The 30-second summary: Examine how metaphors and game design of World of Warcraft motivate people to learn and to work, with an eye to transferring motivation, social knowledge building, and persistence to online higher education practices, like community building for lifelong learning.

Click the “More” link below to continue reading the online version of the proposal and progress report. A downloadable PDF version is also available.

What’s Gone Before

“Those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, 1905 (2005)

I started my part-time D.Phil in 1996 with Ben du Boulay as my supervisor working on something that was a combination of information retrieval and natural language processing. For various reasons—health, job, personal reasons, etc—I intermitted a lot. As my last intermission period was expiring, I put a great deal of thought into whether I wanted to continue or not. I was loathe to completely give up everything, so I decided to continue doing a Ph.D. but unite my three lifelong interests into something more related to what I actually do: educational technology. I therefore started a new D.Phil with Dr. Judith Good in October of 2009 within my original period of registration.

Research Questions

What do I hope to discover?

There are three primary initial research questions:

1. How is the “Robert and Susan” metaphor applicable to World of Warcraft and what does that gain us in understanding how to successfully encourage lifelong learning and build communities of learning?
2. How does the social structure in-game and out of game resemble a community of practice? How much of a role does social knowing play in the development of expertise and the dissemination of learning? What features would it be useful to adopt when designing learning communities?
3. What encourages game players to persist in learning and working, although many tasks are boring and repetitive, and to continue improving long past their current goal? How does this relate to Hagel and Brown’s (2009) “lessons”?

Roberts and Susans

Hello, my name is Susan. I am bright and highly motivated. I love to learn and to think about things. Robert is taking endless lecture notes until he gets his degree. Robert is very different than me.

The nature of universities and the characteristics of their students are changing. Students no longer arrive on the university’s doorstep intrinsically motivated to learn regardless of the teaching method employed. Tim Clydesdale, sociology professor at the College of New Jersey, describes it this way:

So this… produces a rather odd kind of student — one who appears polite and dutiful but who cares little about the course work, the larger questions it raises, or the value of living an examined life. And it produces such students in overwhelming abundance.
(Clydesdale, 2009)

Clydesdale is giving an example of a “Robert” student, from Biggs and Tang’s “Robert and Susan” student prototypes in higher education (Biggs and Tang, 2007 p.9). Susan learns in a deep way using higher order thinking skills, like theorizing, reflecting, and generating. Robert learns in a surface way using skills at a much lower cognitive level, like note-taking and memorization; he is happy do the minimum to get by. Michael Wesch comments in his recent Britannica blog essay that “…the unquestioned assumption [is] that ‘getting by’ is the name of the game” for students (Wesch, 2008), so he too has noticed the increase in the number of “Roberts”. The difference in learning approaches is expressed eloquently by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott:

There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.
(quoted in Fish, 2009)

What Is Social Learning & Social Knowing

“We participate; therefore we are.” (Brown and Adler, 2008)

What exactly constitutes education or learning? As an educator with a computer science background, I contend that learning is different than knowledge or facts in the same way that data differs from information. Without a context, a fact is just a piece of data. It is only information or learning when it can be applied to something. Biggs and Tang (2007, p.21) are saying something similar, when they say, “The acquisition of information in itself does not bring about [effective learning changes], but the way we structure that information and think with it does.” They go on to say “education is about conceptual change, not just the acquisition of information.”

How do we elicit this conceptual change? How do we elicit this conceptual change? Biggs and Tang enumerate four precursors. The most interesting is the fourth: “[S]tudents work collaboratively and in dialogue with others, both peers and teachers.” (2008) call this “social learning” and explain that “our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions.” This fits in nicely with David Weinberger’s ideas about social knowing:

What you learn isn’t prefiltered and approved, sitting on a shelf, waiting to be consumed… Now we can see for ourselves that knowledge isn’t in our heads: It is between us. It emerges from public and social thought and it stays there, because social knowing, like the global conversations that give rise to it, is never finished.
Weinberger, 2007 p.146-147

Lifelong learning, like Weinberger’s social knowing, is never finished. It continues on outside the four walls of the classroom. It is on Twitter. It is on Facebook. It is in the student’s workplace. It is in the student’s home. It arises in conversations with the student’s friends and it arises in play. The social component, previously undervalued, is key.

Brown describes some research by Richard J. Light where Light discovered that the ability of students to form study groups was one of the strongest determinants of students’ success; it was more important than the instructors’ teaching styles (Light (2001) cited in Brown and Adler, 2008). Brown says this shifts our attention from the subject content to the learning activities and human interactions around them, which, while agreeing with Biggs, goes further by suggesting the instructor themselves is of lesser importance. Susan and Robert, becoming social, taking turns being teachers and learners together, is a powerful combination for deep learning.

World of Warcraft

The gamer’s mindset—the fact that they are learning in a totally new way—means they’ll treat the world as a place for creation, not just for consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.” (Wright, 2006)

World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiple online role playing game (MMORPG) in the dungeons and dragons genre, is the most successful personal computer game ever released. As of 2008, it had more than 10 million active subscribers worldwide, amounting to 62.2% of the online gaming market (Yee, 2005).

Although it is a game, WoW, its communities, and its cultural artefacts share a number of commonalities with lifelong learning in online higher education. The first is that both have Roberts and Susans. The second is that both have structures that support ad-hoc groups where alliances shift, merge, and collapse dynamically as people come and go. The third is that both encourage the formation of communities of practice through their design and purposes (Wenger, 1999). Finally, they both, with varying degrees of success, encourage learning and collaboration that results in an ongoing learning journey continuing past the current goal.

Hagel and Brown (2009) enumerate eight “lessons” that businesses hoping to get their employees to collaborate, create, and innovate should draw from World of Warcraft:

1. Reduce barriers to entry and to advance in initial stages
2. Provide rich performance metrics
3. Keep raising the bar
4. Remember to account for and use intrinsic motivations
5. Provide opportunities to develop shared knowledge not easily shared but don’t forget broader knowledge exchange
6. Create opportunities for teams to self-organize around challenging goals
7. Encourage frequent performance feedback
8. Create an environment that rewards new dispositions

These lessons are just as applicable in fostering collaborative learning in online education and lifelong learning as in business, perhaps even more so. My mission is to discover how it applies.

Major Activities Undertaken

Making connections, forging links, firing neurons.

It was a fairly busy period. I attended a number of seminars, workshops and conferences, either in person or virtually (see Table 1). Some presentations were previously recorded.

Although I have been teaching computing science and technology in higher education for over 14 years, I do not have a background or formal training in education. I decided to alleviate that in September by registering for H812: The Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice at The Open University, a 60-point course in their online distance education masters program. Upon completion, I will have my Higher Education Academy accreditation for teaching in HE. Prior to that point, I had already agreed to teach H810: Accessibility Online Learning: Supporting Disabled Students, another course in the online distance education program. It was, in fact, applying for a teaching post for this course that led me to decide to rekindle my Ph.D. by changing to something I already do: educational technology.

Teaching a pilot course is always a lot of work, especially one where you have a background in half the content—technology—but not necessarily in the other half—educational pedagogy. I spent quite a lot of time in the fall working through the course on my own, just ahead of my students. I have also been dipping into the material for another brand new course: H800: Technology-Enhanced Learning: Practices and Debates, a new course that just started this year, co-authored by Gráinne Conole. What all these courses have in common is exposure to different ideas in educational technology and pedagogy. From the accessibility and e-learning course, I picked up ideas about Wenger’s communities of practice, which I have incorporated into my thinking. From H800, I have been exploring ideas about digital natives and “the Google Generation”. From H809: Practice-Based Research in Educational Technology, I’ve acquired some guided readings on ethnography as a research method, which I suspect is one of the types of study I need to use for studying behaviour within World of Warcraft.

It is the course I am actually taking that has proven the most useful, though, as it has a guided introduction to many pedagogical theories, especially constructive alignment from Biggs & Tang (Brown & Adler, 2008). That material was directly usable in the book chapter proposal I submitted earlier this year, the bulk of which is now incorporated into this document.

For the second assignment, I did some analysis on a course I chair, examining how outcomes-based learning and teaching, a kind of constructive alignment, has not been properly employed in the course design and how that has resulted in students failing to persist and pass the course. That piece of research served as the basis for my recent “Making Connections” conference presentation. That assignment also included ideas about Robert and Susan and the increase in the number of Roberts, as well as the current nature and purpose of universities. Building on that analysis and inspired by Constance Steinkuehler’s work on scientific literacy practices in World of Warcraft communities, I developed an activity intended to improve academic literacy practices in my Open Source third-year students, and then evaluated the effect on demonstrated practices in their course practices; I presented some of those findings during my “Making Connections” talk, The Nutcracker Effect.

That Open Source course I chaired this year has fed into my thinking in other ways too as a direct result of my ongoing fascination with the ideas of John Seely Brown. In a keynote speech I watched, he was comparing evaluating the influence of “tinkering” on Open Source and how that ties into learning. One of my students innocently made a comment about how Open Source is very similar to learning too. It got me thinking about how tinkering is directly applicable to problem-based learning as well as deep learning, both topics related to activities I see taking place in World of Warcraft and ones I want to encourage in communities of practice for learning.

I do not spend time looking for relevant course materials. In actuality, useful material from other courses came to my attention because of people in my online personal learning networks with whom I interact via Twitter and Plurk primarily. That includes people like Gráinne Conole (OU), Martin Weller (OU), George Siemens (Manitoba), Bryan Alexander (NITLE), Howard Rheingold (Stanford), Steve Wheeler (Plymouth), Tony Hirst (OU), and Alan Cann (Leicester). I am also connected and in regular contact with a number of other Ph.D. students and researchers around the world, both in e-learning and games research.

Not all of the seminars and workshops I attended were immediately obviously applicable, although people I have met at them have fed into my work, like K. Faith’s Lawrence’s and her Ph.D. work on fan fiction and artifact production in LiveJournal communities (2008); or practices that encourage motivation and persistence from an Open University staff workshop. Ben du Boulay’s motivation reading group was also very helpful by picking out important theory papers from psychology and cognitive science in motivation, a topic I did not initially realize was of interest until I started regularly attending those meetings. Now motivation is a key element of what I want to investigate.

Progression and the Future

There’s much left to explore.

My immediate plan is to complete a literature review and formal thesis proposal by the end of October. That means a summer spent reading. I have some good starting points, both in e-learning, motivation, and game-related to learning areas, including Constance Steinkuehler’s World of Warcraft literacy research and Bonnie Nardi’s work. There is also more to read on John Seely Brown’s ideas on information spaces, learning, and tinkering. I feel I am in a good position to start and make good progress on that without getting too lost. I also can draw upon the advice and recommendations of others in my personal learning network, if need be.

I am anticipating at least three studies to complete my Ph.D. work. The first is a beta study to test out the research and data methodology for a larger-scale study in World of Warcraft. At this point, it is not clear whether the study will be an ethnographic study occurring in World of Warcraft directly or some other kind of research, like discourse analysis, on related artifacts like forums and web sites. That will be more evident after the thesis proposal has been written and I have a clearer idea of what specific questions I want the study to answer, perhaps after consultation with Dr. Ruth Woodfield from Sociology. However, I do know that I am looking for metaphors and systems for motivation and persistence that can be transported into an e-learning communities of practice environment. The second study would be the actual large-scale study intended to gather sufficient data to answer the posed questions.

The third study would take the hypothesis of motivation and persistence gained from the World of Warcraft studies and apply it to a subject online student population for positive improvements. I hope to facilitate something through my current connections at the Open University. This would be a good route as the student population in my undergraduate courses are quite large and could be divided into control and experimental groups. If an OU group is not possible, using a smaller group from Dr. Good’s online e-learning cohort might work. I am in the process of sounding out various people already at the Open University as to how I would go about obtaining permission to do that.

I am also actively looking for small JISC grant projects in related areas that I can apply for on my own. Dr. Tony Hirst (OU) has apparently figured out a way by which universities can be bypassed when applying for JISC funds, thus avoiding the universities annexing up to half for fixed costs out of an already small amount. He has already done this with one of his own projects (Winn, 2009), but I will admit he is in a better position than I am to pull it off. Still, it does not hurt to look and to try.

In addition to obtaining funding, another benefit of research grants is that they expect output, usually in the form of published papers or other documents. That would tie nicely into my plans to do a thesis comprised of a collection of papers (published or unpublished) as already permitted in Psychology at Sussex. With my attention deficit disorder, I feel this approach will be a lot easier for me to manage, as individual papers are self-contained and smaller units. My plan is to publish several papers. The initial research questions I have already could form at least one and the two major studies another two. The argument would be that published papers have already undergone some sort of peer review and, by publication, obtained far wider public exposure than most Ph.D. theses ever get. Dr. Good and Dr. Whitby are responsible for making this possible (or attempting to do so) on the departmental side. I would like to see the option available to everyone, but I am confident I should be able to get it as a reasonable accommodation for my disability.

My intention is to complete by spring of 2011. I will include a tentative timeline of things to be done and when in my thesis proposal at the end of October. In order to complete in 2011, I will need to make a change to my registration status as I am officially out of time in January 2010. I spoke to the postgraduate advisor at the beginning of the year. She believed the department would work with me to either restart my registration period or extend my current one. I am in the process of trying to get that sorted prior to the decommissioning of the school later this summer.

References

Biggs, J. & Tang, C. (2007) Teaching for Quality Learning at University, 3rd edition, Maidenhead, UK, Open University Press.

Blandeburgo, B. (2009)> ‘Activision “WoWs,” But Where’s Wireless?’, The Game Trade Journal, blog entry posted March 4, 2009. Available from: http://www.gametradejournal.com/2009/03/activision-wows-but-wheres-wireless.html (Accessed March 9, 2009).

Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008) ‘Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0’ Educause Review, 43 (1), [online] Available from: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823 (Accessed August 22, 2008).

Churches, A. (2008) Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy, [online] PDF. Available from: http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom’s%20Digital%20Taxonomy (Accessed January 20, 2009).

Clydesdale, T. (2009) ‘Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology’, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2009, [online]. Available from: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i20/20b00701.htm (Accessed January 23, 2009).

Fish, S. (2009) ‘Think Again’, The New York Times, blog entry posted January 18, 2009. Available from: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/ (Accessed January 22, 2009).

Hagel, J. & Seely, J.S. (2009) ‘How World of Warcraft Promotes Innovation’ Business Week Online, January 14 [online] Available from: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2009/id20090114_362962.htm (Accessed January 19, 2009).

Krathwohl, D.R. (2002) ‘A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview’ Theory into Practice, 41 (4), [online] Available from: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2 (Accessed January 12, 2009).

Lawrence, K.F. (2008) The Web of Community Trust – Amateur Fiction Online: A Case Study in Community Focused Design for the Semantic Web. Ph.D. thesis, University of Southampton.

Weinberger, D. (2007) Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, New York, USA, Holt Paperbacks.

Santayana, G. (2005) The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress, Project Gutenberg, [online] Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15000/15000-h/15000-h.htm

Wenger, E. (1999) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.

Wesch, M. (2008) ‘A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do)’, Britannica.com, blog entry posted October 21, 2008. Available from: http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/10/a-vision-of-students-today-what-teachers-must-do/ (Accessed October 21, 2008).

Winn, J. (2009) ‘JISCPress: Developing a Community Platform for the JISC Funding Process’, The Learning Lab, blog entry posted June 5, 2009. Available from: http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/06/05/jiscpress-developing-a-community-platform-for-the-jisc-funding-process/ (Accessed June 5, 2009).

Wright, W. (2006) ‘Dream Machines’, Wired, 14.04

Woodcock, B.S. (2008a) MMOGCHART.Com, [online]. Available from: http://www.mmogchart.com/ (Accessed March 8, 2009).

Woodcock, B.S. (2008b) An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth: Version 23.0, [online]. Available from: http://www.mmogchart.com/analysis-and-conclusions/ (Accessed March 8, 2009).

Yee, N. (2004) Player Demographics, [online] The Daedalus Project. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/gateway_demographics.html (Accessed March 9, 2009).

Yee, N. (2005) ‘WoW Basic Demographics’, The Daedalus Project, blog entry posted July 28, 2005. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001365.php (Accessed March 9, 2009).

Downloadable Resources:
-A4 PDF Version of Levelling Lifelong Learning: Progress Report 2008/2009 (612 KB)

Anal1a, in terms of clumping, doesn’t look very good, at least not anymore. That was not previously the case, but I had revised my algorithm to make it symmetrical as per the insructions of a computing statistician here at the University of Sussex. He claimed that the Procrustes Rotation needed symmetric data and my nonsymmetric data, where Doc1 vs Doc2 didn’t have the same similarity as Doc2 vs Doc1, was not going to work. That change has, I believe, altered the efficacy of the algorithm and things are no longer clumped together as promisingly as they were previously. The clumps should be a two- or three-letter short code followed by a digit. Therefore, ac1 and ac2 belong together. Pl1, pl2, and pl3 belong together, and so on. The clumping is significantly better in the already symmetric cosine normalization algorithm (anal2a). The two speech processing documents are clumped together (sp1 and sp2), all of the Power PC and G4 documents are together (pp1, pp2, g4c), and the three Pine Lake tornado stories are clumped far away from everything else (which is all computer-related) and together on their own. Excellent clumping, in fact. So the hypernym hypothesis looks like, on these short documents, it is working well with cosine normalization.

Here’s the final bit of loveliness: comparing one MDS cluster diagram against another. MDS output is mapped to the vector space independently. That is, the same data will produce the same visualization or mapping, but different data is mapped to a different vector space, so you cannot just compare one MDS matrix to another directly. That is where Procrustes Rotation comes in. It applies a series of intelligent matrix transformations, trying to map the second vector matrix onto the source vector matrix. As a side benefit, essential in my case, it always provides a fitness measure to tell you how close the two were. on a scale of 0 to 1. So these two, as you can see (see above image), even after the transformations, were not that close together. As it happens, though, this is not particularly useful information to know. I am currently more interested in assessing how close the two algorithms are to human classifiers.

This recent success gave us plenty to discuss, particularly with respect to metric and non-metric data. The MDS community calls source data metric when the similarity or dissimilarity data is symmetric. That is, the value at row 2, column 1 is the same as the value at row 1, column 2. Classical multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) is designed to only work with metric data. SPSS includes the ALSCAL and PROXSCAL MDS algorithms which can work with non-metric data, but MATLAB’s classical MDS does not because it treats things as Eucledean distances–another reason why I had to alter the Anal1a algorithm. The primary reason I now had metric data for everything, however, was because the computing statistician had told me I needed it for the Procrustes. Hawever, as we were examining my output, it occurred to me that Procrustes did not really care if the data was symmetric, so long as the dimensions of the data were the same (the same number of rows and columns). Which leads us to question whether the application of the method is statistically sensible or not. To that end, I need to track down a new computing statistician and perhaps a mathematician and discuss the process with them. My original computing statistician has retired.

Earlier I said that comparing one machine to another, to see how they fit is not useful information, but what would be interesting is to prepare a matrix of all the possible combinations of human judgements, cosine normalization, and weird formula:

cosine   wrd form.   human
cosine (anal2a)		x
weird formula (anal1a)           x
human                                        x

So that is my task for my next meeting (on the 16th of June). Before then, I need to figure out how to get MATLAB to take multiple tables as data. In SPSS, I could paste in several tables (representing all of the people’s individual data, for example) and it would work with that. That is necessary in order to aggregate the peopel to do the comparison. Onward ho, then! Progress at last!

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David L. Jones had a series of MATLAB pointers which included links to toolboxes for non-metric multidimensional scaling. The latter toolkit, developed by Mark Steyvers, doesn’t come with any documentation and includes some DLLs, so I wonder if only works in Windows somehow? I couldn’t find any other reference to it on the web.
I was waiting for the Mac support person to come install a new version of MATLAB for me. The demo installation and toolkits I installed last fall have long since expired. I’m also still waiting to hear back from the UNIX software support people in the department about acquiring one of the pool licenses for use with a copy of MatLab on my Macintosh off campus. Latish on in the day, I found the Mac support person and acquired a valid license file. It didn’t work right off the bat. I had to edit the file and change the linefeeds from Macintosh ones to UNIX ones. After that, it worked great and it looks fantastic. So I should be able to start doing something with that soon. It also works from home, surprisingly enough, as long as I have an Internet connection, so that will be quite convenient. Hurrah! I am moving ahead.

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Despite my pitiful progress on the items on my list, I hadn’t been completely idle. I was able to report that I had been investing time in helping coordinate and set-up the new FirstClass intranet to be used by the IDEAs Lab. I have also been providing some advice to Julie Coultas on creating a web-site specification for her EduServ project. These activities do not directly further my Ph.D. work, but Thufir pointed out that they serve to help relieve the intrinsic isolation of my position in the group, as I am not working on a project with others and my work is not very directly related to most of the Lab’s projects. I must be careful, however, not to spend the majority of my time on Lab-related work.
On my list of things still to do is to sort out my MATLAB problems. Prior to leaving for Canada last October, I was in correspondence with Dr. Tom Browne, who is responsible for academic license management here at the University of Sussex. While the software can be run directly on campus from various UNIX boxes, copying and pasting data/diagrams between the UNIX machine and the Mac isn’t particular convenient. Sussex maintains a pool of MATLAB licenses. Purchasing individual licenses and toolkits is very expensive, so I have been trying to acquire the use of a license for use on my Macintosh. I need to follow up and see what the status of this last was.
One of the things Thufir is concerned about is that I have been basically stuck at the same point of my Ph.D. for several years now. Of course, that has not been helped by my lengthy absences due to work and my poor health over the past few years. It also has not been helped by the fact that the analysis I need to do is quite tricky and not understood by many people. Thufir admitted that the statistics was beyond him. Imagine a supervisor not knowing everything, but he was happy to admit he’s not the end-all, be-all for everything. He tried forwarding me to various people and I spent ages asking people for advice and help all over the Internet and locally before I chanced across something on my own. The other factor that has been impeding the analysis is that statistics is not my strong point. I do not enjoy doing this analysis, yet it is hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles. He worries the analysis tarpit is making my Ph.D. a chore and leading to anxiety and a constant circling without any substantial progress. He is looking for ways to help me break the “logjam.” He suggested two things. One thing was to look for something “fun” that I could start work on now, which might help rekindle my enthusiasm for my project. Another related idea is to see if there is something I can do which does not hinge upon the results of the analysis, perhaps, for example, some of the writing. I promised to look at that as I continue my work on updating my timeline.
Finally, we discussed my general health and wellbeing. I confessed to being tired, after a hard week the last time he saw me of preparing for a big client demo and then following it up the week after with energy-intensive marking. He wondered if I could afford to not do the work at the Open University. The financials do not allow that at the present time. Almost half of what my company paid me (pre-tax!) went out as rent here in England. Without the OU income, I would have been in the hole. Nevertheless, I did discuss with him my idea of working more at the OU, maybe up to three days a week and none for my own company. I would probably make more money, be less stressed, and have more time to spend on my Ph.D. Doing so, particularly without planning and warning, would place my own company in a precarious position, so I will need to muddle along as best as possible for the moment.
Next meeting is April 2nd at 16:30.
Task list:
- Resurrect and review Ph.D. plan.
- Sort out MATLAB issues
- Work on CSR version of my paper so that I can submit it for publication and send it off to my external advisor

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Planning:
I started off the day by trying to set myself up a new research calendar of days at the University. The calendar left on the door only went until October and, of course, none of those dates were ever used. I consulted with Stephen and arranged to have 5-7 days a calendar month for my research. In most months, 5 of the days are in a row with the other days being made up of Fridays about two weeks before and after the week-long period. I tried to take into account that we might be taking a week off in May to go walking in Scotland. The other days chosen are mostly Fridays because that’s the day we have our IDEAs Lab weekly meetings. One of the things I complained about at our last “away day” was feeling isolated. If I attend meetings, then I won’t be so isolated. The proposed calendar can been using iCal at webcal://ical.mac.com/eingang/Ph.D..ics or on the web at http://ical.mac.com/eingang/Ph.D..
I’ll need to take the proposed dates and map them onto my research plan timeline. Oh boy, another battle with Fast Track Schedule. Is it so much to ask for that a piece of software allow you to edit some things and then have things dependent on that automatically update? Apparently it is, because it’s a pain in the butt to do, but there isn’t a lot of choice of project scheduling software available for the Mac. If somebody knows of something better, please do let me know.
Infrastructure Changes:
After 6 months away, the wireless roaming network is finally live across the campus, but you can’t print from it. Apparently, it was mostly designed with students in mind and students (undergraduates) don’t have access to free printing. I’m hoping they come up with a cunning plan, because it’s kind of weird to not be able to see any of the printers on the network and I can’t, apparently, print to them by IP (although I don’t know why).
While my office was still intact, I needed only to shove some stuff aside, the printers around the building have changed. I had to do all the “Adding” of printers, where I discovered that Mac OS X’s (10.3.2) discovery of printers via AppleTalk is somewhat slow. It seems to take a bit of time to “sync” up when you first connect. In theory, I should now be able to print seamlessly, while plugged in via ethernet, to either printers on the COGS research network or on the teaching network. The teaching network printer is a lot closer, being only a few doors down. The rest of the printers are on different floors.
I had Christian give me a copy of EndNote 7 for the Macintosh. I had requested a license from the lab when they were ordering licenses for themselves. I’ve previously always bought and paid for my own academic license. Version 5 of EndNote, which only runs under Classic, worked with text files, other word processors, and FrameMaker MIF files. As I typeset all of my papers in FrameMaker, this was very convenient. Version 6 dropped that and only supported typing papers into Microsoft Word. At least this version allows you to use something other than Microsoft Word, but it’s still RTF, which isn’t as convenient for me. If I want to make changes, I have to update the FrameMaker file, produce an RTF document, parse that to insert the references, and then print the RTF file. We’ll see how that works. When you change formats, some formatting always gets lost, so I am not completely hopeful.
Intermission:
I picked up a new photocopier card from the postgraduate secretary. The regular school secretaries wanted me to have a research grant to apply the charge to, but I was pretty sure I was entitled to a quota of copying per year as a research student, as indeed I am. I also asked her about the whole intermission process as my supervisor wants me to intermit. Apparently, I can only intermit entire terms, so I need to intermit for the fall and spring terms. I guess that makes any time I spent in March bonus time, assuming I’m granted intermission. She says she doesn’t know of any limits for postgraduates on intermitting, which is good, because I’m apparently going for some kind of record. I also don’t need to write another letter. If my supervisor e-mails her, she’ll prepare the necessary paperwork and all will likely be well. I e-mailed my supervisor and suggested he do so to get the ball rolling. I’ll check back on that in a few weeks.
FirstClass:
The IDEAs Lab has just teamed up with the new Creative Systems group to purchase a FirstClass server and some client licenses. The intention is to create a shared space for the IDEAs group people to be able to collaborate/discuss papers, have shared resource calendars, and update the IDEAs web site automatically with content from FirstClass. I was just discussing this with my supervisor at today’s meeting. As I was searching for some BluTak in our resources room, a contingent of people came excitedly down the hallway looking for me. They knew that I was very familiar with a href=”http://www.centrinity.com/” title=”FirstClass from Centrinity”>FirstClass from my work at the Open University and that I was also a technical web person. They want me to liaise with the FirstClass configuration person, so I’ve added that to my list of tasks to undertake in the next week.
iPod Study:
Michael Bull is doing a study on the use of iPods. Siufai saw a Wired article about Michael Bull and how he’s looking for female inverviewees. Imagine my surprise to discover that he’s at the University of Sussex too. Actually, I’d read an article in the New York Times (online) edition a week or so ago entitled The World at Ear’s Length, all about how people completely shut out the world by using iPods in New York. That article also mentioned Michael Bull. Anyway, I had contacted him about being interviewed, being an iPod junkie, and had arranged to meet him this morning. I arrived at the appointed time, waited twenty minutes, and there was no sign of him. I left a note and followed up with an e-mail, but I haven’t heard back from him.
So, there’s lot to do, but time has run out for today. I need to wrap up, file things away, and head for home until the next day.

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Nevertheless, I still had to confess that I basically had not accomplished anything since our previous meeting on the 23rd of September and that our librarian was hounding me to submit my revised paper as I promised her I was going to publish it as a Computer Science Report last year. She now has a gap in her numbering and wants me to cough up the goods. My supervisor thought that would be a good place to start in getting my mind back into my research. Revision of that paper and publication of it is also what I have been waiting on before seeking assistance from an external advisor, so it all ties together nicely.
He also thought I should make sure that I am represented in the upcoming annual HCT publication, with a picture and a description of my project. As that was already on my list of things to do, that is not a big deal. I believe I can even recycle previous material. I showed him my to-do list and my latest calendar for working on my Ph.D., which reminded him that I should unearth my research plan and update it for past progress and new timelines. I am not looking forward to that, but it is good to have a timeline. My new proposed timetable gives me between 5 to 7 research days at the University a month.
I mentioned, almost in passing, that I will be winning a national award for excellence in teaching from the Open University. He was extremely pleased and suggested that I drop a note to the editors of the Bulletin, a weekly newsletter here at the University, as that’s the kind of tidbit they’d likely want to publish. That also led into a discussion of what I am doing at the Open University and my usage of FirstClass there. Our Lab is getting a FirstClass conferencing system for sharing resources and updating web pages. I wasn’t sure how well it would work for updating web pages automatically, as I have not seen FirstClass really used for that, beyond shared calendars, but I think it’s a neat experiment.
Finally, I told him that I’d actually put together a research blog which was currently very short on content and unindexed by Google, but it was a good place to start my efforts in building myself a community. It’s another positive step forward.
At the end of the meeting, we closed, as usual, by selecting a new meeting date. Next meeting is a half hour squeezed inbetween other appointments on Tuesday, the 16th of March, at 16:15.
Task List:
- Send another letter to postgraduate dean about extending intermission from October to end of February.
- Send HCT Info to Rose’s secretary for inclusion in annual publication.
- Resurrect and review timelines for my research plan.
- Send note to A.F. of the bulletin about winning teaching award at the Open University.
- Review the paper for submission to the library.
- Send e-mail to F.S. saying I’m alive and include revised version of paper.
- Review MATLAB application acquisition status.

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Everywhere I look now, the signs of the University’s decision to rearrange the school so that there no longer is a School of Cognitive and Computing Science are in obvious fruition. Even my building, previously known as COGs, is now just relegated to the not-so-glamorous Pevensey II. Printers have moved, the wireless network is finally launched to the public, and I cannot find the departmental support pages to save my life. Irrespective of the changes, it’s good to see that some things never change: Darren is still “almost done” his Ph.D., like he’s been for the last two years; and Rob is still pursuing his Ph.D. slowly but surely. I’m in good company, I figure.
I ran into Beate in the hallway and she seemed glad to see me. She’s also working part-time on her Ph.D., but she started several years after me. Nevertheless, I was quick to assure her that she would probably finish first. Shortly thereafter, I ran into Darren, too. He also seemed pleased I was back. It’s nice to be welcomed and assured that there was a slight bit of worry that I might have “slid in the depths of Brighton’s underbelly.” All in all, it’s good to be back.

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The MATLAB discussion led quite nicely into the progress. I was able to show him a graph and explain what I had been doing and my current problems. He’s going to look for info on MATLAB courses at the university and/or tutorials so I can get up to speed faster. He also reminded me that David Young is a MATLAB resource I might be able to tap.
He was quite pleased about my progress and thought I’d managed to get quite a bit done, even if I hadn’t yet completely solved my analysis problem. At least I was getting somewhere.
Things To Do:
Clean up report and give to Ben before publishing as CSRP
Continue work on MATLAB
Read my Hypertext ’03 papers
Research what I was waiting for David and Ian to provide
Continue on with MATLAB licensing issues

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