gave me the courage to go against the flow and consider what we call today Social Media as a research topic back in 2004!
How we first met: I missed Blogwalk1 because I was just out of hospital after surgery, but went to Blogwalk2 in Nuremberg in May 2004 and met Lilia and Elmine on that occasion. I remember that day very well: I was after a week of teaching at CNAM in Paris and I had to move from Germany to Luxembourg on that very Sunday, but I spent the Saturday in Nuremberg speaking and walking along with all these people whose blogs I was reading, and I was so happy I could be there!
Last summer, I had the honour to be there when Lilia defended her thesis in Utrecht. Lilia lives in Enschede, Netherlands.
Elmine Wijnia (@elmine) Elmine is a wise person who asks a lot of thought provoking questions. She’s always on a quest for what could help us live up to our values. The workshop she facilitated together with Ton Zijlstra at reboot9 in Copenhagen was one of those moments when you feel surrounded by creative and intelligent people, the ideas burst from all directions, and sky is the limit! Elmine and Ton live in Enschede, Netherlands, and I’m really looking forward to visit them this summer!
Carmen Holotescu (@cami13) – Carmen is teaching Software Engineering in a renowned Romanian Technical University in my hometown, Timisoara. But she’s also building fantastic apps. Cirip.ro, a sort of Romanian version of Twitter, but with far more capabilities built in, made her known worldwide. To me, she is the one who gave the Romanian blogosphere the much needed self-awareness, by putting together and maintaining a list of Romanian bloggers at a time when blogging started to take off in Romania back in 2005-2006.
Sabrina Dent (@sabrinadent) Sabrina is a web designer extraordinaire living in Cork, Ireland with a dog and a husband;) Although she’s working insanely too many hours, every now and again we get the chance to listen to her witty and thought-provoking presentations at various barcamp-style events across Ireland. Sabrina’s blog is a sort of focal point for many people involved in digital media here in Ireland, and on many occasions I’ve sent my students to have a look at her work and read her blog instead of reading yet another academic paper. Sabrina is a real treasure and imho we are very lucky to have her here in Ireland!
Alexia Golez(@lexia) – Alexia is originally from Limerick and currently works for Microsoft in Dublin, Ireland. She blogs about everything from current affairs and technology to music and cultural events. And her Red Links are a delight to follow! She’s part of the fantastic team that organizes the Irish Blog Awards every year – a great opportunity to meet face-to-face hundreds of bloggers from all the ways of life. I had the honour to have Alexia in my class last semester, giving a talk to my 4th year students, and I had the feeling that her insights about her work at Microsoft and the social media landscape in Ireland were extremely valuable for them!
Ina O’Murchu (@Ina) Ina lives in Galway, Ireland. She’s a brilliant community facilitator and a passionate promoter of the semantic web technologies. She’s always up-to-date with the latest technologies and is very active organising Social Media events in her area. She was the first blogger I met after I moved to Ireland – I found her blog by accident and then we organised to meet in person when I travelled to Galway. She was the one who introduced me to the Irish blogging scene.
So, on Ada Lovelace’s Day, thank you, ladies, for sharing your knowledge, reflections and enthusiasm day-by-day through your blogs, and for being such a great inspiration for me and for others!
On Wednesday, Nicholas Polley, the founder of the Dublin-based company 3rd Dimension was our guest in the IDC. He was invited to give a talk for our students and staff, continuing the Interaction Design Talks series we initiated in autumn (previous speakers were Nicola Quinn and Macdara Butler).
3rd Dimension’s Visualisation and Animation studios are based in Blackrock in Co Dublin. The company is focused on creating design solutions that include 3D visuals, photomontages, visual impact assessments and 3D walkthroughs meant to support their clients planning and marketing strategies.
I met Nick last year at the InnovateMedia 09 event, and approached him to talk about 3dcamp. Nick was open to the idea of coming to give a talk in UL, and we’re glad we managed to organise it.
The talk, titled Inside 3D Visualisation, attracted a pretty large crowd from both our undergrad and postgrad courses: Digital Media Design, Product Design and Interactive Media.
Nick spoke about his own career, about his company’s past and ongoing projects and referred to the processes and technologies involved. I think it was a great opportunity for our students not only to find out about technologies and work processes, but also about how to get a job in the digital media industry. Nick emphasized the importance of portfolios in selecting appropriate job candidates – and gave me yet another argument to push our students to start the work on their portfolios as early as possible!
On the same evening, Nick was the guest speaker at the IxDA Limerick meetup in the Absolute Hotel.
In the medical domain, 3rdDimension are doing interesting things in representing the eye, its conditions and interventions to correct this, in collaboration with a Swiss ophtalmologist.
A discussion started around VirtuSphere and its potential use for walkthroughs in to-be-built spaces. It was compared to CAVE – after the InnovateMedia 09 event, both myself and Nick had the chance to visit the CAVE installation owned by IADT. I expressed doubts that bringing people to visit an installation would be as successful as the wide spread visualizations that can be made accessible to anyone, anywhere
Nick blogged about his visit as well. It was great to have him in Limerick and I hope we can convince him to speak at the next 3d camp!
I’ve seen many posts, articles, presentations and videos about making social media to pay off. Most of the times, people don’t get it, and I can see a lot of metrics that are produced just to please managers.
So I was delighted when I cam across this presentation via someone’s tweet:
The series of iHCI conferences started two years ago – my colleague Luigina Ciolfi organised the 2007 event, hosted by the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick.
I chose to attend the IxDA industry talks this morning – and I was really impressed by the great speakers line-up! Kudos to Ben Arent for the organisation and for telling us more about the IxDA Dublin and the upcoming Design Week!
Niamh Phelan (IQ Content) spoke about Google Analytics and how to harness its power when researching usability matters. She pointed the audience to the IQContent blog for useful tips on tracking multiple domains and I was really impressed by their openness to share useful solutions.
I enjoyed the morning session a lot and I’ll do my best to convince these fantastic guys to come to Limerick and talk to the students in the near future.
The afternoon was dedicated to a tutorial on Inclusive Design for Older and Disabled Users offered by Prof.Helen Petrie from the University of York, UK. The tutorial was a real mind opener on what it means to design for and with people with various disabilities. The conclusion was that even if the needs of these groups might be very diverse, the solutions are not that diverse, and by including these concerns in the design process from the very beginning, mainstream technologies (and not only the assistive ones) could benefit a lot. Prof. Petrie mentioned quite a lot the Utopia project and the work of Alan Newell from Dundee University who is using theatre as an intermediary between users and designers.
The workshop included a practical exercise that required us to wear 3 pairs of latex gloves and glasses exemplifying various sight disabilities while trying to perform a simple task on a phone or laptop that didn’t belong to us. Here I am wearing the glasses:) (thanks to @aquigley!)
The first day ended with a social event at the Bagott Inn. More about iHCI tomorrow!
At ECSCW’07, I was running a workshop on GSD and couldn’t attend the one organised by Michael Koch and Wolfgang Prinz on Web 2.0. As this workshop took place next door from ours, I couldn’t avoid noticing the enthusiasm and the fun the participants had.
The organisers put together a wiki page and a blog was created to allow the participants to publish their own position papers and to get acquainted to the others’.
The workshop was structured in two parts: the morning was dedicated to the applications of web 2.0 tools in education, while in the afternoon we spoke about the applications of the same tools in research.
During the morning session, I was scheduled to fill the first slot. I had prepared slides, but it seemed to me that things were very relaxed and I decided to speak from my place instead, with no visuals. All I had to share were stories about tools I’ve used in both education and research, their adoption(or rejection!) by various groups, the feedback I got and what I’ve learned from these. My position paper can be accessed here. The discussion flew from there – there were a lot of interesting contributions, stories and solutions shared. Here are some of the things we spoke about:
different student groups have different needs – one size doesn’t fit all!
the use of social media tools almost always generate more work for the students, and more work for the teachers as well. But:
most of the students love the feeling of having created content that becomes public and can be seen as a meaningful contribution;
the first cohort of students using a specific tool seem to have the hardest time; once examples are out there, and a precedent was created, things seem to work better.
the introduction of social media tools tends to add more problems, as these tools are brought in to support an old paradigm.
the use of social media tools is challenging academics and students to update their own teaching/learning style.
A number of interesting questions came up – here are just a few of the ones I jotted down:
do students like social media tools?
do social media tools really support learning?
do these tools make learning more attractive?
are teaching institutions interested in supporting this adoption?
what is the impact of social media adoption on the position of the teacher? Is he still the expert, or his role is shifting more toward facilitating knowledge sharing?
The afternoon was dedicated to social software applications in research: e-science, research collaboratories. I heard a lot of interesting things about various communities using web 2.0 tools, and also about various initiatives and projects meant to facilitate collaboration at distance, serendipity and open sharing.
On Wednesday evening, I took my daughter to the O2 to see Leonard Cohen. Other mothers (in the movies) might make more expensive gifts to their daughters at graduation, like a car, or a shopping trip to NY, but I’m not in that position…so this seemed to me the perfect gift, that none of us will ever forget!
It was a fantastic night – words cannot describe the atmosphere in the O2! Cohen is a great singer, poet and human being – his generosity and spirit were overwhelming.
I remember very well that the first time I heard him singing (on a tape) – it was on New Year’s Eve ’76, and the song was Suzanne. One of our friends had emmigrated with his family to Germany, and now he was back for Christmas holidays, and he brought this tape with him. For days, “Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water” kept on playing in my head.
And then nothing, for years and years. Censorship never allowed Cohen songs to be played on the radio in Romania before 1989.
In 1998, on a trip to Germany, I bought my first Cohen CD.
I never imagined I’m going to see him live, although last year when he played in Dublin I made an attempt. The only other famous person I’ve seen live was Billy Joel in Croke Park in 2006. And it was a major disappointment – the way he treated the audience was simply outrageous. Maybe it was part of the show-his show. Cohen was a completely different experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
He sang most of his famous songs. He recited “A thousand kisses deep“. He sang a few songs I’ve never heard before as well. He spoiled us with solos of the members of his band. He was on his knees in front of us very often, but he also danced like a young man.
It was a great night that none of us will easily forget!
July 24 2009 | Events and Life and Uncategorized | Comments Off on There’s a crack, a crack in everything…
A few weeks ago, when I desperately needed a break, I decided to become a wwoofer. For a workaholic, I thought that was the most reasonable thing to do. You don’t have to stop working, but you’re doing something else, out in the nature. It turned much nicer that I thought it will be: a few hours of work a day, long walks, visiting people and gardens. I even ended up inviting my host to a concert in the famous Bantry House – the West Cork Music Festival was on! I couldn’t resist sending a picture to Twitpic, and one of my friends reacted saying that I seemed to be living the life of Reilly those days…
I had to look the expression up on the Internet. Me – living a life of a king? I was ready to react in the “poor me” style! But then I realised that in a way, it was absolutely true… I wasn’t completely free, because I still have a few duties connecting me to the university – the biggest being the conference I’ve been working on organising for almost a year now, but still… no stringent plans for the future.
I’m at the crossroads – my contract as a lecturer came to an end in March. I got work until June, with the perspective of a lecturing job that was going to be advertised during that period. But we’re in recession times – a recruitment embargo was set on all public institutions in Ireland, and the hiring process was blocked. So I guess the university gates closed for me – although some people claim there’s still hope.
For the first time in 28 years, I found myself unemployed. It was difficult to accept in the beginning – any kinds of jobs are scarce right now, but I tried to accept this lesson and find some good parts in it. I have accumulated so much during the last four years, that maybe it is time to sit down and digest. In the trepidation of academic life, deadlines are hitting you like trains, often coming from unexpected directions – so sometimes you don’t even have the time to get back on your feet, that a new task hits you and needs to be fitted in somehow.
OK. So I signed up for the dole on Tuesday. I was told I will feel ashamed and miserable. I don’t. I have worked for 28 years and I paid taxes all this time. I want to work, but wasn’t able to find something else, because I was too busy … working! For free. I’m a real addict, ain’t I?!
People ask me if I will leave Ireland, because jobs might be available elsewhere. No, I’m not planning to leave. I have the feeling that my place is here. I fit in. I am happy here. I have no complaints about the weather;) More than anything else, I love the people. And I believe there’s a future for me here.
What will I do? I don’t know yet. Knowledge management, distributed software development, social media, user studies, online facilitation, cultural mediation – I can wear many hats, and I have served many masters. Maybe I’ll have to go on my own – although I’m scared to death right now by this idea of total independence.
I am still involved in paper writing, I am the co-editor of a special issue of IST, and so on, and so forth. Does it make sense to keep working on these if they don’t mean a thing when it comes to employability? I don’t know. All I know is that my heart is still there, no matter how hard writing seems at times. And that I have a whole lot of goodies in my bag that I didn’t have the time to share until now.
Last year on 
Suw Charman-Anderson(
