The Whole Story

Back in June & July when we visited Europe, Lotte and I started talking seriously about the idea of spending an extended stay there. We’d actually been talking about it since our previous trip when we visited Zurich and thought how fantastic it would be to live there. But this time we were talking about the practicalities rather than the dreams — if we wanted to make this happen, how would we do it exactly?

We figured out pretty quickly that the biggest hurdle would be for me to get a visa and a job. Lotte has excellent English and holds an EU passport, which makes everything pretty simple for her in many countries in Europe. It turns out that Switzerland is one of the most difficult places to move to in the world, and not even EU people can live and work there easily.

It didn’t take long for us to start thinking about the UK. It’s close to France, Holland and Sweden, and it has the distinct advantage of being a good place for an Australian to find work. It also happens to have a lot of universities.

When we got home, Lotte just asked me one day about where exactly I would like to live and work if I had my choice. The answer was obvious but I hadn’t really given it much thought until then. Cambridge. It’s about a year ago now that my supervisor was over in the UK and visited the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) at Cambridge. He came back with a lot of good things to say about it. The interesting thing is that they were clearly interested in what we are doing at Melbourne as well, because in some ways our work is complementary as well as overlapping. The background of CARET is as a research unit, whereas CDS (where I work now) is made up mostly of people involved in the production of multimedia.

More recently, apparently, CARET has started to turn its attention more to projects involving the development and delivery of materials for courses — the sort of thing we do here all the time. At the same time we are attempting to bring more of an applied research model to what we are doing here.

In one of those really fortuitous turns of events I just decided to do a search of jobs in the higher education and see what turned up. The second job ad I looked at was actually from CARET and the Faculty of Education at Cambridge. It was quite bizarre — these jobs don’t come up very often. The job description was a very close match to my background.

I applied in late August, and didn’t hear anything for about a month. I actually only found out that I was shortlisted last Monday, and the interview was on Wednesday night. Despite some technical problems (the videoconference didn’t go according to plan) I thought it went pretty well. I answered all the questions and seemed to get along well with the interviewers.

After the interview I had a strange deflated feeling — perhaps because I had hardly slept the night before with nervousness, but also because there was really nothing I could do after that point. I mentally prepared myself for the possibility that I might get the job, but I had also didn’t expect too much because I knew the other candidates would be strong.

On Friday night we got home late and got the news by email. It said that they had given the job I applied for to another candidate. Again I had that sinking feeling in my stomach, along with the sort of immediate acceptance that I had tried my best. But then I kept reading.

The next sentence said that they had been impressed with my interview and my background, and wanted to offer me a different, even better, position. I was absolutely stunned. Not only was I going to Cambridge, they were offering me a new position that they were creating just for me, and it would be 100% within CARET, which is exactly where I wanted to work. I had got even more than I’d asked for!

Lotte and I have been so excited since getting the news we have hardly had time to think about anything else. The position is for 12 months in the first instance. We’ll move to Cambridge in January. So if anyone knows of some good accommodation in or around Cambridge, let me know!

Cambridge!!

Well, this one is a biggie. We found out late last night that I’ve been offered a position at CARET at the University of Cambridge, starting in January. I don’t have time to tell the whole story right now but needless to say we are both incredibly excited and will be rushing to get everything in order before we leave. Wow!

Poor neglected blog

Okay, okay, so I haven’t been updating much lately. Well, at all. It’s just that I don’t have a lot to talk about. Well, there’s news, but for various reasons I’m not able to talk about it here yet. Maybe more soon.

I can say that I’ve been very busy lately. At the start of October I took over the coordinator role for my group and it’s meant quite a bit of extra work behind the scenes, on top of my normal project load. Some of it is boring, but some of it is quite interesting as well.

It’s hard to believe that we’re almost in November already and that MLX is only just around the corner. It’s a strange feeling not to have to worry about how the registrations are going, or to attend volunteer meetings at every spare moment.

The labyrinthitis continues, unfortunately, and on Monday I went in for an MRI, which was actually a much more greuling experience than I had imagined. Nothing at all like a CT Scan, which was pretty easy. The main difference is that the whole machine shudders and makes a huge racket, which makes you feel like you have your head inside a jet engine while it’s starting up. It’s very offputting.

I also wasn’t prepared for the strange feeling of the magnet sort of scanning around… it’s a very odd sensation and sort of made me think of weird science fiction brain probing experiments. The strangest feeling was my eyeballs sort of jiggling around as though they were being buffeted by an invisible force (which they probably were). I thought magnets only had an effect on metal! Perhaps it was just the vibrations of the machinery as it clunks around.

Whatever it was, I finished up with a king sized headache and my eyes were watering from movement. The funniest thing was they ask you to bring along a CD of your favourite music, which I did, but you can’t hear a bloody thing. First they shove huge earplugs in your ears, and then they turn up the volume so you can just hear it. But as soon as the scanning starts, you can’t hear anything else at all. I got up to find the medicos talking about what great dance music I’d chosen and smiling broadly, so at least someone was happy.

Interviews about to start

I’m gearing up to start interviews as soon as possible. The next stage is to contact the students with the Plain Language Statement and a copy of the consent form. I’m feeling confident after spending quite a bit of time observing the class and getting to know the students. They appear to be keen to participate and all signed up when I passed around the pen and paper!

Here’s a revised version of the interview questions, and attached to this post is the revised Plain Language Statement.

My notes from the two classroom visits are here*:

Notes from The Campaign Press Conference 7 October

Field Notes: SPC 9 September

And here are some of the notes on the Specification document for The Campaign:

Campaign Specification

* This post was originally made to my thesis work log. Links to pages on eroleplay.net are password protected.

Horoscope time

At a meeting at work today one person was talking about horoscopes, and as a result mine was read aloud.

Libra
The prevailing influence brings a strong masculine energy into the day and may increase your sexual appetite. Now that’s not a bad thing, so plan a bit of fun tonight. But through the day you shouldn’t flirt or that may be taken the wrong way! Keep your energy firmly focussed on achieving your goals.

Now, when they got to the part in bold of course everyone was in hysterics. I started to turn a nice shade of bright pink and everyone wanted to know what starsign Lotte was. Naturally the next thing that was read out was hers:

Virgo
Happy Birthday Virgo: This should be the perfect day to attain a goal, make a dream come true or fulfil an ambition. All things can be realised when you take a stand, be courageous and work for your own benefit. This is not a hostile thing; you just want to know you’ve done it alone! Plan a hot and sultry romantic night if that’s possible!

Of course they had to add that last line just to embarass me in front of my colleages, didn’t they?

Classroom visit

Today was definitely one of the most interesting and motivating days I’ve had in a long while working on my research project. I sat in on the Strategic Political Communication class and took a bunch of field notes, so I felt like a real researcher on the job. But more than anything I had a real sense of what my interviews were going to be like by seeing the students first hand. They are an interesting bunch from a lot of different places. Very talkative and informed about media and communications, so I think the simulation would work well with them.

One of the most interesting things that came up was actually that the students recognised that there was a technical problem with the system allowing them to see things ahead of time. This potentially breaks down the authentic feeling of the simulation — or does it? I was really interested to see that they knew it was a problem but were not necessarily going in and checking out stuff that they shouldn’t. Virtually the whole class knew there was a problem. The other main thing this brings up is the importance of things such as chronological order to a simulation of this kind, and the potential therefore of the system to add a great deal of confusion when it malfunctions. I think this is a theme I need to write something about in my discussion and the whole story about just what happened when this did crop up should make wonderful reading. The students basically lead the discussion, showing the lecturer exactly what the technical problem was and how to subvert the system. Excellent stuff.

The other thing I was paying a lot of attention to in the class was the ways in which the roles were reinforced by the way that people addressed each other face to face. At a number of stages the students were referred to as Journalists or Advisors. There wasn’t any real first person “role-playing” going on at all, though. No side-jokes with students pretending to hate/like each other or anything of that nature. It was all very much as though they viewed the exercise as something to ponder and reflect on rather than “live”. I want to know whether that illusion of living in the shoes of an Advisor or Journalist is any more real in the online exercises.

New MLX Chapter

Well, I haven’t been able to post about it until now but it’s finally public. We’re not going to be coordinating MLX this year. It was a tough decision to make, but we’re both relieved too. I think it’s going to be really different for both of us to be there as attendees and just enjoy the vibe, and the new team is going to be great. I’m not quite sure if they know what they’ve gotten themselves into, but that’s probably a good thing. Here’s our announcement, made yesterday night.

How BSG Killed TV

Further to my previous post, see this article from Mindjack if you need any more convincing or if you just want to know some more details. Download the presentation this article is based on with Bittorrent here. The end of the broadcast age is nigh, I tell ya.

BSG Season 2

So now I will turn my attention to something far more interesting, and certainly more enjoyable. The new Battlestar Galactica. Season 2 is now upon us. At least, if you are in the US or have access to recordings from the US. There is no indication that any of the Australian free to air networks have picked up Season 2, despite (or perhaps due to) Network Ten’s botched airing of the first series down under. So local BSG fans have no idea if or when it will arrive here.

Enter peer 2 peer networks like Bittorrent. Newspapers are reporting that Australian TV viewers are increasingly turning to downloading episodes of series like BSG out of frustration. Speaking hypothetically of course, if I was to engage in any bittorrenting, I know I would still be keen to watch a series like BSG on free to air TV. I’m a big enough fan to even go to the expense of purchasing the entire series on DVD. I’m already planning to get the first series on DVD and I’ve watched that through a couple of times now. Just about all the other BSG fans I know are similarly committed to owning the series on DVD. It might just be a BSG thing, I don’t know.

What it says to me is that networks will be increasingly under pressure to air series that enjoy international success more quickly. It just can’t be sustainable for Australian networks to withold episodes for 12 months or more when your average 10 year old can download them from the US the day after their release. Sure it’s a hassle to download, and it’s bandwidth that you pay for, but if the alternative is waiting indefinitely, people will do it.

Anyway, all that being said, I am really enjoying Season 2 of BSG. Not only is the plot in this series more involved than the last one, the characters are being revealed in more detail, which is the most engaging thing of all for me. I heartily recommend it to anyone, even if you have no interest at all in Sci Fi. Suffice to say that the issues explored are very relevant to today’s headlines, and also include the sort of timeless themes of a real masterpiece. I just cannot speak highly enough of the writing, the direction and the acting in this show. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, track down the New Battlestar Galactica mini series in your local video shop — it’s easy to find and it watches just like a movie. You’ll be hooked.

Blogsick

Today I have been thinking about why I haven’t been blogging much lately. It’s simple really. I’m sick of hearing myself whine about being sick. It seems to be the main topic of conversation everywhere and with everyone, and it seems to affect just about every aspect of life. So I can’t be bothered writing about it here any more. I want to be over it. I want to just put it behind me like it was last week’s news. So I think I will.