Well that was a shockingly long time since the last post. One thing and another have conspired to keep me from blogging without me really noticing I had stopped until I got a message yesterday from one of my former students asking after me because my blog was quiet.
Since I last posted in April, I have moved from a computer science department to a School of Education to become a professor of Digital Learning. You might think that as I professor I would have all the time in the world to blog, but not so. In fact my days are taken up with eating scones and playing tiddly winks. It is a culture shock in many ways. I have moved back to a giant and rich university, I work in the centre of town again and my colleagues are no longer eccentric computer scientists. My new colleagues do things like telling seminar speakers how much they enjoyed the talk instead of savaging them with obnoxious questions. Admittedly they then may impenetrable remarks about Foucalt, but I can overlook that. They tend to be respectful of one another and constructive during meetings as well, which is refreshing. My favourite two new words are "criticality" and "under-theorised". Not sure what they mean exactly, or what "sustainability" means with respect to education but I am sure I will find out one day.
What are professors meant to do all day? As far as I can see it is a bit like being a PhD student except the pay is better and you know how to do research already. I suspect it would be quite easy to get bogged down in doing Big Important Things but I am trying to avoid that because it would be a shame to waste the opportunity to immerse oneself in research. Here are some things I am working on:
- Co-editing a book on modern statistical methods for HCI with Maurits Kaptein (due in Sept this year). This is great - somehow we managed to convince a lot of very clever people to write chapters about how to escape from the curse of null hypothesis significance testing. It's got running examples with R code and everything. For those of you who followed my increasingly irritated tweets last year about our article on poor stats methods in HCI getting rejected from 3 HCI journals in a row, this is what we did next. We got a book contract with Springer and a host of respectable statisticians on our side and by golly we will take the HCI world by storm with our nerdiness. We'll fight 'em, one underpowered study at a time.
- Learning about realist evaluation and logic modelling from the wonderful Ruth Jepson and using these methods to make sense of the randomised controlled trial we ran on our exergame last year. I'll post more on realist evaluation shortly, but it in a nutshell it takes all the complicated real world messy bits you meet during socially useful HCI studies and gives them a big hug instead of ignoring them.
- Working with Quintin Cutts, Kate Farrell , Andrew Manches and others to map a progression of how computational thinking skills develop from early years up.
- Still developing and evaluating technology for children with BrainQuest (an exergame to enhance executive function and Critter Jam which is an exergame which does not make you any smarter but does make you tired)
And lots and lots of other things besides which I might write about one day.
for (int i =1; i < 100; i ++){
System.out.println("I will remember to blog more often");
}
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
But it is an attractive picture that you paint, which is nice. Yes, I find your observation on "impenetrable remarks about Foucalt" very descriptive of my own experience from time to time. And the comparisons between Professors and PhD students I feel clarifies a lot for me.
Of course, the trouble with blogging in this way is that your new colleagues hear all about the clever stuff that you know. So, about R, .....
Posted by: Hamacleod | February 06, 2015 at 07:36 AM