fredag 5 juli 2013

Follow-up (spring 2013)


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Last year, I wrote a follow-up blog post that revisited, followed-up and clarified what had happened after I wrote about topics x, y and z in the blog. This is the second of two blog posts that follows up loose ends in blog posts I have written during the just-finished academic year (2012-2013). 

In this blog post I revisit the 45 or so blog posts that I published during the spring this year (January - June 2013). The previous blog post (published last week) treated the preceding period (August - December 2012). 

Apparently, a lot more happened during the spring compared to the autumn. That's because the autumn term was pretty much filled with teaching commitments, while the blog posts that I have written during the spring have been characterized by snapshots of ongoing and follow-upable research and writing projects.   

January
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I submitted an abstract for a paper, "Net literature in China and the professionalization of authors" to the conference "MASH 2013: Making and sharing. A conference on audience creativity". It was accepted, but my co-author, Chinese master's student Zi Yang could not go to the conference due to visa and work permit complications. I instead planned to go the conference (held right now, this very week in Maastricht, The Netherlands), but it didn't work out in the end. While the actual paper is currently only half-written, my hope is to be able to finish the paper and submit it somewhere later (preferably to a peer-reviewed journal). 

Me and Elina Eriksson submitted an abstract, "'It's not fair!' Making students engage in sustainability" to the 6th international conference on Engineering Education in Sustainable Development (EESD 2013). Our paper was accepted to the conference and we have since written a 10-page paper. What remains to do is to fix a few minor things based on the feedback we got and to resubmit the final version - as well as to attend the conference in England in the end of September and present the paper.  

I was also part of a team that submitted another abstract to that same conference, "Engineers of the future: Using scenarios methods in sustainable development education" together with Josefin Wangel, Mattias Höjer and Örjan Svane (I'm the third author). People are busy and that paper definitely had some birth pains. Has it not been for a generously extended deadline, the final paper would never have been written. 

I also submitted a position paper, "HCI in a world of limitations: Addressing the social resilience of computing", to a pre-conference workshop on "Post-sustainability" at the huge annual CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) conference. I wrote the paper together with Åke Walldius and Elina Eriksson and I'm very happy about the paper. The workshop was a great opportunity to meet some of the people in the HCI-and-sustainability-community. The paper itself merits an extension, a work-over and a publication in a "real" (peer-reviewed) publication but I don't know which, what and where for the moment. 

Back in January I attended the Center for Sustainable Communications (CESC) annual workshop. I've been to some of the previous annual workshops, but then as a more peripheral player. This workshop can perhaps be seen as the symbolic starting point for a closer affiliation between me and CESC that has developed during this academic year. Beyond being the School of Computer Science and Communication representative in the CESC steering committee/management team, I have also worked 20% in one of the CESC research project since the beginning of the year. I've written about that research project, "Scenarios and impacts of the information society", in other blog posts during the spring (here in February and here in June)

February
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I wrote a looong blog post in the beginning of February about my recent career as an activist ("I'm an activist!") and about the power of social media tools (Facebook, Google docs) to lower the threshold for bottom-up organization. And, we won our struggle. Well, at least us parents with children who will start school after the summer "won" since they will extend the current school with (temporary) barracks to cater for the 100 children who are born 2007 (like my youngest son). That is a one-time solution though and the situation for children born 2008 and later still looks grim or at least uncertain. The parents' struggle to find a solutions for the coming years goes on, but I'm not very active in that struggle any longer.

I submitted an abstract, "Being a good sport? On the sportification of professional practices" to the 18th annual Congress of the European College of Sport Science (ECSS) conference to be held in Spain this summer. This was the first tangible outcome of my cooperation with ph.d. student Daniel Svensson. While our paper was accepted for presentation, it was also demoted from a long to a short presentation, and we chose to withdraw it. It just didn't make sense to travel all the way to Spain in order to talk for five minutes!

In my regular "Books I've read recently" blog posts, in February I started to publish also pictures of the book covers (rather than only text and more text). The fact that we bought a new printer/scanner definitely had something to do with this decision and it makes a huge difference. If I feel ambitious and have the time and the energy, I might make an attempt to scan in the covers also of books I read last year and update previously published blog posts. Maybe.

March
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Only two months into the new year did I feel secure enough to write a blog post about my new year's promises. Have I been able to live up to these two promises? One promise was to make it a regular habit to read scientific articles. I have kept that promise but have blogged about "articles I've read" only infrequently. The other promise was to spend half an hour each day sorting papers and things in my office. I haven't done that for months. The whole thing broke down, or was quickly out-competed by urgent writing projects (see above). I hope to be able to pick up the habit again as my office is still a mess and it is thus still very much needed.

Me and Daniel Svensson (see February above) submitted another abstract, "From movement to sports and to sports without movements" to a cultural studies conference (ACSIS). It was accepted, we wrote up the paper later during the spring and changed the title to "21st century sports: Movements without movements". Although the paper is not finished, what we've written is very good and we plan to enhance it and submit it to a journal in the autumn. 

I wrote yet another paper, this time together with Jorge Zapico, Hannes Ebner and Elina Eriksson (I was the second author). The paper is called "Hacking sustainability: Broadening participation through Green Hackathons" and the final, revised version was presented at a pre-conference workshop at the Fourth International Symposium on End-User Development. The workshop was called "EUD for supporting sustainability in maker communities" and first author Jorge went to Copenhagen to attend the workshop and present the paper. We hope to later be able to extend the paper for a suitable (journal/peer-reviewed) publication.

My blog post on "Students' cognitive inability" was my most-read blog post ever, primarily because high-volume blog linked to it. I even wrote a blog post about the resulting visitor flood.

April
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I wrote about the game Carbonopoly in April and things are right on track. We will use Carbonopoly in our course on Sustainability and Media Technology right after the summer. The translated and generally-updated game will be printed and delivered in mid-August - a few before the course starts. I will for sure get back with more info after we have had our three Carbonopoly sessions in the course, i.e. in mid-September. 

In mid-April, I wrote about a lunch talk I listened to by Student Competitions co-founder Gustav Borgefalk. I visited and presented myself at their office in the beginning of May and came back later in May conducted seven interview with the four co-founders and some other people there. My intention was to write a blog post about my preliminary impressions and thoughts after having conducted those interviews, but haven't had time (yet). I might still do that as it would be interesting to document my "immediate impressions" - even if those impressions no longer are particularly immediate. 

Mine and Björn Hedin's procrastination project is (unsurprisingly) for the major part still on hold. I've been busy with other things during the spring (see above) and Björn needs to finish his ph.d. thesis before he takes on any new projects. We did however report off our project by way of a "pedagogical seminar" at the School of Computer Science and Communication and we also submitted an abstract to the 4th developmental conference for Swedish engineering educations (to be held in in Umeå in November). Just the other day we found out our contributions has been accepted. We will write Swedish-language a paper - our first that is based on this material - and the (preliminary) title is "Nu ska jag plugga! Jag ska bara färgsortera mina böcker först..."[I will study now! I just have to color-code my books first...].

May & June
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There is nothing much to say about the 15 blog posts I wrote in May and June. First they are pretty close in time so not much has happened since. Second there already are no less than eight links to May and June blog posts above, for example a comment above about an abstract (submitted in January) that has been complemented with a link to a May blog post about submitting the finished paper.


I'm now officially on vacation both from my job and from this blog. I will post very irregularly - if at all - during July. I will be back again in August when I get back to my job. 

Have a nice summer!
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